Features | Interviews
John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats)
By Andre Perry | 10 May 2007
John Darnielle is the songwriting force behind the Mountain Goats. Although he is consistently lauded for his focus on lyricism and songwriting rather than recording practices and arrangement, recent albums like 2005's The Sunset Tree and last year's Get Lonely have seen him expanding the sound of the band's music. I talked to Darnielle after his exclusive Daytrotter session during SXSW and we talked again following the band's spring tour of Scandinavia, discussing his interest in the sixties and seventies reggae scene, how Mountain Goats albums get made (from the boom-box days to the current studio era), and what to expect on the next record.
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CMG's Andre Perry (CMG): What are you working on now?
John Darnielle (JD): A new album. It's a dark record but it's more uptempo than you'd think. I've got a bunch of new songs and they lean towards the fairly dark stuff. More songs about reggae singers.
CMG: What's up with that?
JD: You know it's an amazing scene: the whole growth of the sixties and seventies. The mid-seventies reggae dudes had this mythical amazing thing where everybody knew everybody else and they were all recording at the same two or three studios. And there was this guy named Prince Far I, a really remarkably strange guy. I think a lot of people think of reggae as this monochromatic genre but actually there's almost infinite variety in it and I don't think there's been anybody else quite like [Fari] in any genre. He was a very strange guy, murdered in his home. I'm really attracted to stories of people who die strange and sudden deaths.
CMG: Are there any other reggae people you're writing about?
JD: I wrote about Dennis Brown on The Sunset Tree. He was Bob Marley's favorite singer. He has a voice to die for. He got really into cocaine and his lung collapsed. There's something about the contrast between the sweetness -- he sang love song type stuff and seemed to live an extremely hard life toward the end -- and there's something about that contrast between the sweetness of his work and how harsh it was in the end that really appeals to me.from a narrative standpoint.
CMG: The arc of it?
JD: I haven't quite parsed out why it is I keep reading biographies of these characters that we know as faces or names on records. The other thing is that we tend to know a little back-story on most of our pop stars but unless you become a big roots head then all you know about the reggae guys is their names. The whole growth of the movement throughout the late-sixties, especially the seventies, it's one of the great stories of all music. It's easily as good as the story of the birth of rock n roll. It's just amazing.
CMG: Can you talk about the process of creating a Mountain Goats album? How does an album begin from the time you start writing songs to the point you're in the studio?
JD: Well, there's usually a period of just sorta putt-putting around writing songs that usually become strays -- I think it's a bad idea, for me at least, to first get the idea for an album and then be super-programmatic about it. So, I write songs and pursue whatever ideas I have kicking around in my head, and at some point one song will usually quietly announce itself as the germ of a bigger idea. With Get Lonely it was "New Monster Avenue" -- it was written a long time before the rest of the songs, but I kept coming back to it, something about the central image of it really grabbed me. So, I'd look for other themes or phrases that sort of spoke to or built on that. It was more or less the same writing process when I was using my boombox, since when I'm writing now I write more or less the same way -- only I record the demos into my laptop now. I usually try to leave a couple of things under-practiced or unfinished for the studio, so that there can be that just-made energy in one or two of the songs -- for example, on The Sunset Tree, nobody had ever heard "Pale Green Things" except me, I just told everybody there was one I'd show them when the time came.
CMG: What sounds and aesthetics have you yet to explore? What's left to do?
JD: I'm not really a what-would-you-like-to-do guy like that. Lyrics are my first concern, I always let the music sort of develop organically and trust it to take care of itself. There are random things in my mind sometimes, like I'd like to get somebody who can play French horn, or those guitar-shaped acoustic basses -- I've had one of those on my want list for ages. But most of my ambitions are around song writing, not song recording.
CMG: What consumes you when the Mountain Goats are dormant?
JD: The Mountain Goats are kinda never dormant these days. I've sorta barely had a non-Mountain-Goats life for the past several years. When I'm not touring I'm setting up the next tour, when I'm not setting up a tour I'm writing: there are a thousand little things always to be taken care of. I am working on a book right now for the 33 1/3 series -- I'm doing Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. So I wake up and work on that or write songs, since I work best in the mornings. By three I'm thinking about what to cook for dinner, since I am the cook around here and I cook from scratch. Tonight it is savoury chickpea patties in a tomato glaze with a cooling banana raita on the side.
CMG: Judging from our brief email communications while you were on tour it seemed like this trip was really tiring.
JD: Oh, I'm just kinda bitchy when I'm on tour. Being a hypochondriac's bad enough, but when you're a hypochondriac and you actually get hit with some bad health it's the double whammy of death-fear doom. It was a very long tour though. I wasn't home for more than three weeks between August and March. One of my New Year's resolutions was not to bitch too much about that though since lots of people wish they lived on tour. I love playing shows for sure, love it more and more. Tour though, that I do not love. I wish I could just fly whole audiences into Durham, one after the other, for three weeks. That would be a bitchin' tour.
