The Passions of John Darnielle

“I can write a song under fire,” says John Darnielle, from his home in North Carolina. “I don’t sit around waiting for lightning to strike me before I write. I write when I write as a matter of course. The whole process is a pleasure.” The musician/writer has been releasing albums at a steady clip since the early ’90s, including six LPs since 2020, with another on the way in early August called Days. Darnielle also published his third novel Devil House and This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days in that span. 

Thirty minutes with Darnielle is never enough. During that time, the conversation veered from his writing to his embrace of the internet and Eternal September (look it up). The mention of the band Souled American (“My wife and I probably wouldn’t be together if it hadn’t been for bonding over Souled American in 1994”) inspired another diversion. Still, the half-hour yielded plenty of thoughtful commentary and stories about his songs and books.

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For the uninitiated, Darnielle began the Mountain Goats in the early ’90s as its sole member, recording directly to a Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox. The lo-fi quality gave the songs an immediate and urgent feel. Darnielle built up a devoted fanbase over time, and after releasing music on a variety of indie labels, signed with 4AD in the early ’00s, where he released a run of much-loved records including Tallahassee (2002) and The Sunset Tree (2005), which deals with Darnielle’s complicated relationship with his abusive stepfather. 

“I’m in a human body on earth, there’s inspiration everywhere, every day,” Darnielle said. “If you’re not inspired about what you see in front of you, you have 59 years behind you to look back at and see what’s there. There’s just never any shortage of subject matter.” 

Seeing a Mountain Goats show is often an emotional experience for diehard fans. Yes, there are cathartic singalongs to favorites such as “This Year,” “Up the Wolves” and “No Children,” but devotees seem to know the lyrics to even the numerous rarities, unreleased or otherwise, that Darnielle will often pull out during his shows.

It’s from this deep well that This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days arrived last December. The book presents 366 Mountain Goats songs, one for each day of the year including one for February 29, along with notes from Darnielle that range from honest accounts detailing his former struggles with drug addiction to more cryptic annotations. 

“So, I would call the ones you’re calling cryptic elliptical, right?” Darnielle pushed back. “I think they’re doing something from a different angle.”

According to Darnielle, This Year gave him an opportunity to talk about and engage with his music in a way that falls outside the standard album cycle interview.

“That’s what happens when you get a new album out and one of the streaming services wants to do an interview with you,” Darnielle explained. “They ask you about the songs in a really prescriptive way. What do you remember about writing this one? That’s a very limiting way to frame a question about a song.”

When I greeted Darnielle, I began the interview with “Happy ‘Up the Wolves’ Day,” since this was the entry that fell on the date of our discussion. Although “Wolves” is one of the Mountain Goats’ most popular songs, Darnielle doesn’t use the space to explain the lyrics. Instead, Darnielle parses the transcription of “going to” versus “gonna,” talks about tracking the song in a room Tom Waits once recorded in and how he asked the studio owner to sit in so he didn’t have to record the vocals and guitar in total isolation.

“I wanted each entry to be interesting,” Darnielle said. “I am treating it like a writer. I’m not separated from my central vocation as a writer. When I’m doing this, I’m still thinking about what’s the most interesting and fun way of writing about this.” 

Darnielle’s editor initially wanted to release a book of complete lyrics, but the musician wanted a different format. This Year introduces readers to some deep cuts, including songs that were only played live or never recorded. In order to make room, the book sometimes eschews some of Darnielle’s more beloved tracks in his discography.

“I was operating on instincts,” Darnielle said when the time came to choose the songs that would make the final list. “Like, these are the ones I want to talk about. In the case of “It Froze Me,” that’s really a song more for hearing than talking about.” 

This Year gives Mountain Goats fans another opportunity to bond over Darnielle’s work. A book club of sorts has formed on YouTube where each day, readers post ruminations and reflections in the comments section. Even though Darnielle is aware of the club’s existence, don’t expect him to pop in and comment anytime soon.

“I know about it, and I think it’s amazing, but I would consider it crass for me to check in on it,” Darnielle said. “I love it when people who listen to my stuff are doing their own thing with it. I am not needed there. I already did my end. But I think it’s amazing that it’s there.”

