https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umm6el4mitw

“Cotton” is about specific cotton for a specific purpose, but it’s also about the things you leave behind physically but not mentally.

Track: “Cotton”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

It’s kinda remarkable that a song like “Cotton” has been played hundreds of times live. It’s an outstanding song on an outstanding album, but it’s so personal. John Darnielle has said that it’s about imbuing objects with yourself such that when they go away you feel the pain. I relate to this deeply, and my personal totems aren’t as specific as John Darnielle’s, but the process of how they get there feels similar. John Darnielle’s father owned a desk that the younger Darnielle took to Portland. We Shall All Be Healed is about what happened in Portland. You don’t need me to tell you that it didn’t go all that well in Portland.

I’ve listened to “Cotton” countless times. It is one of those songs. It’s catchy, in the way that songs like this are catchy, but it also rewards deeper study. You’ll get most of the context the first time through, presuming you pick up on what “the stick pins and the cottons” in the drawer of that same desk are used for in this apartment in Portland. You don’t necessarily need to know that it was his father’s desk and that there are complex emotions as something goes from being a childhood memory into a place where you keep your drugs. The strength of We Shall All Be Healed and the best songs on it, like “Cotton,” is that you do not need to be exactly there to be close enough to count. Maybe you did not have a difficult time with specific drugs in specific Portland, but I would bet that there was something you once had that you no longer have. Now, you know.