There is no better storyteller among American songwriters this side of John Prine than John Darnielle. His undisputed masterpiece: 2002’s All Hail West Texas, a lo-fi album recorded on a Panasonic cassette player about, as the cover puts it, “seven people, two houses, a motorcycle and a closed facility for adolescent boys,” which begins with the classic “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton.” Jenny, who drives up on a Kawasaki in the song of the same name and appears again as the sender of several postcards over the course of the album, returned ten years later on “Transcendental Youth” – “Jenny calls from Montana/ She’s only passing through,” it said – and seemed to Darnielle to be more of a cipher for the romanticized memory of his narrators than a character with a story of his own.
On “Jenny From Thebes” Darnielle actually reports on her life
But on “Jenny From Thebes” Darnielle actually reports on her life. The fact that the album has the ancient Egyptian city in its title suggests – as does the cover with a quote from the Aeschylus play “Seven against Thebes” (“I want to lead this man home, the father’s city/ Let him possess and the power of his father’s house”) – on the mythical character of his story, which begins sometime in the mid-eighties and sounds like it. The poppy new wave of the Cars and the drama of Jim Steinman served as a reference for producer Trina Shoemaker for the sound of the album. In the first song, “Clean Slate,” we end up in Jenny’s ranch in West Texas, where a wide variety of people find refuge, to prancing piano, whirring strings and jagged brass.
But a mysterious providence drives them away in the following songs… out to sea. “Jenny From Thebes” is a rock opera in the spirit of Greek and American mythology, and is at the same time the “Odyssey” and “Easy Rider”. “I wish the West Texas Highway was a Möbius strip/ I could drive it forever,” sang Darnielle in 2002. Two decades later, he’s still talking about it, and we listen, spellbound.
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