The comments range from brief greetings to longer, more emotional entries. This is nothing new for Darnielle, as many Mountain Goats fans have been “very online” since the early days, helping spread the word about the music. 

“I was online early and the band has grown up with the internet,” Darnielle said. “I don’t think you’d be talking to me if people didn’t share my stuff that way.”

Long before This Year, the internet has been home to sites devoted to collecting Darnielle’s lyrics and listing his multifarious releases. Fans also post live recordings of rarities on YouTube. These resources helped Darnielle put together his book and even find information on some of the most obscure songs.

“People who like my stuff, they do the archiving,” Darnielle said. “I’m not really an archivist guy by nature or disposition. So, the internet makes it easier to do something like this. I didn’t dig up some tape version of “You Were Cool” to write about it. I looked it up on the internet.”

The excavation of obscure material in This Year can be a double-edged sword for completists. Much of the early Mountain Goats material is hard to find in physical form and extremely expensive. There are also numerous EPs that house some of the best Mountain Goats material. Reissues of albums such as The Coroner’s Gambit (2000) and All Hail West Texas (2002) have appeared recently, but don’t expect some of the more obscure stuff to resurface anytime soon. 

“Putting stuff back in print is one of the least interesting errands of a person who’s always making new stuff,” Darnielle said. “You have to clear space for it, and then you have to do interviews about a thing that you wrote 15 years ago.”

An avid book collector, Darnielle knows the pain of not being able to acquire every rare or out-of-print edition. 

“Streaming has given this sort of illusion that ubiquity is the best thing,” he said. “That if you read about something, you must also lay eyes on that thing and hear that thing and have that thing. Sometimes you make a choice where you say, look, ‘I can’t buy all of the books, right?’”

Still, Darnielle is aware of the desire and said his old stuff could eventually be reissued on physical media. In the meantime, fans can look forward to Days, releasing on August 7. The album comes less than a year after Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan, following one of Darnielle’s longest titles with one of his most direct.

“After I wrote “Days” as a song, I wanted to point at it, because it really does speak to a lot of the stuff at issue in the other songs,” he said. “It sort of summarized them, but it connects to all of them, like it was the center of a wheel. Like a lot of my records, much of this one came during an extended, concentrated burst of inspiration.”

Days was conceived as a follow-up to Goths (2017). Working again with bandmates Jon Wurster and Matt Douglas and a cast of other musicians, Darnielle recorded Days at Sear Sound in Manhattan. Many of the song titles namecheck famous people such as “Song for Layne Staley” and first single “Charlie Sheen Reaches Out to the Feds.” But don’t expect homages to fallen stars. 

“It’s not that they’re celebrities, it’s that they’re from the past,” Darnielle said. “These are figures from the past, which looks different down the line. This is not Venom in the ’80s; this is in the 2000s. The Charlie Sheen story is from that moment, but it’s a very distant story. It’s a record about memory in a lot of ways.”

Now 59 years old, Darnielle is looking at both the past and the future, even though This Year and Days are both conduits for memories. Near the beginning of our discussion, he brought up a recollection involving this very publication.

“There is a possibility you, writing for SPIN magazine, found out about the Mountain Goats because we were listed as one of the 10 best records you didn’t hear in either ’93 or ’94,” he said. “Zopilote Machine was like one of the indie records that they gave a two-page spread to in their year-end issue. That was a big deal for us. I was doing bookings off of that list that year. That got me in the door at the Troubadour. I was very arrogant and insufferable. Oh, you haven’t [heard of us]. Well, SPIN magazine has!”

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“I can write a song under fire,” says John Darnielle, from his home in North Carolina. “I don’t sit around waiting for lightning to strike me before I write. I write when I write as a matter of course. The whole process is a pleasure.” The musician/writer has been releasing albums at a steady clip […]David Harris{authorlink}https://www.spinmagazine.com/feed/SPINMusic News, Album Reviews, Concert Photos, Videos and Morehttps://static.spinmagazine.com/files/2023/08/cropped-logo-spin-s-340×340.png