This Year 365 songs: January 20th
Jan. 20th, 2026 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
js_thrill Today's song: Quetzalcoatl Comes Through
I listened to the wrong version for a while (it wasn't bad), I've written before about how Darnielle is a Christian musician, and he is, for sure, but just as he is fascinated with Classical Antiquity, and loves to sing about Roman and Greek mythology, he has other fascinations (a lot of them are just being a huge history fan in general, which comes through with this song being inspired by a book about Aztec history that he was reading, but later we'll see that his enthusiasm for regional pro-wrestling or Magic: The Gathering also get their share of space in his corpus). Anyway, I think part of the appeal he brings is just his general enthusiasm. Darnielle has genuine passion for things that comes across vividly. The other part is that he brings a perspective. Whether it is the tragedy of the alpha couple's eternally traumatically dissolving yet somehow fixed orbiting of each other, or that riff on Auden's take on Bruegel's Icarus, the wedding of his enthusiasm for whatever he turns his attention to and the point he wants to get across about it is really the heart of why the songs resonate with so many people.
This is one of the better tracks we've hit so far, I think.
I listened to the wrong version for a while (it wasn't bad), I've written before about how Darnielle is a Christian musician, and he is, for sure, but just as he is fascinated with Classical Antiquity, and loves to sing about Roman and Greek mythology, he has other fascinations (a lot of them are just being a huge history fan in general, which comes through with this song being inspired by a book about Aztec history that he was reading, but later we'll see that his enthusiasm for regional pro-wrestling or Magic: The Gathering also get their share of space in his corpus). Anyway, I think part of the appeal he brings is just his general enthusiasm. Darnielle has genuine passion for things that comes across vividly. The other part is that he brings a perspective. Whether it is the tragedy of the alpha couple's eternally traumatically dissolving yet somehow fixed orbiting of each other, or that riff on Auden's take on Bruegel's Icarus, the wedding of his enthusiasm for whatever he turns his attention to and the point he wants to get across about it is really the heart of why the songs resonate with so many people.
This is one of the better tracks we've hit so far, I think.
