https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBw9c-JtT1A

On a beach in the biggest city in India, a monk looks out over the world and reflects.

Track: “Hotel Road”
Album: On Juhu Beach  (2001)

Imagine that you are John Darnielle and it is the late 1990s. You have just written and released The Coroner’s Gambit and you are about to begin the work of All Hail West Texas. This is a big moment for you, though of course, because you exist in the present, you have no way of knowing that. In this head space, you write several songs that form small EPs. Many of them are about death, even more than usual for you.

“Hotel Road” opens the beautiful, but very different, On Juhu Beach. The album is out of print because it included intricate, handmade packaging. John Darnielle still loves complex packaging, but nothing is really close to On Juhu Beach. The songs reflect this level of craft, with an eerie specificity to them that makes you picture not just the idea of India, but a very grounded, very real part of India.

The liner notes tell us this is an old monk in a hotel room at the top of a building. The monk watches the world around them and contemplates their surroundings. The waves are clear and the children are joyful. In my reading, the ending finds the monk not embracing death, but wondering why death should be something we think about at all. “It’s hard to say why // I should come here to die” could mean any number of things, but I choose to read it as an acceptance of the passing of time, but not quite yet. Not on a day like this in a place like this.