My Favorite Songs: Deerhunter's "Desire Lines"

Some Words About A Track I Haven't Stopped Playing On Repeat

Every now and then I write about one of my favorite songs of all time. This is one of those times.

“Desire Lines” is probably my favorite indie rock song of the last 15 years. I listen to it at least once every couple of weeks, usually when I’m walking. (“Desire Lines” is an incredible walking song! It accelerates my pace by an average of 15 percent each time I put it on.) There’s a Martin Scorsese quote I remember — possibly apocryphal since I couldn’t find it online — where he talks about why he loves “Gimme Shelter” so much, and he said “it feels like something exciting is about to happen” whenever it comes on. I feel that way about “Desire Lines.” If I were a filmmaker, I would put “Desire Lines” in every movie just like Marty does with “Gimme Shelter.”

There are many reasons why I love “Desire Lines,” but I want to focus on two of them. The first is is my general adoration of extended instrumental outros. When I think about my favorite songs ever, many of them have extended instrumental outros. “Like A Hurricane” by Neil Young & Crazy Horse. “The Concept” by Teenage Fanclub. “An Ocean Between The Waves” by The War On Drugs. “November Rain.” “Purple Rain.” “Free Bird.” “Layla.” The countless Tom Petty and Fleetwood Mac tunes where Mike Campbell and Lindsey Buckingham get wicked in the closing stretch. That’s my shit.

The magic of “Desire Lines” is that more than half the song is an extended instrumental outro. It kicks in at the 2:58 mark, when the tempo suddenly quickens and Lockett Pundt stops singing about how youthful dreams are destined to die. For about a minute, it feels like the band is going to keep playing faster and faster and faster! until the song is finally forced to implode. But after about a minute, the pace stabilizes. And that’s when the lines get truly desirous. Unlike those other venerable “extended instrumental outro” songs I mentioned in the previous paragraph, “Desire Lines” doesn’t culminate with a climactic guitar solo. It just locks into a groove and rides it for several minutes. It feels like a trance that you wish would continue for 20 uninterrupted minutes, but Deerhunter ends it at just the right time, at 16 seconds shy of seven minutes.

That’s the first reason why I love “Desire Lines.” As for the second, I want to go back to that possibly fabricated Martin Scorsese quote. “Desire Lines” is the sixth track on Halcyon Digest, Deerhunter’s 2010 mainstream-ish breakthrough and the record generally considered to be their apex. It is one of two songs written by Pundt, the George Harrison of Deerhunter, who otherwise cedes most of the record to the band’s brilliant auteur, Bradford Cox. Pundt is a narrower talent than Cox, whose songs range from psychologically fraught synth-rock to beach-y psych pop on Halcyon Digest. Pundt’s specialty meanwhile is widescreen dream pop, which he also demonstrated on the excellent 2012 album he put out with his side project Lotus Plaza, Spooky Action At A Distance, which essentially reworks “Desire Lines” 10 more times (complimentary).

Revisiting Halcyon Digest this week, I was once again blown away by how immaculate it sounds. Deerhunter’s co-producer, Ben H. Allen, had just worked on another indie-rock landmark of this era, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion, but Halcyon Digest is his most impressive work as far as I’m concerned. Listening to it reminds me more of Siamese Dream or Disintegration than a typical indie record from 2010.

Halcyon Digest is lush and inviting, and yet there’s also an undertow of mystery and something … foreboding. You feel it lurking beneath the surface in ways you can’t quite pinpoint. When you’re a kid just getting into music, this feeling usually correlates with an allusion to the adult world that is scary but also seductive. We all have own experiences with that. Typically in rock music this revolves around direct references to sex and drugs, though ultimately it’s really about the essential enigma that is the greater, larger world as viewed by a naive (but eager to learn) listener. For me these experiences derived from greatest hits albums by The Doors and Velvet Underground as well as those alt-rock warhorses I mentioned by Smashing Pumpkins and The Cure. For younger generations it might have been Yeezus or Blonde or … well, I honestly have no idea!

Anyway: I was already well into adulthood when Halcyon Digest was released. But it still gave me that “mystery/foreboding/enigma” feeling. It started with the album cover, which features a photo taken in 1982 of a contestant at Atlanta’s Miss Star Lite Pageant. I suppose that if Deerhunter ever has a TikTok-fueled resurgence, they will be retconned as an “indie sleaze” act. But that album cover tells a different story. It pinpoints and isolates the emptiness of the “indie sleaze” caricature. Cox certainly was known for his “antics” at the time, as it were, some of which were performative in a sort of “indie sleaze” kind of way. (Deerhunter’s classic performance of “Monomania” on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon comes to mind.) But this was not the kind of band that posted selfies of themselves spraying champagne at foxy clubgoers in some exclusive Brooklyn establishment. They did not party and they did not make “bops.”

When I listen to “Desire Lines,” I think about outsiders and the worlds that outsiders create when they don’t get invited to parties where beautiful people spray champagne all over themselves. A place you can sense and imagine but can’t ever quite touch or fully arrive at. Bands like this don’t try to be part of our world. They make you want to be a part of theirs. That is where the “something exciting is about to happen” feeling comes from, and it remains whenever I listen to “Desire Lines.”

Not that I want to get overly romantic. The central premise of Halcyon Digest (and “Desire Lines” specifically) is that the good and bad parts of the past get lionized equally. I don’t want to be guilty of that. So I’ll just share this poorly filmed clip of Deerhunter performing “Desire Lines” at the 2011 Pitchfork Music Festival. I remember watching the band from the side of the stage. They played while facing the sun. You could see it setting as the outro kicked in. But the daylight never fully disappeared as the played on.

Self Promotion Time

I didn’t post a Substack last week, as I was on vacation in Wisconsin Dells. So I want to make sure to share this huge column I wrote about one of my favorite bands ever, Ween. Also, over at my Dylan pod Never Ending Stories, I had the pleasure of talking with the incredible Winston Watson, one of Bob’s most beloved drummers. I’m telling you: The man has met and hung out with literally every famous rock star ever. My cohosts and I barely scratched the surface with this guy!