“Song from the Shoreline” is brief, but it’s powerful, and it serves as a way into so much more.

Track: “Song from the Shoreline”
Album: Unreleased

If you were at Simplon, in Groningen on a specific Wednesday in 1995, you saw this show, where John Darnielle and Rachel Ware played 14 songs. Simplon is still there, three decades later, and, at the time of this writing, is hosting a drum and bass show right this second. YouTube user notasfarwest digitized the show from a tape and uploaded it here a few years ago. I’ve probably watched it all the way through five times. The video is incredible, both that the quality is this good for what had to be just some VHS tape in a stack somewhere and that it exists at all. People seem to believe this is the earliest footage you can find and if it isn’t, it’s at least close.

They opened with “Song from the Shoreline,” which is more of a snippet than a song. The delivery at that show in the Netherlands is passionate and arresting. It feels like a song designed to gather attention and to segue into something else. At that show, that something else was “The Recognition Scene,” one of the best songs the band has ever written, still, here in a world of 600+ songs. I love the simplicity of “Song from the Shoreline” but simplicity leaves little to say. It’s enough to just go watch it and to picture someone making this tape all those years ago and wondering if they could imagine the lifespan.