Mountain Goats

Mon 12th Apr, 2010 in Features

John Darnielle is rarely lost for something to say. Both in song and in life, he’ll bubble over with words spoken at such a rate you can barely keep up. He is a wordsmith who began in poetry and then became a “lyrics guy” as lead singer of The Mountain Goats.

Darnielle’s bio states that he always aspired to be a poet but somehow it became music instead. “I started out setting my poems to music. I had my poems and my guitar and I had time on my hands. I was playing something that sounded interesting to me, and I had all these poems about divorcing couples. Poetry is the big stuff; it’s where the giants walk. I try to write poetry but… A song is its own thing. It’s lower but generally a more human effort. I like the fact that they are a little grubbier than poetry is.”

These “grubbier” creations have spanned over ten years worth of albums and countless compilations. While The Mountain Goats have an immediately recognisable sound, the songs have evolved from their poetic origins into a creation encompassing more than just poetry. “I think my earlier stuff is melodically less interesting. The band opens things up. If it was just me and the guitar I think I would be making the same records ten years after the first records…I’m working on this one song now where the melody is forcing me to cut down on phrases where I would normally – you can probably tell by talking to me – rabbit on and on and on and on. The song is really forcing me to restrict myself in an awesome way. And that I think is where song really is more complicated than poetry is.”

To add to the complication, Darnielle tackles big issues- drugs, death, violence and divorce among others. None have been planned that way. Over the past years and albums some songs have appeared strictly autobiographical, some based in distant memory, or childhood memories that are exaggerated in time. Others seem straight from fiction. “It’s really been very interesting to me. It’s the kind of thing you can’t be thinking about when you’re writing. If you catch yourself trying to decide what the theme is or something you have to stop yourself.”

This time around, by intention or accident, he’s gone for religion and faith. The Life Of The World To Come carries the same torch held by previous albums. It is theme-driven, intense, and relentlessly and desperately exultant. This time the album is based around what Darnielle describes as “twelve hard lessons the bible taught me. Sort of.”

Considering that the credibility of a band can be easily written off as soon as they are exposed as remotely faith-driven, how have the fans reacted to one of the dearest held indie bands writing an album about religion? “There’s been a number of different reactions. Before The Life of the World to Come came out I felt a certain consternation among people who listen to what I do and they were concerned that it would be my Slow Train Coming or whatever. I suffered through some losses in the past few years, you know, my mother-in-law, and my own health has been up and down. It’s stuff like that. It questions your spirituality whether you’re a spiritual person or not. So I wrote the record I wrote, and I’m still figuring out just what I wanted it to say.”

Clearly people didn’t mind. And many connect with the songs in a very strong way. “It’s clear to me now that the emotional centre of the album is Matthew 25:27 and that’s the one that I don’t play live much but it is the one I get letters about. The difficulty of being fragile; what it’s really like to come face to face with your own fragility.”

Much like any The Mountain Goats release, the album appeals to people who find a piece of themselves in it. “Like with Get Lonely,” says Darnielle, “there were fewer people who attached to it quickly. Part of it was that it’s an introverted record. It’s not so much for people who voice their concerns out loud vehemently. It’s about those feelings that you carry with you a long time before you know what they’re all about.”

The strength of this personal draw lies with the protagonists of Darnielle’s songs. They are far from perfect, often close to death (whether they realise or not) and tortured, and yet the listener finds themselves drawn to them. The manic Letters From Belgium (from 2004’s We Shall All Be Healed ) is a prominent example of this with the lyrics: “In the cold clear light of day down here/Everyone’s a monster/That’s cool with all of us/We’ve been past the point of help since early April”. The scene depicted is nearly apocalyptic, but they’re all still having a good time anyway. “I’m very fond of that song actually. We don’t have a set list for the tour yet, but I should remember to throw that in.” laughs Darnielle.

How does this tie in with Stephen Colbert’s description of the Mountain Goats’ music as “cheerful desolation”; that people can relate to these characters but find hope in that “well at least I’m not as bad as that”? “That [appearance on the The Colbert Report ] was a really exciting time for us. That was really cool. I always worry that I’m coming across too heavy! The thing is that we have a character speaking for himself in a situation. It appears to me as an opportunity to reflect on the choices he’s made, and that you probably wouldn’t get that opportunity in your own day to day life. You’re too busy living it, right?”

“You don’t stop to think about your deal, you just go on with you’re doing. But these characters in the song have these misery stricken lives and you give them a rest and give them an opportunity to stop and pause and reflect. And when they do reflect they get to see both that they’re blessed to be alive at all, and two, that they could have been a lot happier. Which is true of all of us, right? That’s why it’s kind of cheerful because they get to have lives at all. And we should all be like that. At the same time they see that they kind of made a mess of things and we should all be like that too.”

The Mountain Goats still have these shows left on the tour:
Tuesday April 13 – Manning Bar, Sydney
Wednesday April 14 – The Corner Hotel, Melbourne
Friday April 16 – Fowlers Live, Adelaide
Sunday April 18 – The Rosemount, Perth