Darby's Song

This is taken from a website and quoted by Brian Venable:

“please quit asking us to play darbys song…
we’re not….ever.

april 9th of this year was the 8th anniversary of darbys mother and my best friend katies death…
this is not some sweet sad song about some made up girl for us, she was very real to me and the fact that it even got recorded is amazing in itself.

katie jean killough was 26 in 1999 when she died of stage 4 cancer. when they found the tumor it was graped sized and in her colon,she’d had it since highscool and didn’t know it.
it had spread over the years to her liver,girlparts and her lymph glands.
3 yrs before that she had a very feisty but beautiful little baby girl that she named after darby crash, singer of the germs.
through out her entire pregnancy the doctors never noticed of found any signs of the spreading cancer…

me and katie never dated…never wanted too. we were like brother and sister, always fighting,making food, buying records …she got me the job at the doughnut shop and forced me to move into her room so we could make the rent cheaper.it went from $70 a month for her to $35 a month for the both of us.
we literally lived in a windowless back closet with 2 beds, 2 records collections, 2 record players & 1 fucking lizard that wasn’t mine!

i was very lucky to have katie in my life for as long as i did…
when she found out that she had cancer the doctors told her she had 10 yrs. to live…less than 2 weeks later and more tests that number was changed to a year and a half.
a month later she was told that it had spread farther than they thought and she had about 6months to live…

we all quit or jobs for a month and went on an ill fated trip to cal. that doesn’t really get discussed by the particpants and when she came home she started really freaking out.

she sent darby to live in franklin,tn. with darby’s fathers parents and tattoo’d her face and started using heroin. i got mad and we would fight about her behavior and what i felt she needed, i was being selfish about losing my friend looking back.
we quit talking and a month later she went to live in a krishna temple in india til she died…

i was at a show and went home early luckily when we got the call that katie didn’t have much time left, we all got to say something to her, to tell her we loved her so much.
she was completely out of it and couldn’t hear of understand us at all.
we hung up and something like 10 or 20 mins. later we get the call she had died.

her body was burned on a funeral pyre and her ashes spread in the ghangis river. that was april 9th,1999.

darbys song isn’t so much about darby as it is about katie for me…”

~ Brian

theres a mistake in this song, second verse should read:

hardest part there is about dying are the ones who get left behind ...

mhm.

The song is actually about the guitarist brian's close frind who had a daughter... before she dyed he promised to take care of her daughter.

This has to be one of the most heartbreakingly sad songs I've ever heard.

yeah ben doesnt have kids

I actually did an interview with Ben and asked what this song was about;

APR: Speaking of songs, we were hoping you might give us some insight into the real meaning behind “Darby’s Song”. We’ve read that its possibly about you having a daughter...

BN: Nope. Don’t have any daughters. [Laughs] People like to make up their own explanations.

APR: We also read that it was about one of Brian’s friends that had passed away and he promised that he would take care of her little girl, is that a little closer?

BN: Well Brian had been real close to Darby and Katie both, and so he had just written a couple of lines in his journal... He wrote, “I loved your mama more than she loved me” and “the hardest part about dying is the ones that get left behind.” So he had those two lines and I just took those and put music and finished the words, so thats what its basically about. But its kind of... Yeah, It all pretty much stemmed from those two lines. But I don’t know, we never play it live.

This song is about Ben's (lead singer) daughter, and about her mom dying. Really sad... :(