John Darnielle shows us a narrator who isn’t as concerned as they should be in “Spilling Toward Alpha.”

Track: “Spilling Toward Alpha”
Album: The Hound Chronicles (1992)

John Darnielle often jokingly chastises people who hoot and holler at live shows when he says some version of “this was on the second tape” by telling them he knows they didn’t know it then. This isn’t gatekeeping or even really all that serious, it seems to be just the honest truth. The number of people who bought The Hound Chronicles in 1992 has been dwarfed by the number of people who have gone back out of curiosity. I was in elementary school. I didn’t hear this when it came out. I’m just gonna level with you.

“Spilling Toward Alpha” is one of the first songs about the Alpha Couple. It’s not the very first, but it’s pretty close. It seems like it’s late in the official chronology of their relationship, but it’s so interesting that John Darnielle was already writing about these two a full decade before they got their own album. The song holds up in ways that some of the early stuff doesn’t, to modern ears, though one wonders what contemporary listeners thought. They couldn’t have known what was coming and they couldn’t have known that this brief song would be part of a sprawling story. In 1992, this was just the story of a narrator talking about how they have learned to life with ominous actions from a partner that’s sharpening claws and creeping around late at night. The text has enough to make you worried, but the larger story of the Alpha Couple really unlocks the terror of these moments. You really should mind.