“Ending the Alphabet” finds a narrator unable to connect to the world at large.

Track: “Ending the Alphabet”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

“What is there left in a city like this // when everyone you know has gone?” The narrator says this near the end of “Ending the Alphabet” and I suspect most of you can identify a moment in your life where this felt true. I’ve only moved away from a city a few times in my life but there was always a time when I realized it was time to do so because of how I felt about what was left. It’s important to note that the narrator is explicit that “the avenues are throbbing with people.” This is not the lonesome, desolate world of Get Lonely. This is a bustling city, you just feel alone in it.

The pitch-corrected version of this is different because the vocals are different, obviously, but they both feel the same to me. The same emotion comes through from the narrator whether they’re in John Darnielle’s normal voice or a higher version. “I can almost hear their voices,” our narrator says, as they tell us over and over that they are both here and not here. As part of the larger emotions of Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg, we might put some romantic loss on this person, but I don’t think it has to be that, at all. You experience the world like this when your brain is trying to tell you something. You may take some time to parse just what that is, but the difference between this day and the one before it is very real.