In August 2001, Darnielle was driving from Ames, Iowa, to the airport in Des Moines and Lee Ann Womack’s “I Hope You Dance” came on the radio. “I was listening,” he said at a show in 2006,
and I thought, “God, this is horrifying! This is a terrible, terrible song, teaching people awful lies!” And I was sort of singing along at the same time because it had a catchy melody. And the song goes “I hope you dance, I hope you dance,” and I just sort of vamped on it, I went like, “I hope you die, I hope you die!” And I thought, “Well, that’s an idea, isn’t it?” So I scribbled it down on a receipt and I tucked it into my pocket.
Instead of backing away from what he’d just sung, he used it as a starting point, a means of getting somewhere. He wrote the rest of the lyrics after landing in Athens, Georgia, came up with some rough-and-ready chords, and put it in a 6/8 time signature. Two months later, he recorded it with Hughes, who played more of a melodic, up-the-neck accompaniment than a beat-keeping line; a couple of days after that, Franklin Bruno overdubbed a piano part. When you can write lyrics like these—when you can rivet people to what you’re saying—you don’t always need a rhythm section behind you.
The hook, initially, is the way that Darnielle turns the language of hopefulness against hopefulness. Lee Ann Womack sings, “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean/Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens”; Darnielle sings, “I hope that our few remaining friends/Give up on trying to save us/I hope we come up with a failsafe plot/To piss off the dumb few that forgave us.” Womack sings, “I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance/Never settle for the path of least resistance”; Darnielle sings,
And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here
Someday burns down
And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away
And I never come back to this townAgain
In my life
Alpha Couple One is hoping for hopelessness, hoping that hatred and entropy will take their course (I hope the worst isn’t over). Alpha Couple Two is pretty clearly hoping for the same things. “This is a song about letting the positive energy flow,” Darnielle said in 2011. “This is a song about letting the rich, positive, loving energy between two people flow . . . right down the drain.”
But then something unexpected happens. The song, which is in C# major, mostly cycles through a I-V-IV-I progression—C#, G#, F#, C#—and a I-VI-IV-V progression: C#, A#m, F#, G# (Darnielle plays the song in A, capoed up four frets, so the fingered chords are A, E, D, A and A, F#m, D, E). Right after singing, over an F#-G#, “I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away/And I never come back to this town,” Darnielle drops back to the F# for the beginning of the prechorus:
Again (F#)
In my life (G#)
I hope I lie (C#/F)
And tell everyone (F#) you were a good wife
You can be feeling and expressing nothing but hatred and then, because you’re expressing yourself honestly, you can suddenly find yourself feeling something else. When Darnielle sings “I hope I lie/And tell everyone you were a good wife,” everything feels new, partly because of the sadness and strangeness of the future he’s imagining and partly because of the way that the F in the bass changes the voicing of the C# chord on “lie.” The chord progression simultaneously resolves and doesn’t resolve on the word “lie”; the C#/F is, in part, the song’s feeling-of-home chord, but because it rests on the very uncertain third note in the scale, it has a non-home feeling too. “And I hope you die (C#/F),” Darnielle sings, returning to that in-between chord, “I hope we both die (G#).” And then the oddly rollicking intro returns and there’s time for everything to begin to sink in.
“When I’m writing about [the Alpha Couple], I write about how we all react to failure,” Darnielle told an interviewer in 2002. “They’re failing really hard at something that means a lot to them. That gives me a chill, and it’s the chill that makes me want to write.” The chill, the shiver of grief, makes its way into Darnielle’s voice when Hughes’s bass dips down to the F in the prechorus and then takes that tiny step upward. You hear something, or at least I hear something, like the voice of someone you can’t see. Right on the other side of your most intense hatred of another person, there is, maybe, a not-thought-out feeling of having failed, of having given less than you had in you, of wanting to cover your shame and the other person’s shame along with it.
This is how the song ends:
And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can’t find one good thing to say
And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You’d stay the hell out of my wayI am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable handAnd I hope you die
I hope we both die
There’s no better example of Darnielle’s ability to perceive whatever has just been said as an opportunity, a sudden opening of a space in which something more may be said. I hope it’s all destroyed, AC One sings, I hope that the memory of the good things will be erased, I wish that I were strong enough to take action and kill the whole thing quickly—“I am drowning.” A door is pounded, the door breaks, and we fall into a far-out-to-sea scenario. “There is no sight of land/You are coming down with me”—Hughes drops back down to the F—“Hand in unlovable hand.” And then, in the wake of that horrifically sad line, we get the song’s one-two punch. “I hope you die/I hope we both die.”
