A powerful being looms over the conversation in “Quetzalcoatl Comes Through.”

Track: “Quetzalcoatl Comes Through”
Album: Yam, the King of Crops (1994) and Protein Source of the Future…Now! (1999)

During the only other available version of “Quetzalcoatl Comes Through” that I am able to find, John Darnielle refers to it as a song where he was learning he could yell. That live version, uploaded to YouTube almost ten years ago at the time of this writing, is obviously different than the version on the 1994 release Yam, the King of Crops. The original is quiet and curious and the live version is loud and biting. The message isn’t different, but how you experience it might be.

I usually try to listen to every live version of these songs when I approach them. John Darnielle has said, often, that he isn’t the last voice on his own work and that interpretations differ and don’t need to be conclusive. It’s the weakness of using live stage banter as a primary text. Taken at face value, you’d be confused, because this is as far away from a “yelling” song as anything, so what is he talking about?

That performance in Missouri is the only one I can find, but it’s certainly not the only one. That comment makes us imagine the other versions and the other variations within those versions. If your version of “Quetzalcoatl Comes Through” is a screamer, the bite on the line “he put our love in clear perspective” is a fierce rebuttal of a relationship. If it’s the quiet one, it’s a contemplation that might go either way. It’s both, really, and so many things beyond both that you could only have experienced on certain nights in London or San Francisco or Iowa City. It’s often been said that it’s the journey and not the destination, but for some songs it’s also about the parts of the journey that you don’t even get to see.