The central action in “Milk Song” is extreme and memorable and works beautifully as a response to loss.

Track: “Milk Song”
Album: Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg (1995)

You can see John Darnielle play “Milk Song” in Gothenburg in 2019 here, from someone who has three subscribers on YouTube. It’s a crisp recording and it does the song justice, but it isn’t necessarily essential. You should also hear the pitch-corrected version of it here, which is similar and also really works. To be complete, you can also hear this live version from 2020 in, I believe, the last live, in-person show before the pandemic. The banter there about the experience of having and not having an answering machine is incredible. Don’t take my word for it.

This is one of the two or three best songs on Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg overall and almost certainly the best set of lyrics. Our narrator is pining for someone, as most of these narrators are, but this one tells us more than most of them do. What makes “Milk Song” memorable to me is not the “gradual” vanishing of one figure or the bitterness of the other, but the ridiculous-but-believable destruction of an answering machine in response. This huge gesture, plus the accounting of it as a financial loss, is the kind of thing we laugh at in other people but choose to gloss over in ourselves. Maybe you’ve never literally smashed up a machine in response to a loss and growing bitterness in yourself, but if you search the files in your head long enough I suspect you might find something similar. Maybe don’t look too hard.