http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qtad55FbUA

On an album full of the “after” of drugs, “The Young Thousands” looks at the “before” right after the point of no return.

Track: “The Young Thousands”
Album: We Shall All Be Healed (2004)

“I have this sick feeling there’s something really great past the point of no return.” – the liner notes of We Shall All Be Healed

We Shall All Be Healed may be all about one thing, but it doesn’t have one just one way of talking about it. Songs like “Mole and “All Up the Seething Coast” are entirely low points. “Quito” and “Palmcorder Yajna” are less low, though in the grand scene of addiction terms like “low” really become complex.

“The Young Thousands” is without mood, because it is about inevitability. You live in a nightmarish building, haunted by your friends who are hardly your friends, and you are consumed like the others like you. You don’t feel good or bad about your choices. You don’t think of previous or post. You exist in this moment, you and the other young thousands.

Looked at specifically among the other tracks on We Shall All Be Healed, “The Young Thousands” hints hardest at some of the darker choices. “The things that you’ve got coming will do things that you’re afraid to,” John Darnielle insists, and it drives home the album’s message that it doesn’t really matter what you’re interested in doing or not doing when you’re hooked. “Mole” may be the result of decisions made in the depths of addiction, but “The Young Thousands” is the defense that those aren’t even “decisions.” When he talks about addiction and his youth, John Darnielle always speaks very sadly of some of the choices he made. The narrator in “The Young Thousands” wouldn’t even understand that that is a place you can even end up.