‘You can administer your own dosage’: 365 days of The Mountain Goats
John Darnielle has spent the last few years revisiting The Mountain Goats’ lo-fi origins for a book of annotated lyrics – while also tapping Lin-Manuel Miranda to help make one of the band’s most ambitious albums yet.
In the early 1990s John Darnielle was living in Norwalk, California, in an asbestos-lined apartment block on the grounds of the hospital where he worked as a psychiatric technician.
It was there that he began setting the poetry he was writing to music, bashed out on an acoustic guitar as cheap as the rent. He would record them into his boombox, capturing songs mere moments after they were written. At some point, he began scrawling ‘the Mountain Goats’ on the paper inserts of the cassette tapes he recorded to.
“It’s so long ago, that’s a different person,” Darnielle tells InReview from Durham, Carolina, where he now lives in a much nicer place with his family. “It’s an alien – that hasn’t been my life in so long that when I can see it vividly, it really is like I’m looking at another person,”
Three decades later, The Mountain Goats are an internationally renowned band with almost two dozen studio albums behind them. Darnielle has been its sole constant member, and one of America’s most celebrated modern lyricists. He’s also a published a string of novels, which in part is what led his literary agent to suggest publishing a collection of his now-deep songbook.
Darnielle had previously shown little interest in printing his lyrics, or writing a memoir, but on New Year’s Day 2023 he cracked it: he would work his way chronologically through over 30 years of songwriting, assigning one song to each day of the calendar year.
“I woke up and I was like, ‘What if you had a song a day?’ Then you can administer your own dosage, right?”
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It can’t have hurt that Darnielle’s biggest hit – and now, the book – is titled ‘This Year’. With its structure sorted, the next challenge came the source material, spread across shelves full of notebooks and old tapes unknown to even the most dedicated Mountain Goats head.
“I’m not a real organised person,” he concedes. “I did what anybody else did: I grabbed a lot of them from the net. If they’d been released, I went to the various lyric sites and then I would fix them. Then to find out what had happened in drafts, or to do stuff that never been released, I would take up the notebooks I have in the next room – and there’s a big box of notebooks downstairs.”
As he pored over these old songs, he began to recognise the “fault line” of where his distinctive style emerged. “Conversational but formal; familiar to a point of obscurity,” he writes in the book, “at least a little funny.”
At the same time, Darnielle and the band’s current lineup were making a new project: an epic, string-laden concept album named Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan. Darnielle describes the record as a “fake musical”, and while it might on its surface seem a world away from a guy and a guitar in an empty apartment, he says he owes a lot to musicals like Music Man and Fiddler on the Roof.
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“I listened to musicals from a very early age,” he recalls. “These were records that would spin on my record player in my room before my parents divorced. I was four and five, and they were super important to me.
“The songs in musicals are personified monologues; you have a character who exists, and then they sing. They have dialogue too, but then they sing parts of their lives, right?
“Well, all my songs are personified narrators. That’s what I do, right? I have a person step into the spotlight and describe their situation in various ways. That’s all I’ve done from the beginning – so I’m sort of writing in that style already.”
The album even features backing vocals from modern musical theatre icon Lin Manuel Miranda. “We became friends and started sharing work with each other, the way that you sometimes do with fellow travellers in the craft,” he says of the cameo.
With a discography full of recurring characters and narratives, it’s not surprising that many people have pitched “real” musical projects to Darnielle over the years. But for now, he’s content to keep making records, writing books, and playing shows – The Mountain Goats will visit Australia in April for the first time since 2017.
“You know, the notion of a Mountain Goats musical actually running on Broadway for longer than a few weeks seems a little ambitious to me,” he laughs. “I don’t know that there are that many normal people who want to go hear about, you know, the ‘Tianchi Lake’ monster from Heretic Pride, or, a guy who takes a handgun and goes down to Georgia,” he says, citing the old fan favourite ‘Going to Georgia’.
For those that do, there’s always the book – and version of himself that lives inside its songs, in that old flat in Norwalk.
“I learned recently that those buildings that I lived in, they still stand, but they can’t tear them down,” he reflects. “You can’t knock down asbestos buildings without making a huge thing of it, and it’s on the grounds of hospital, so they just sit there empty.
“It’s amazing, but that’s how distant that space is in timd. I have only one or two pictures of the inside of the room; the songs, they are actually more vivid pictures of who I was then, than they would be if were photographs.”
This Year: 365 Songs Annotated (Scribe Publications) is out now. The Mountain Goats will perform at Princess Theatre, Brisbane, on Tuesday April 14, and The Gov, Adelaide, on Thursday April 16
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