This Year 365 songs: February 12th
Feb. 12th, 2026 09:57 am Today's song is Pure Gold
I enjoyed this song, but the thing that most caught my attention relates to the annotations. "Don't touch the door" was taken from a readout on the Twilight Zone pinball machine. The annotations go into a bit of detail about the machine and Darnielle's time playing it, but what I think is most impressive to me about this track is how Darnielle took his affection for/fixation on that aspect of a Twilight Zone pinball machine and used it as a seed for lyrics to a song that is not about pinball at all. In some cases, his songs have been directly about what inspired them, but here, we get a compelling partial narrative attached to this phrase that must have been stuck in his head for some time.
I enjoyed this song, but the thing that most caught my attention relates to the annotations. "Don't touch the door" was taken from a readout on the Twilight Zone pinball machine. The annotations go into a bit of detail about the machine and Darnielle's time playing it, but what I think is most impressive to me about this track is how Darnielle took his affection for/fixation on that aspect of a Twilight Zone pinball machine and used it as a seed for lyrics to a song that is not about pinball at all. In some cases, his songs have been directly about what inspired them, but here, we get a compelling partial narrative attached to this phrase that must have been stuck in his head for some time.