“”Bluejays and Cardinals”” offers a vision of someone gone too soon that was really extraordinary when they were here.

Track: “”Bluejays and Cardinals””
Album: The Coroner’s Gambit (2000)

I’ve linked this before, but I need to call your attention to this interview John Darnielle did in 2004. The interview has 28 footnotes, including one explaining who Andrei Tarkovsky is. You never really know what you’re going to get from an interview with John Darnielle. He’s a really interesting guy, obviously, but he’s also just as likely to answer the question as he is to tell you a story about an obscure Roman general. This is not a complaint, but it’s a testament to how incredible this interview is that the interviewer recognized the challenge and rose to the task.

This interview explains the odd formatting for “”Bluejays and Cardinals,”” which officially has quotation marks in the song title, thus necessitating double quotation marks. The song, and several other direct songs about death on The Coroner’s Gambit, are about a friend of John Darnielle’s who passed away. The quotation marks reference an album that was in quotation marks called “Ashes” that supposedly had a not very satisfying reason for the marks. John Darnielle deliberately didn’t elaborate so I haven’t tried to crack that answer further.

“Shadow Song” is the sister song and it’s even more direct, but “this world couldn’t hold you // you slipped free” tells you what you need to know. It’s a song about death without being necessarily sad, though even that is not exactly accurate. The Coroner’s Gambit is a fairly brutal album and John Darnielle asks you to look directly at the subject matter a lot of the time, but the high moments of “”Bluejays and Cardinals”” are really something. It’s nice to think of someone who makes baseballs go further just because they rule.