The unreleased “Edvard Munch” finds a lonely person on a lonely morning, but doesn’t reveal how we got there.

Track: “Edvard Munch”
Album: Unreleased

I can’t prove this, but it feels like this one was written backwards from that repeated line. There’s power in a phrase like “there was nothing good in your going” and you feel it before you consider what it means. There are so many songs from the early days that feel like this one, which explains the comment on the wiki that John Darnielle at times would mix this song up with another one when introducing it. The title “Edvard Munch” is obviously the painter and almost certainly has nothing to do with the song, though you could certainly choose to believe this is about the famous painting.

What we have here is another narrator who is telling us about someone leaving. We rarely hear from the person leaving and this is no exception. We just get the visuals as this narrator soaks in the world of Norway and watches them leave. What led to this moment, we wonder, and does our narrator deserve this fate? Like so many other songs from these days we aren’t going to find out, but the surrounding texts definitely put a finger on the scale.