CMG: So when do you think we'll have the next album?
JD: We're recording in August and September and after that it's up to the powers that be.
CMG: Are you going in with the same team, with John Vanderslice and Scott Solter?
JD: Yep.
CMG: Awesome. Thanks, John.
*****
CMG's Andre Perry (CMG): What are you working on now?
John Darnielle (JD): A new album. It's a dark record but it's more uptempo than you'd think. I've got a bunch of new songs and they lean towards the fairly dark stuff. More songs about reggae singers.
CMG: What's up with that?
JD: You know it's an amazing scene: the whole growth of the sixties and seventies. The mid-seventies reggae dudes had this mythical amazing thing where everybody knew everybody else and they were all recording at the same two or three studios. And there was this guy named Prince Far I, a really remarkably strange guy. I think a lot of people think of reggae as this monochromatic genre but actually there's almost infinite variety in it and I don't think there's been anybody else quite like [Fari] in any genre. He was a very strange guy, murdered in his home. I'm really attracted to stories of people who die strange and sudden deaths.
CMG: Are there any other reggae people you're writing about?
JD: I wrote about Dennis Brown on The Sunset Tree. He was Bob Marley's favorite singer. He has a voice to die for. He got really into cocaine and his lung collapsed. There's something about the contrast between the sweetness -- he sang love song type stuff and seemed to live an extremely hard life toward the end -- and there's something about that contrast between the sweetness of his work and how harsh it was in the end that really appeals to me.from a narrative standpoint.
CMG: The arc of it?
JD: I haven't quite parsed out why it is I keep reading biographies of these characters that we know as faces or names on records. The other thing is that we tend to know a little back-story on most of our pop stars but unless you become a big roots head then all you know about the reggae guys is their names. The whole growth of the movement throughout the late-sixties, especially the seventies, it's one of the great stories of all music. It's easily as good as the story of the birth of rock n roll. It's just amazing.
CMG: Can you talk about the process of creating a Mountain Goats album? How does an album begin from the time you start writing songs to the point you're in the studio?
JD: Well, there's usually a period of just sorta putt-putting around writing songs that usually become strays -- I think it's a bad idea, for me at least, to first get the idea for an album and then be super-programmatic about it. So, I write songs and pursue whatever ideas I have kicking around in my head, and at some point one song will usually quietly announce itself as the germ of a bigger idea. With Get Lonely it was "New Monster Avenue" -- it was written a long time before the rest of the songs, but I kept coming back to it, something about the central image of it really grabbed me. So, I'd look for other themes or phrases that sort of spoke to or built on that. It was more or less the same writing process when I was using my boombox, since when I'm writing now I write more or less the same way -- only I record the demos into my laptop now. I usually try to leave a couple of things under-practiced or unfinished for the studio, so that there can be that just-made energy in one or two of the songs -- for example, on The Sunset Tree, nobody had ever heard "Pale Green Things" except me, I just told everybody there was one I'd show them when the time came.
CMG: What sounds and aesthetics have you yet to explore? What's left to do?
JD: I'm not really a what-would-you-like-to-do guy like that. Lyrics are my first concern, I always let the music sort of develop organically and trust it to take care of itself. There are random things in my mind sometimes, like I'd like to get somebody who can play French horn, or those guitar-shaped acoustic basses -- I've had one of those on my want list for ages. But most of my ambitions are around song writing, not song recording.
CMG: What consumes you when the Mountain Goats are dormant?
JD: The Mountain Goats are kinda never dormant these days. I've sorta barely had a non-Mountain-Goats life for the past several years. When I'm not touring I'm setting up the next tour, when I'm not setting up a tour I'm writing: there are a thousand little things always to be taken care of. I am working on a book right now for the 33 1/3 series -- I'm doing Black Sabbath's Master of Reality. So I wake up and work on that or write songs, since I work best in the mornings. By three I'm thinking about what to cook for dinner, since I am the cook around here and I cook from scratch. Tonight it is savoury chickpea patties in a tomato glaze with a cooling banana raita on the side.
CMG: Judging from our brief email communications while you were on tour it seemed like this trip was really tiring.
JD: Oh, I'm just kinda bitchy when I'm on tour. Being a hypochondriac's bad enough, but when you're a hypochondriac and you actually get hit with some bad health it's the double whammy of death-fear doom. It was a very long tour though. I wasn't home for more than three weeks between August and March. One of my New Year's resolutions was not to bitch too much about that though since lots of people wish they lived on tour. I love playing shows for sure, love it more and more. Tour though, that I do not love. I wish I could just fly whole audiences into Durham, one after the other, for three weeks. That would be a bitchin' tour.
CMG: So when do you think we'll have the next album?
JD: We're recording in August and September and after that it's up to the powers that be.
CMG: Are you going in with the same team, with John Vanderslice and Scott Solter?
JD: Yep.
CMG: Awesome. Thanks, John.