I actually used the answer from How do I run a node.js app as a background service? combined with what dwrz said above. In my case, I was creating a Discord bot that needed to be able to run when I was not around.
With this service in place, I initially got the same error that the initial poster did, which brought me here. I was missing the #!/usr/bin/env node
at the top of my executed node.js script.
Since then, no problems, although I intend to see what else can be extended to the service itself.