Drunken Barn Dance: "A Winter's Tale"

In the upcoming musical adaptation of Dave, premiering at Slamdance next year, the Kevin Kline role of the American president is changed to that of John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats. Parallel to Kline in the original, Darnielle slips into a coma after strumming too hard on his acoustic guitar and inducing a stroke. Desperate to keep the fragile nation of indie kids from dissolving into chaos, Franklin Bruno cons Scott Sellwood of Saturday Looks Good To Me and Drunken Barn Dance into filling in under threat of revealing the secret to all and letting hundreds of bearded, late-twenties fans stab him to death with their Sunset Tree pins.

Foiling the conniving Bruno (who secretly wants the Mountain Goats to himself), Sellwood transcends his surface vocal and stylistic resemblence and sets his own course of action by refusing the easy emotional outs, samey music and grad-school Bukowski bullshit. He adds subtle structural complexity, experimental touches, and deceptively simple lyrics that pack more of a wallop than any of Darnielle’s corrupt, overblown storytelling. Gone is the uncomplimentary Vanderslice production, and the increasingly irrelevant lyrical opacity.

The fans love the new persona, and demand more. Bruno, in a fit of rage, blames him for selling “Cubs In Five” for a Microsoft ad, but after discovering the kind heart of backup musician Peter Hughes, Sellwood replaces himself again with the comatose Darnielle (who eventually dies) and Hughes takes over the band while he goes back to his day job with Drunken Barn Dance, no longer chained to dead end literary aspirations or folk-rock jams. At the end of the film we see him, with Mountain Goats merch scattered all around, a little more confidently chugging away, quietly practicing, with his ever improving cascades of acoustic strums and neatly tenored vocal story sketches, all ready for future glory.