“Store” is a violent, expressive song about the only thing scarier than death in the abstract: death right in front of you.

Track: “Store” (also called “Aisle”)
Album: Jam Eater Blues (2001)

“It’s called ‘Aisle’ but I always want to call it ‘Store’ but I might have that backwards. You can call it whatever you want, because generally speaking if you’re requesting it, I won’t play it anyway.” – John Darnielle, on “Store.” (Which, obviously, you can also call “Aisle”)

There are a lot of songs from the catalog of roughly 25 years that don’t get played a lot these days. Some of them are for obvious reasons — I’ve already expressed my love for “Beach House” but it’s a lengthy diatribe about seals, so, okay, might not fit in with the divorce album and the meth album and so on — but some of them just don’t exactly represent where the band is at anymore. See: “Going to Georgia,” a longer conversation for a later time.

“Store” is one of the “songs about dead friends” in the catalog. The narrator walks in a store and has a painful experience (John sometimes calls it “a vision” but you can read it as literal or metaphorical pain and it works the same) and passes out for a moment in the middle of the aisle. They experience the memory of the sight of a dead friend with a head wound and exclaim “ah, the blood! all of that blood!” over and over and over.

When we think about a death we often think about the loss of a person moving forward more than actual, literal death. The reason the exclamations of “ah, the blood!” and the screams and the hard strums here work so well is because they force us to look at the same thing our hero is seeing. They force us to consider something even more extreme than a representation of loss, and that’s “the sight of the hole in the side of your skull.”