“Get Famous” asks you to consider if you could, or maybe should, well, get famous.

Track: “Get Famous”
Album: Getting Into Knives (2020)

Just before the two-minute mark in “Get Famous,” John Darnielle says “listen to the people applaud” and there is a tiny sound of applause in the background. When Getting Into Knives first came out, a review called this out and now I hear it every single time I listen to the song. I can’t find that review now and I don’t think it matters if you can, but that point is one I keep coming back to when I listen to the album.

Depending on how you count, John Darnielle and various collaborators and bandmates over the years have released or been featured on more than 70 releases, but I find Getting Into Knives one of the toughest to personally connect with. I don’t want to blow that applause sound effect out of proportion, but when I listen to “Get Famous,” I wonder why that is. The Wesley Willis reference is excellent, I like the music video, and I think the message here is funny, but not silly. It’s a great song.

Darnielle’s delivery makes this one for me. The backing horns are great, sure, but the snarl on “you” in “you should be famous” changes the meaning and really gets at the blessing/curse element of fame. It’s just also a song that speaks for itself, which is probably why things like putting applause on the word applause drove some reviewer nuts enough that they had to draw attention to it, and while that detail doesn’t really matter, there’s not quite enough of what I love about most of the other singles here for this one to be one of my favorites.