“This is a song about a couple of people who really probably shouldn’t have hung around after the first or second date,” Darnielle said at a concert in Austin, Texas, in 2010.
It probably would have been better for them if they’d have just said, “Hey, you and I are bad for each other, and as much as I enjoy your company, as a mature person who wants to take good care of himself I think it would be better if you and I parted ways and went on to take better care of ourselves, both you and I, not just for me but for you, because I like you,” and then if the other had said, “I agree, I agree, we should be good to ourselves during our short walk across this lovely planet, we should be good to ourselves.”
He paused briefly, and then said, “The likelihood of these people ever saying that to one another is slighter than the likelihood of the moon crashing into the earth.” He had first imagined them, in a poem, slow-dancing in a hardware store after midnight, right before a horse crashes through the wall. Part of him was always on their side. “I feel for them,” he said in a 2002 interview. “These people are staring each other down and every bit of artifice is dropping off. They’re naked, and there's something so sweet about that nakedness. There’s a sweetness in the worst things.” They sensed that there was something beyond “we should be good to ourselves” and they wanted to find out what it was, and once they did, they wanted to find out what it felt like when you took it to the limit, and then, as they approached the limit, all the stories that they had been telling themselves flew off them as they told them and they found out one last thing. “This, despite what anybody may tell you, and you will know when the time comes, is a love song,” Darnielle said at a concert in April 2011. “One-two-three, one-two-three.”
One of the top comments for the Youtube video of "No Children" describes it as a "total commitment to losing". I think that's a good way of putting it, at least for most of the song; it seems that Darnielle dug his heels in on the hatred and anger out of spite. Out of spite for what I couldn't precisely say before you wrote this and pointed me to "I Hope You Dance". I listened to it a few minutes ago and almost spit my water laughing, because I can so clearly imagine Darnielle reacting so violently to a song that leaves no room to feel the things he crams "No Children" entirely with - failure, disillusionment, anger, hatred and self-hatred, spite, and so on. It's so in-character and the image of him scribbling furiously on a receipt in his car so self evident that it's fucking hilarious. I have to admit that the distance I feel to this song is now slightly amplified by this meta-knowledge of Darnielle's reaction.
But the other part of the distance I feel is the "leaving no room" for other feelings. Womack's song is sweet, naive, and definitely a bop - but more than that (and I promise this is relevant). I was watching The Age of Innocence by Martin Scorcese last night, and there's a line in there my mind flashed back to as I read your post. The narrator comes on towards the end of the movie and describes one of the main characters, a woman played by Winona Ryder, who is happy and cheerful in a wilfully ignorant kind of way: "so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change. This hard bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered ... And she had died thinking the world a good place."
There is a similar "hard, bright blindness" in the kindergarten-teacher philosophy of Womack's song and this is, I think, what Darnielle's song was responding to. But "No Children" does the same thing - sure, in a self-aware way, and there are little openings that you point out which are great ("I hope I lie", "I am drowning") and I'm glad you brought my attention to - but there is a hard line of anger that I can't deny here, and it makes me, personally, take a step back and feel remote from the lyrics.
And it is personal, because I'm sure some people are drawn to this song like a magnet, but I only observe it respectfully from the outside, because I don't think I have the requisite levels of self-loathing or bitterness, even in times of crisis or heartbreak. There are times when I think I ought to be, and try to will myself out of my default state of "sanguine" to really feel, say, "No Children", but I just can't.
Anyway, I'm just glad that Darnielle recognizes that unforgivingness on some level, knows that it's not the whole picture, and engineers some ambiguity and space into the song. Thanks for another great post!
I like this take on this song. But the pure bright line of anger in this song. Idk. The satisfaction of destruction. Darnielle: " There's a sweetness in the worst things." Perhaps the essay or me reading into the essay highlights nostalgia a bit more than the song highlights nostalgia. Because all these memories are nothing except the long last effort to die. To remember the past, a past worth remembering, in order to drown it. This song is about those who couldn't attain purity attaining purity. This song is a triumph.