Interview: John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats
Posted on 26th May 11 by Caroline O Donoghue | 
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“Whoever said you shouldn’t meet your heroes was a liar”, we said late last year. Caroline O’Donoghue gets ready to back us up on that one.
Doing justice to an artist whose work means more to you than most of the people you know do is never going to be an easy feat. What’s even trickier is trying to convey this to the artist when they’re sitting right next to you. The Mountain Goats, currently touring with their 13th studio album, enjoy a dedicated fan base that enables them to play Dublin for the first time in nine years and still pack Whelans. They haven’t had anything resembling a hit record in this country, and none of their music has been used in a Vodafone ad. The Mountain Goats’ cult following stems from the songwriting of John Darnielle, a musician whose originality, phrasing and wit has redefined his fans conception of lyric craftsmanship. Darnielle writes songs about things you didn’t know people could write songs about, his subject matter wandering from drug-dealing teenagers to pulp fiction writers, and everywhere in between. If John Darnielle released a concept album about the early life of Sonny Cheba, I couldn’t imagine a Mountain Goats fan batting an eye.
“I just do what I do. I don’t really think about it and I’m not trying to critique how songs are written. It just comes naturally to me, I guess” he shrugs. The latest album, All Eternals Deck, embodies actors such as Liza Minelli, Judy Garland and oddly, sixties badass Charles Bronson. I ask him what prompts him to use these characters in his songwriting.
“It varies from song to song, but a lot of the time what inspires me are things in my direct field of vision. The inspiration for “For Charles Bronson” happened while I was watching a Charles Bronson movie, and I think about this guy a lot. That song is straight bio, he grew up really poor in a house with thirteen children with a single set of clothes to share among them. And it was a girl’s pair of clothes, so when he got old enough to go to school, he was sent in his sisters clothing in this tiny mining village in Pennsylvania. He grew up with nothing, in that pre-World War Two kind of poverty that people lived in. And I think that was kind of interesting, so that was that prompt. And then there’s Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland… these survivor characters, have always been very attractive to me.”
While this earlier work dealt with personal issues, he tends to avoid out-and-out confessional songwriting, preferring to inhabit characters in often elaborate story songs.
“What they tell you when you’re a very young writer, is that every character you write is going to be you eventually anyway. When you have a dream, every person in the dream is you. That lizard self of you who dreams doesn’t really know that other people even exist. So, if someone is trying to do something to you in a dream, it’s really just you trying to do something to yourself. And it’s a really profitable way of reading dreams, and for writing songs too. The only person you really know anything about is yourself, so everything you write is going to be some version of that. I try to stay away from confessional stuff because it seems a little… well, weird.”
Unable to mask my squirming fan-girl status, I admit to posting on the official Mountain Goats forums. Like any artist discussion forum, it is essentially a friendly community of borderline cultish dedication, characterised by lyric discussions and bootleg debates. However, occasional fans will pass through when they realise that Darnielle himself is a user, and use it as a medium to establish direct contact with him. Over the last several months, Darnielle has distanced himself from the forums, instead choosing to tweet messages to fans.
“The forums are a double-edged sword, it’s very much in-for-a-penny, in-for-a-pound. People think they can get your attention by saying your name over and over again. For me, Twitter is kind of an ideal expression of the internet. No-one gets angry with you if you don’t respond to their question on Twitter. I liken it to the hallway in high school. Y’know, you say hi to people, you talk a little, but you don’t really know them. Then you go to your class, and you go back to your real life.”
