One lover tells another about what happened to Hercules and what it means for them in “Deianara Crush.”

Track: “Deianara Crush”
Album: Sweden (1995)

Deianira, or Deianara, or any number of other spellings of the same name, was Hercules’ wife. As you can somewhat gather from “Deianara Crush,” Hercules died burning in a flaming shirt. The full story tells us that Deianira wanted to ensure that Hercules would be eternally faithful to her and a trickster centaur assured her that mixing his blood with olive oil would do just that. It did, in a sense, as a shirt with this concoction on it burned Hercules forever, which killed him. It wasn’t what she had in mind, but it did, in fact, end his ability to run around on her.

“Deianara Crush” finds two people thinking about this myth and what it means. One tells the other how Hercules died and the other says “that’s something I’d rather not be reminded of.” As with other songs from Sweden, John Darnielle’s vocals are especially on point with some signature whine on the vowels in “Hercules,” but it’s the finality of the last line that really sells the song. We don’t spend a lot of time with these two and we don’t get any concrete details that tell us how we got here, but what a scene we do get. Imagine your partner, silent for a time, then saying your name in a unique way, only to give way to a story about how, in chasing a perfect love, a mythical figure destroyed the greatest hero of all time. You can draw many things from this moment and the meaning behind it, none of them good.