An early reviewer hated “Snow Owl,” but there’s a lot to learn about John Darnielle’s approach to lyrics in it.

Track: “Snow Owl”
Album: Full Force Galesburg (1997)

John Darnielle played “Snow Owl” as part of the Jordan Lake sessions recently, which is potentially only the third version of the song that exists. There’s the released version on Full Force Galesburg and exactly, probably, only one live version. In 2017 a fan asked for it at this live show in Virginia and this is absolutely the definitive version. You should listen to it to hear the full story, but John Darnielle explains that he never played it live because right after the album came out he walked into a music store in Pittsburgh and read a review that singled out the song as bad. Two years earlier he told the same story on Twitter.

That reviewer thought it was overly sweet. “Snow Owl” is a risk in that regard, with lyrics like “In your eyes were all the colors that the rainbow forgot.” It works, though, for the same reason John Darnielle was able to put the refrain from the theme from Cheers in a song a decade later. John Darnielle is unafraid to sound corny, which means it’s very hard for anything he makes to sound corny. It’s real, and you can tell that it’s real because of who is selling it to you. He was once very hard on “Going to Bridlington” for similar reasons, but I love that one, too. There are several physical descriptions of a snow owl in “Snow Owl,” but it all works because it’s so damned earnest.