Pitchfork

I introduced myself to John Darnielle after his performance at this summer's Pitchfork Music Festival, and this conversation happened:

Darnielle: Have you heard the new album?
Me: Yeah, I just got it.
Darnielle: What do you think?
Me: I've only heard it a couple of times; I'm still processing.
Darnielle: Do you have a girlfriend?
Me: Yeah, she's right over...
Darnielle: I hope she leaves you. Then you'll understand it.

He was joking. I think.

But he's right; my girlfriend is now my fiancée, and I'm not sure I get this record. I sort of hope I never do. Get Lonely comes right on the heels of The Sunset Tree, Darnielle's gut-wrenching 2005 album/memoir about an abusive stepfather. It wasn't an easy record to listen to, but the songs had an anthemic roar that united Darnielle with those who've had to rise above their stations, and it all fit together to create something triumphant and tangible. It even had a clear story arc, a clear villain, and even something approaching a happy ending: Darnielle gets out alive, the stepfather doesn't, and the final song, "Pale Green Things", is a postmortem remembrance of a happy morning with the man who once made his life a living hell. It was inspirational-- the sort of peaceful, warm reminisce that can only happen once the villain no longer presents an immediate threat, sort of like Darth Vader rematerializing as a benevolent ghost in the closing seconds of Return of the Jedi.

There's nothing inspirational about Get Lonely, and there's no story-arc or clear villain-- even though every song is about one particular feeling. That feeling is a sort of existential dread, the thing that happens when the most important person in your life walks out. It's a complicated emotion; you can blame yourself or the other person but you still won't come any closer to feeling better. So Darnielle doesn't sing about anger; he sings about loss, and in a way the results are as dark and brutal as The Sunset Tree.

Darnielle writes about all this stuff indirectly; we don't even learn the reason for the narrator's crushing disconnect until the third song, when he finally comes out and says he's lost without her. Even then, he sings his most horrifically sad lyric ("What are the years we gave each other ever gonna be worth?") as a quick aside. Mostly, he just sings about wandering aimlessly around town, trying to figure out what's going on. Most of the songs seem to take place on cold mornings, and they all involve meticulous descriptions of ephemera: the cracking ground, the vacant lot across from the gas station, the amorphous shapes in his dreams.

A few of these songs are narratives, but even those are disconnected slivers of action. On "Half Dead", Darnielle sings about spending a morning cleaning his house just to take his mind off things: "Try not to get caught, try to think like a machine/ Focus in on the task, try not to think what it means." And on "Woke Up New", he sings about the day after she leaves: "On the morning when I woke up without you for the first time, I felt free, and I felt lonely, and I felt scared/ And I began to talk to myself almost immediately, not being used to being the only person there." It's devastating stuff, and it has none of the satisfying closure that The Sunset Tree provided.

The album also further represents Darnielle's removal from his early four-track days. Acoustic guitar is still the main instrument here, but it has none of the stomp-and-scratch urgency of his ancestral work. Sometimes, as on "Moon Over Goldsborough", he's on some Streets shit and the music feels perfunctory, like it's just a quick and colorless backdrop to his lyrics. Other times, as on "New Monster Avenue", he has a slight and pleasant groove behind him, drums rippling and guitar amiably ringing along. The backdrop of "Woke Up New" is gorgeous; there's something Afropop about the ways the guitar and bass intersect. "If You See Light" has subtle flecks of organ and horn.

So Get Lonely isn't musically monochromatic, but everything is warm and light and well-recorded, and it sounds like a self-conscious rebuke to his blood-and-thunder old days. And so does his singing voice, which was once a strained yelp and which now see-saws back and forth between a placid speak-sing and a weirdly airy falsetto. He hasn't been a young turk for a long time, and now he doesn't sound like one either.