Decades after what might be the only surviving version was recorded, you can still contemplate “The New Potatoes.”

Track: “The New Potatoes”
Album: Unreleased

At the risk of writing more about it than the full text of it, “The New Potatoes” is one of those live songs you can only find one version of. In this instance it’s one John Darnielle played by himself at Duke Coffeehouse at Duke University in 1997. Remarkably, 26 years later as of this writing, there’s even a scan of the poster from the show you can see here. The fact that both of these exist is a testament to the permanence of media even in an increasingly impermanent world. I truly cannot believe these are here for us all these years later.

The song itself is short, as I said before. It’s 54 words long and those words describe some potatoes being washed away by rain. Darnielle belts out his goodbyes to these potatoes in increasing severity. It’s a song about things being temporal and the change of things that accompanies that reality. The final lines are really intense, even for him, even for the time, but the real remarkable element of this is that it’s still here for you to hear long after anyone in that room might have guessed that it would be.