Punk’s Reviews > This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days > Status Update

"One mark of progress as a writer is reading something and knowing that you couldn’t have written it earlier than you did. I wrote this in 2021, right on time."

"The rhymes here are nothing special, but the story is my favorite kind of mystery: one where you can’t say exactly where the mystery is, but you sense its presence. Yes, I’m Catholic, why do you ask?"

John Darnielle's comments, in total, on To The Headless Horseman: "The original draft of this is more hopeful. That is why we revise."

From "Tidal Wave":

It’s not the mutiny that gets written down in the diary
it’s the manifest
forgotten cargo in obsolete measurements
anybody’s guess

"That “OK” doesn’t sit with me right, on the page—my whole notion of some songs not really having an existence outside of the air in which they resound finds support there: but not elsewhere in the song, where rhymes like “cabinets” and “chemistry sets” practically cry out to Heaven for somebody to notice. Accordingly, we printed the lyrics in the liner notes in an almost completely illegible font."

"Hence, in a broad sense: all this."

"I think of albums as usually having a single gravitational point, like a star, around which the other songs orbit like planets. The notional sun will rarely be the single, the big song everybody knows; the gravitational center of an album is the song that contains something of all the others."

"On side one you bang the drum, and then on side two, as a reward, you get to complicate things. You know the phrase 'I don’t make the rules'? It doesn’t apply here, because I made this rule."

On THANK YOU MARIO BUT OUR PRINCESS IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE: It’s a simple song about how Toad must feel inside when Mario beats Bowser, which is to say, it’s a song about being surprised to see someone whose absence from your life has been a total catastrophe: personally, physically, spiritually, emotionally, practically, vertically, horizontally, Game Over.

Lines from "Family Happiness" that as Darnielle put it "look down the line toward “No Children":

I hope the stars don’t even bother to come out tonight.
I hope we both freeze to death.