Crucial Track for February 17, 2026

"Rooks" by Shearwater

#365songs (48 / 365)

I probably found Shearwater via cokemachineglow, for many years my favorite music review website, who raved about their 2008 album Rook. Besides the very positive review, my curiosity was piqued by their reference to Okkervil River, who I was already a fan of and whose singer Will Sheff was in Shearwater for their first few albums, I think they parted amicably, there's a whole song about it that both Sheff and Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg sing on.

You should click on the word "raved" in the previous paragraph and read cokemachineglow's review of Rook, which is a great bit of writing about a stunning album, but you should also listen to "Rooks," which is a very approachable way in (if I recall correctly, it was mine, and thus my onramp to Shearwater as a whole). Superficially, you got a hooky fingerpicked electric guitar line. You got some swelling horns over the instrumental breaks to lend some gravitas. You got Jonathan Meiburg's powerful voice, the centerpiece of Shearwater, including both an instance of the strident /aɪ/ diphthong that he does so well in the last syllable of "And we'll sleep until the world of man is paralyzed" and his very nice falsetto in the last verse. As with so many songs, what elevates "Rooks" for me is the lyric. All that prettiness and hookiness is in service of some pretty dark, apocalyptic stuff: birds dying or disappearing en masse, the world of man (as mentioned above) being paralyzed, nowhere to flee for your life, empty cages, kingdom come. And I always like a song that ends abruptly and without a lot of foofaraw, and "Rooks" does that, on a low piano note that sounds just enough like the tolling of a bell not to be too on-the-nose.