“One way that you do that is to indulge it as a thought. The imagination is so rich that as long as you understand its limits and can keep it in balance, then you can totally imagine ‘Death to my enemies!’ It’s a good and healthy thought as long as you understand that the function of that thought is to bring you peace. It’s unhealthy or bad if you get too into it or you start writing op-eds about how you have the right to kill your enemies.”

Those sorts of ideas still need to cohere into an album, and some of the exciting work happens when it turns into a unified piece.

“When you put it together, you do have to answer: what was I writing about?” Darnielle said. “Here’s the common thread among those, and here are the ones that express that the most strongly, ‘Younger’ being the best one for me. I have my suspicions that, for every writer, there are one or two themes that just make a straight line. When you do art or writing, you’re trying to say something that nags at you. Your opinion on it may shift, but it’s probably true that the work is a continuous line, and individual songs, stories, books, paintings — whatever — are just expressions of that line.”