We Shall All Be Healed opens with “Slow West Vultures” and gets right to the point.

Track: “Slow West Vultures”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

There’s a lot happening in “Slow West Vultures.” Someone breaks a bottle in the background. There are at least two seemingly unrelated vocal samples, a device you hear on the early albums often but not so much anymore. The backing vocals are elevated, which isn’t totally unheard of but is rarely this notable. It signals that this album isn’t quite what you’ve heard before, which is fitting. This is post Tallahassee, so the band’s sound has already changed, but it’s pre The Sunset Tree, so the honesty is new.

John Darnielle has often been accused of being the narrator of his songs, which he says he understands but disavows when he can. In the early days of writing this series I was surprised to confront how often the gender identity of the narrator is even ambiguous, suggesting that it isn’t even a male speaker. The person in We Shall All Be Healed is not explicitly John Darnielle like it is in The Sunset Tree, but if not, it’s much closer than it usually is.

The lyrics are a relatively straightforward affair for We Shall All Be Healed. Everyone does drugs, everyone understands they’re going to do more drugs. There’s some nice wordplay here, but I’m always struck by “ready for the future” because it calls back to the album title and the joke within it. There’s likely not a future and likely nobody here is going to be healed.