14. Tyler Lambert’s Grave

This is probably the least-known song on the list. Darnielle gave it away on the Internet in December 2010 and there have only been seven shows, all of them in June 2011, in which he has played it—it’s like it’s too sad, too dependent on a certain kind of emotional willingness, to be released on an album or played live. He wrote it in the middle of the night in May 2010, set it to music on his piano, recorded a demo, and sent it to the Manitoban cellist Leanne Zacharias, who overdubbed it beautifully. It’s worth finding the mood that will allow you to take it in.

“Steal WEST across the COUNtry,” Darnielle sings, “under MOONlight soft and wet/And LET the dead of NIGHT hide you from THINGS you can’t forGET.” He strikes simple, Life of the World to Come-style chords on the stresses—Dm-Bb-C, C-F-A7-Bb—and the sadness in his voice is plain. “Spend daylight in dark tunnels, where the demons rave,” he sings (Bb-F-A7-Bb). “One day closer every day to Tyler Lambert’s grave” (Bb-F-C-F). And now the cello comes in:

Shoplift when you have to, keep your visor low
If your hunger shames you, never let them know
Feel your sadness lifting, ride it like a wave
That sets you gently down beside Tyler Lambert’s grave

Tyler Lambert was the son of the Diff’rent Strokes child star Dana Plato, who battled addictions to drugs and alcohol. (In the mid-1990s, Darnielle wrote a song about her, “Song for Dana Plato,” that ends with this mostly spoken line: “And in situations like these, it’s sometimes useful to think of life as one long continuous evening that never turns into night.”) When she killed herself, on May 8, 1999, Tyler was fourteen. Almost exactly eleven years later, on May 6, 2010, he killed himself too, with a shotgun blast to the head. Most of the news articles about his suicide ran a picture of him that was taken at his mother’s funeral—blue suit, yellow tie, gelled hair, staring firmly at the sky.

He looked, to Darnielle, “like young men often look: full of hope and promise, at the beginning of life. My heart broke for all the pain in that family, and I wrote the song.”

The song’s vision is so exact, in the first two verses and the gorgeous descending bridge, and so scenically vivid (Shoplift when you have to, keep your visor low), that it’s hard to see how he can improve on it. But then, with the cello silent, he does:

Young man in a yellow tie, hair gel in his hair 
No context for the picture, just kind of standing there 
Try to step outside the shadow of your great catastrophe 
Dream all night of freedom, never wake up free

When he sings, “just kind of standing there,” his voice is as lonely and unformed as Tyler Lambert’s face, and when he sings the final couplet, he seems to have as much trouble getting through it as I do. The original narrative, about someone traveling, night by night, across the country, stealing food along the way, is somewhere behind us now, because it was really just a way of getting to this point. “Fall into a pattern, never get unstuck,” Darnielle sings in the bridge. “Anyone who can’t relate should thank God for his luck.” The character in the original narrative is one of the unlucky people; he has gotten stuck and can’t unstick himself. But the sadness of that character and of anyone who can relate to him is suffused with a special, near-mystical quality: it’s capable of lifting, letting you ride it, and setting you gently down beside the grave of someone very much like yourself.

“What I believe after [a] song’s over doesn’t really figure into what happens in my heart when I’m absorbed by the song,” Darnielle wrote on Tumblr in 2013. I do believe things after “Tyler Lambert’s Grave” is over. I believe that being stuck in a painfully repetitive cycle enables you to relate, powerfully, to others in that condition; I believe that not very many people actually do relate to others on that basis; I believe that all-in songs like “Tyler Lambert’s Grave” can at least make it possible for you to “see your own face in the image of somebody who never quite got free of his demons.” But that’s not why the song is on the list. It’s on the list because it brings me to the place where very good songs peak and then climbs higher; because in four brush-stroked phrases (Young man in a yellow tie, hair gel in his hair/No context for the picture, just kind of standing there), Darnielle lets me see not only Tyler Lambert but what’s around him and how he’s standing; and because of what happens in my heart, at that moment of total absorption, when he sings the couplet that lays the song, and the young man, to rest. You were in the shadow of a great catastrophe, you tried to step outside it, but you couldn’t. You dreamed of freedom every night, but you never woke up free. There’ll never be anything more to say.