John Darnielle Is Trying Not To Vanish
| Published Sep 21, 2010
Above: John Darnielle (Center) of the Mountain Goats
Photo illustration by Courtesy Photo.
And this increasing success is due to mostly just one thing. John Darnielle, the brain behind the Mountain Goats, knows words. Almost every word he uses in almost every song he writes is placed with such precision that each reaches a potential similar only to its very first use, the reason for its conception.
And he doesn’t only write his nasally new-folk songs that way, he speaks that way. He types that way. He seems to live that way. His responses seem at first long-winded. But every word is necessary, because that’s Darnielle.
Darnielle gave the DailyER Nebraskan a moment of his time in June earlier this year to discuss books, music, upcoming albums and even religion.
DailyER Nebraskan:
The Mountain Goats’ latest album, The Life of the World to Come, has obviously biblical overtones. Are you of Christian faith? If not then from where did the inspiration to write bible verse-based songs come?
Darnielle:
I'm, you know, an ex-Christian - ex-Catholic, specifically; I was really involved with Church life for a while there. I have been really into the Bible my whole life, in some way or other, but I think it was when I was a teenage Faulkner obsessive that I first realized that the Bible was this incredible fount of compact, rich stories & ideas - it's like, any given story or verse can be expanded almost infinitely; all you have to do is draw it out. The Bible isn't the only text that's like this - another big favorite is Hesiod's Works and Days, which I've been meaning to do something with for years - but it is the one with the strongest emotional connection, the place that one sort of naturally thinks of as offering comfort or guidance, even after you've stopped believing; the cues are everywhere - funerals, weddings, hotels - you know?
DER N:
You’ve said in interviews and live performances that your songs are usually not personal anecdotes, but narratives. Would you say, though, that each narrative has a considerable amount of personal experience and feeling included?
JD:
Feeling, for sure - I only sing songs I can really throw myself into with total abandon - I think of what I do as being emotional & cathartic first and foremost. I would say, yeah, that often it turns out that a song is more about me than I'd thought, but that's usually something I learn years later - when I write, I'm just trying to tell stories; I wouldn't enjoy doing it, wouldn't feel right about it, if it was always me sitting there going "here, let me talk some more about myself." But yeah, I mean, it's a known truth that pretty much anybody, no matter what he's writing about, is to a large extent speaking about himself & his experiences.
DER N:
Lately, each album has had its own entire theme or story. Will you continue this with the next album? What can be expected for the next album?
JD:
Well, the thing is, I don't start out by saying "now, I will write an album around this theme" - I just write songs, and then after a while, I look at what I've got, and I say, oh, what do you know, there's a recurring theme or idea or period in time I'm writing about, these songs go well together. When I look at what I've got written since The Life of the World to Come came out, it's about fifteen songs so far I think (not all of them will make the cut for the next album, presumably) - I mean, it sounds to me like I'm writing about people who've sort of become ghosts but don't feel that way. Like these people are alive & real & trying not to vanish. I don't really know! is the thing. I think it's sort of important, for me at least, to not think "I am writing about this." I have to write in a sort of savage fashion, just write the first thing that makes me feel something and later try to sort of, you know, read the entrails.
DER N:
How do you cope with the balance between writing and releasing so much music as well as touring? Are they two separate things, or do they overlap?
JD:
I write on tour, so they're not entirely separate. I don't believe in setting my writing-self aside from my daily-self: I write, that's what I do, I've been doing it since I was five, first short stories, then poems, then finally coming to songs. I mean, I'm always saying this, but I don't really feel like I write all that much - maybe a song or two a month? Is that really so much to ask of a person who calls himself a songwriter, to write a couple of songs a month? Even if you only worked a week on each song, that'd still leave you three weeks to go fishing or tend to the cats or whatever. And that'd be 24 songs a year, which most people would consider prolific, but I kind of don't. Prolific would be fifty or more songs a year. When I get some time in a day, I try to write something, and when I see a couple of images or ideas or emotions that seem to be talking to each other, I sew them together and stitch them into a bigger cloth; maybe a couple of days a week I don't even write a single line, but it's rare. It is kind of my job to be writing, and I take a lot of pleasure in doing it, so keeping a balance is not really a question for me. I don't know if I am being clear or not so I hope I am!