The clear distinction between the two – his social persona and his ‘real’ life – is extremely telling of Darnielle’s approach to his underground fame. “Twitter is a nice environment where people are known to one another and are friendly, but at the same time it’s not as intense as, I don’t know… actually hanging out with people. Which I don’t … I don’t hang out with people.” He admits, and it is at once both easy and hard to believe this. The ecstatically energetic performer I have just witnessed on stage reveals nothing of the cheerful hermit Darnielle accepts himself as. As I nervously stumble through my questions, trying to condense five years of obsessive listenership into fifteen minutes, I can feel him empathising with me. Deftly steering the conversation, he negotiates his way around my thinly disguised awe of him, coaxing my nerves with an unsaid “Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”
Accepting yourself for the foul and flawed human being you truly are is a cornerstone of Darnielle’s lyrical philosophy, and the more you listen to the Mountain Goats the more you gradually realise how befitting their moniker is. The Mountain Goats is music for the awkward and precariously balanced, by the awkward and precariously balanced. But we’re still going to make it up that mountain, no matter how ridiculous it looks. To quote one of All Eternals Deck’s gems “Birth of Serpents”:
“Crawl through the tunnel and follow, follow the light northwest
See that young man who dwells inside his body like an uninvited guest
See the tunnel twist
Clutch your birthright in your fist
Let the camera do its dirty work down there in the dark
Sit low, rise high, and bring back some blurry pictures to remember all your darker moments by”
Young men profoundly uncomfortable with themselves tend to be Darnielle’s foremost disciples, and for better or worse, he’s found himself their reluctant messiah. As a result of the highly emotional, semi-autobiographical nature of his earlier work, particularly breakthrough album The Sunset Tree, many fans have chosen to view him as an icon for parental abuse, or more importantly, the survival of it. Does he find this role exhausting?
“People… people say a lot of things… After The Sunset Tree I did get a lot of letters from people who had been through some things. But they were things they needed to say, things they needed to tell someone for a long time.”
We discuss The Extra Lens, Darnielle’s side-project with his old friend, songwriter Franklin Bruno. Oddly, the 2010 release Undercard is the record I’d recommend for anyone struggling to break ground with the Mountain Goats, being a somewhat more pop-focused and whimsical album then the Mountain Goats recordings. The album also offers a bonus for existing fans, as it comes packaged with detailed explanations of the songs in its liner notes, a convention that Darnielle has avoided in the past.
“I don’t like to talk about songs on Mountain Goats records. People have a personal connection to the Mountain Goats. The Extra Lens is almost more of a cerebral project. Even if the songs are emotional there’s a certain degree of playfulness that, well with the Mountain Goats… I mean, people get the Mountain Goats tattooed on their bodies. I don’t want to tell them what the songs mean in a nailed down way. If people got something greiviously wrong I’d feel terrible saying “Oh, wow. That’s not what I meant at all.”
As the interview draws to a close I stumble through another half-baked compliment, telling him how much of an inspiration he has been to my own songwriting. I can’t imagine how many times he has heard this exact line, yet he still manages to be enthusiastic about it.
“You make music too?”
Even the word “too” turns me into a giggling mess. Here’s my musical hero, employing a comparative adverb at me.
“It’s really more of a dude’s game,” he says jokingly “You should keep doing it!”
As I make a crack about stalking him, his expression changes to a mock-serious. “Don’t ever make stalking jokes to entertainers. Because… we get stalked. It’s like making a bomb joke in Northern Ireland. Don’t do it because people get bombed there.”
We take a photograph, and he disappears behind a door. I wonder if he understands how much meeting him has meant to me. I wonder if he realises that me and my friend lied to his sound guy in order to get this interview. Most of all, I wonder if he’ll ever write a song about the last fifteen minutes. I know one of us will.
JOHN DARNIELLE | Autoclave — A Take Away Show from one shot seattle on Vimeo.
Tags: chancing our arms, interview, John Darnielle, the mountain goats, whelan's
This was a really great interview, you really got him to open up and he said some pretty interesting things. The lizard part of my brain thoroughly enjoyed it!
The only thing that jarred with me was that your love of Darnielle intruded too much on the article overall. I understand that this was how you framed the article, and it is probably how I would also have gone about it, truth be told, but it is a bit distancing for the casual reader. Things like: “Even the word “too” turns me into a giggling mess. Here’s my musical hero, employing a comparative adverb at me.”
HOWEVER, I think that you are a really good writer, and even though I disagreed with the content at times, the flow of language and your style is really refreshing, and to be honest, it is of a higher level than some of the other writers on this blog, no offence to all the other writers on this site!
Hey, good interview. I really liked the mixture of this kind of storytelling and his answers. I really enjoyed reading it, it was entertaining and, most of all, pretty informative. Thanks!
Very good interview, a refreshing glimpse into not just the life of the interviewee, but also into the interviewer. Looking forward to many more interviews, just dont know how you can beat this having started with your hero
Very Gay Talese!!