9. From TG&Y
In December 2006, Darnielle played a solo show at the new Pitzer College student center, a few hundred feet from the old one, where he had gotten his start, playing open mic nights after his hospital shifts. After two Sweden songs—Rachel Ware Zooi would sing six songs with him later in the show—he said,
Most of you all did not grow up here, probably, so you don’t know that down where the Green Burrito is . . . at Arrow and Indian Hill, you know? It used to be, it was a shopping center when I was a kid, and then sort of died the death of late ’70s shopping centers . . . and there was a drug store there that held on to the bitter end, called TG&Y.
And then he played a song called “From TG&Y,” which he had written and immediately recorded three months earlier. It starts in the area behind a grocery store next to TG&Y, where kids from the neighborhood, like him, would get high.
Out behind the Safeway
Just before the flood
Huffed some cans of spray paint
And began to vomit blood
The chords are really pretty (D-Dmaj7sus2-D6sus2-G, Em-D-Cadd9-A) and his voice is high and vulnerable, so the lines about huffing and vomiting get big awkward laughs. But it’s not a bad thing at all: comedy, especially the comedy of incongruity, flips switches in Darnielle’s brain. “One more night in this town’s/Gonna break me I just know,” he sings. “Hang on to your dreams/’Til someone makes you let them go.” It’s something more than comic now—the teenaged speaker is about to crack from the pressure of being where and who he is—but the comedy has helped us get here. And it hasn’t entirely deserted us: the phrase “hang on to your dreams” comes trailing clouds of glory, but the rest of the two-line refrain comes from the world of people and places like TG&Y, which hung on longer than most other old stores but eventually had to let go.
Reversals of expectations. “Stumble on down Indian Hill/Tail between my legs,” he sings in the second verse. “Sick taste in my mouth/Folger’s crystals and hard-boiled eggs.” Who expects, at this point, a rundown of what he put into himself this morning and coughed out of himself in the shopping center’s back alley? But that’s what we get, as if it’s the ethos and aesthetic of this particular song to circle every drain it finds. Darnielle wrote “From TG&Y” on the floor of a studio in Chicago, where he had gone because he had a day to kill during a stop on a tour. “It was sort of the aftermath of having written The Sunset Tree,” he said in 2010. “It doesn’t have my stepfather really in it, it just has me and the wreckage that I was when I was seventeen.” The materials of the song: aftermath, wreckage, blood, vomit, instant coffee, and cold eggs, all of it condensed in a kind of rune: TG&Y. The atmosphere of the song, the mist in which its reimagined materials cohere: the ghost of his stepfather. “If I can’t run away tonight/I don’t know what I’ll do,” he sings. “Hang on to your dreams/’Til someone beats them out of you.”
That second refrain alters me, reduces my awareness of my surroundings. At Pitzer, in 2006, a hush falls. “Do what,” Darnielle sings in the E-A-D-G (II-V-I-IV) bridge, “You have/To do/Go where you have to go”—and suddenly there’s a beautiful new chord, an F#m—“When the time comes to (G) loosen up your grip/You’ll (A) know.” And then he returns to the home chord, D, and sings a final, world-extending verse:
Called my friend in New York
Three thousand miles away
Halfway through her metamorphosis
Nothing I could sayHoard my small resentments
Like rare and priceless gems
Hang on to your dreams
Until there’s nothing left of them
He sings the last refrain in the studio recording but kind of shouts it, old-school, in the student center show (and in a lot of other live recordings of the song, which has never officially been released). It’s like this is what we really need to hear: it’s not just that abusive authority figures will make you let go of your dreams, or that they will, if necessary, beat them out of you—it’s that the fierceness of your own grip can pulverize your dreams, or that your dreams will go to pieces all by themselves after a while, or that loosening your grip on your dreams and letting them fall might allow you to wake up new. I don’t know. All I know is that I’m changed, that I’ve gone a little deeper into my unconscious perceptions of things, a little farther back in time. Wreckage and the ghost of hopelessness shift a little; three thousand miles of space yawn open and a relationship to another person is momentarily renewed. Little fragments of continuing movement, scattered among those hoarded gems. Hanging on means something, even if I don’t know what that something is.