DER N:
Up until the release of The Life of the World to Come, you released a music video for each of your past three albums. Why did you choose not to continue this trend? Or is there currently a video in the works?
JD:
Well, we did shoot this play-the-whole-album-at-once-live-and-unaccompanied thing, which came out as a DVD. The gap between the album being recorded and released was pretty short this time, and we hit the road almost immediately. I don't know - I was pretty surprised to find myself doing videos when we did "This Year," and even more surprised to do two more in the following years - I do not feel like a guy who does videos, you know? I like the ones we've done a lot, we've worked with awesome directors, but it's not really a priority for me - if I have the choice between touring & shooting a video, I'm usually going to tour.
DER N:
Judging by the lyrics in your work, you seem to be well read. Who are some of your favorite authors, and what books of theirs do you enjoy?
JD:
Well, my favorite living writer is Joan Didion, has been forever; I love everything she's done but I love Play It As It Lays the most. Spent a lot of yesterday reading Yeats, he's like this towering force of awesomeness, who could ever be better than Yeats - not many, I think. I think the writers I've come to most lately who've jumped into my all-time-favorites list are Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter, for rather different reasons - Willa Cather books make me cry real hard, they are so incredible, so true-to-life, so very much about being human and living a real life - I think she is probably one of the two or three best writers of the twentieth century, she seems to understand the human heart so well; I'm going to make her the second author by whom I have read everything (the other one's Didion). Porter on the other hand, I've only read Flowering Judas but it made a big impression, her sentences gleam - she is a favorite of William Gass, who's a favorite of mine; I've read most of his fiction & a lot of his commentary and my favorite is the Cartesian Sonata collection. But both Porter and Gass, I'm not sure how well they love the people they're writing about; I usually need a degree of empathy, even pity, for the characters. Because I kind of feel like most any character is worthy of a little love from the person who is subjecting him or her to existence in the first place.
DER N:
As a musician that writes such novelistic songs, do you draw influence from musicians as well as authors? Which ones?
JD:
This I would guess is kind of not for me to say. Like, this morning, I'm listening to Mary Chapin Carpenter, and it is resonating with me so hard - but do I write like her, play like her? Probably not. The #1 most played artist in my iTunes library is Amy Grant, but I'm guessing nobody'll ever compare me to her. I feel like the impact the music I listen to has on my songwriting is kind of elliptical, cryptic even - it runs through secret circuits.
DER N:
You wrote a book for the 33 1/3 series, do you have any plans on writing another book in the future?
JD:
Yeah, I am working on the second one. Big surprise for me that it's a slow process - the first one just sort of spilled out of me like blood. The central event of the new one gushered forth in the same way, just sort of came out one morning by surprise. And I have spent the last couple of years, when I'm not writing songs or recording or touring, fleshing out this one moment that happens with the main character, digging back to this moment. I am really excited about it but I am not rushing to finish it, I'm a big believer in letting the thing I'm working on tell me when to work on it & not forcing anything.
DER N:
What is your least favorite question you get asked in interviews? If you could answer it in any way, without making any enemies, how would you?
JD:
It's "why are you coming to (insert name of city)" - this is a mystifying question for me - not dissimilar to when, if you're interviewing for a job, they ask you why you want to work there. it's like, you know, I needed a job and I know I can do what you need done here, so I figured, I'll apply here, right? Why do I want to come to any city to play music: because I love to play music for new people. It seems self-evident to me! I always wonder if maybe it's an old-school way of trying to get somebody to big-up the town they're coming to - "we want to come to Nova Scotia because NOVA SCOTIA HAS THE BEST MUSIC FANS IN THE WORLD!" or something - I don't know, something about it always makes me feel like there's a camera on me or something. I try to avoid feeling like there is a camera on me.
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