13. Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod
In January 2003, Darnielle and Hughes went on John Peel’s BBC radio show and played a devastating cover of Baby Dee’s “When I Get Home,” which begins, “Playing in the bricks and the foundry dust/I lost track of time/I’m gonna get it when I get home/He’s gonna kill me when I get home.”
A little over a year later, in a double-parked van outside a Paris venue, Darnielle wrote the lyrics to “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod.” Once he had set them to music, on the floor outside a BBC studios in April 2004, he had a song with all the terror of Baby Dee’s song and something else too: a strange anthemic energy, an energy that’s something like the terror in another form.
“You are sleeping off your demons/When I come home,” he sings in the opening lines. “Spittle bubbling on your lips/Fine white foam.” Outside, it’s a hot Southern California day, full of hot Southern California day possibilities; inside, there are signs that the speaker needs to be careful. He goes to his room, quietly (If I wake you up/There will be hell to pay). Once he’s there, the song’s A-Dsus2/A progression goes into reverse, and Darnielle and Hughes—accompanied by a hard-flanging organ and mixed-down drums—seem to launch into a pre-chorus:
And alone in my room
I am the last of a lost civilization
I vanish into the dark
And rise above my station
Rise above my station
But the chorus never comes; in the last two lines, Darnielle just returns to the A-Dsus2/A progression, as if there isn’t anywhere else to go, as if rising in the dark, repeatedly, is the boy’s only available response to the threat of humiliation and subordination. In a June 2005 interview conducted entirely in haikus, the interviewer offered Darnielle the following summary of “Hast Thou Considered the Tetrapod”: “Sleeping on the couch/sweltering SoCal weather/escape to headphones.” “All interviewers/Seem to like this word ‘escape,’” Darnielle wrote. “For this song: me, less.” All alone, with nothing more than some cobbled-together fantasies to sustain him, the boy in the song “stands forth his own inexorable self,” as Melville puts it in Moby-Dick. The word “escape” doesn’t cover that.
Plus, the hammer is about to come down. “But I do wake you up,” the boy sings, “and when I do,”
You blaze down the hall and you scream
I’m in my room with the headphones on
Deep in the dream chamber
And then I’m awake and I’m guarding my face
Hoping you don’t break my stereo
Because it’s the one thing that I couldn’t live without
And so I think about that, and then I sort of black out
The vocal delivery has a shimmer to it, a rebel angel glow, and it suffuses the song with an emotional contradictoriness. In the final quatrain, the boy has a vision, in his sort of blacked-out state, of being held under waves by the man’s “strong and thick-veined hand.” “But one of these days,” he sings, “I’m gonna wriggle up on dry land”—I’m gonna do what the first tetrapod did, 400 million years ago. It feels good, it feels right, partly because the Dsus2/A-A interlude actually resolves this time, by means of an Esus4. There’s a feeling of victory, even though the victory hasn’t happened yet, a whale-like feeling of “rearing upon the topmost crest of the equatorial flood” and “spout[ing] [your] frothed defiance to the skies.”
It’s an ecstatic moment. And yet you can’t leave it at that, because the ecstasy is spun out of wish-I-had-never-been-born pain—thoroughly colored by it, weighed down by it, maybe even outlasted by it. “I know you must have held me once,” Darnielle sings in the Baby Dee cover. “I saw a photograph/Safe and happy in your arms/A smiling god of wra-a-ath.” At the end of the three notes over which the word “wrath” is extended, his voice sort of crashes. There are moments in some of Darnielle’s performances when the difference between himself and the speaker totally vanishes, and this is one of them. “I’m gonna get it when I get home,” he sings, with a really terrible directness. “He’s gonna kill me when I get home.” I’m gonna get it from the man I also love, the man who used to make me feel safe and happy. My smiling, wrathful god is gonna kill me when I get home. Gonna hold me under smothering waves with his veins bulging from the effort. It’s true that there’s life in me and that I’m going to survive this. But it’s also true that I died very young.