“Hail St. Sebastian” would be at home on an album and feels more complete than many unreleased songs.

Track: “Hail St. Sebastian”
Album: Unreleased

John Darnielle played “Hail St. Sebastian” in 2012 and told the crowd he thought he wrote it outside of a venue in Nashville at this show in 2009. I lived in Memphis at the time and had gone to Nashville for that show. To date it’s the only show I’ve seen outside of Chicago. It doesn’t mean anything or signify anything, but it’s interesting to me to learn that fact only today after having heard this one so many times over the years. I’ve always loved this one. Is that why? No, of course not, but we look for patterns where there are none.

The song is great and is in the tradition of a lot of Mountain Goats songs of the time about pushing through adversity. It feels like a lost part of Transcendental Youth in that way, though obviously it would need the full sound to really work. It’s fierce, though. I know the rule is you never say an unreleased song should have been on an album, but this one really makes that rule hard to follow.

The story of the actual saint is that Sebastian withstood being shot with arrows while tied to a tree. Over time, he’s become a figure cited in hopes of preventing plague, which would have made this one a big hit during the years of lockdown we just came out of. I’m not going to campaign for it, but I have found the sentiment of this one useful at times and I hope if you’ve never heard it that you spend a few minutes with it.