![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This Year 365 songs: January 26th
Jan. 26th, 2026 05:09 pm Today we have Song for Tura Satana
Darnielle loves a) elliptical* storytelling, in which you cannot recover the entirety of the narrative from what is in the lyrics, and b) the demise of relationships. I suspect that this is, like, at least 30-40% of his songwriting corpus. Add in "longing for a place you haven't been" and "fascination with specifics of ancient history", and you are well on your way to the overwhelming majority of his interests.
This is a pretty good track, I think. The annotations are about how he read the story in a magazine, and became fascinated with it, and then wanted to make sure it was preserved for his memory. Somewhat ironically, he notes that he then misremembered a fairly central component of the story (whether Satana was shot or did the shooting) for decades, so, you know, so much for preserving the memory. Part of the cost of telling stories in a fragmented manner, I guess, but also, no narrator of actual history is ever 100% reliable, really. This is a pretty substantive divergence, but if you look at the Genius.com annotations for his Song for Cleomenes, you'll see that Darnielle frequently doesn't let truth get in the way of a good song, even in smaller ways (so much for Keats, I guess).
*I am fairly embarrassed to say that I am pretty sure the word I was searching for, in vain, two weeks ago, was "elliptical".
Darnielle loves a) elliptical* storytelling, in which you cannot recover the entirety of the narrative from what is in the lyrics, and b) the demise of relationships. I suspect that this is, like, at least 30-40% of his songwriting corpus. Add in "longing for a place you haven't been" and "fascination with specifics of ancient history", and you are well on your way to the overwhelming majority of his interests.
This is a pretty good track, I think. The annotations are about how he read the story in a magazine, and became fascinated with it, and then wanted to make sure it was preserved for his memory. Somewhat ironically, he notes that he then misremembered a fairly central component of the story (whether Satana was shot or did the shooting) for decades, so, you know, so much for preserving the memory. Part of the cost of telling stories in a fragmented manner, I guess, but also, no narrator of actual history is ever 100% reliable, really. This is a pretty substantive divergence, but if you look at the Genius.com annotations for his Song for Cleomenes, you'll see that Darnielle frequently doesn't let truth get in the way of a good song, even in smaller ways (so much for Keats, I guess).
*I am fairly embarrassed to say that I am pretty sure the word I was searching for, in vain, two weeks ago, was "elliptical".
