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Mountain Goats.
 Some
interviews are like pulling teeth. You sit there on the phone
with some uncommuncative subject at the other end barely grunting
in response to your increasingly desperate questions as you
try to get something - anything - to turn into an article. Not
so John Darnielle, the man who is, to all intents and purposes,
The Mountain Goats. This man likes to talk. And talk. And talk
some more - and every sentence is a pleasure, because Darnielle
is that rarest of beats: a musician who is both wonderfully
articulate about his work and charmingly candid about his life.
"My mom is visiting so we're showing her all around the new house and everything," he begins. "We had breakfast, went shopping, went to an art gallery or two, and then we came back here and hung around and listened to an advance copy of the new Streets album, which is spectactular. It's really shockingly good. Did you like the last one? I liked it a lot myself, but I think this one, after a few listens, will even surpass the last one. And the weather is lovely. What's it's like down there? You're in Adelaide, right?"
You see? How could you not love this man?
"I remember Adelaide, that's a nice town. That was just a good old time," he says of his Grace Emily gig last year. "I really liked the venue - we slept upstairs, and that's a luxury, to stay in the same building that you play. You can get as drunk as you like and not have to worry - if you leave anything on stage, well, you can get it in the morning!" he laughs.
'We Shall All Be Healed' was dB Magazine's 'We Liked It And You Will Too' a couple of issues ago, and with good reason. By turns thoughtful, playful and emotionally bare it's evidence that John Darnielle might just be the best lyricist on the planet at the moment.
"My focus is always on the lyrics, and I think my lyrics have been continually getting better over the past however many years," he explains. "That's where I work the hardest. On [previous album] 'Tallahassee' I knew those characters [in the songs] a little better, and the ones on the new album are a little more personal, which made it easier to bear down on them. I do like [2002's] 'All Hail West Texas' a lot though, I gotta tell you. I don't know quite what was going on there, but I like the feel of that record."
'...Healed' is the second of the Mountain Goats' albums to be recorded in a studio with a producer, rather than (as was often the case) by Darnielle singing straight into a household tape recorder, and his adoption of such conventions has alienated some of his older fans. "Another victim of the pitchfork.com review," he laughs. "I don't dwell on it too much, and the response has actually been quite positive for the record. I'm prouder of it than anything that I've ever done; but for people that have been listening to what I do for ten years it's a big step and it's asking a lot of an audience to say 'OK now, come with me someplace else.' But you know, as an artist - I hate that word, artist - but as a worker it seemed like it was time for me to do something different in my game, so I wrote a different type of song and I made a different type of record, and there's gonna be people who can't feel me like that. But I can't worry about that. If you're making the same record for the same thousand people every year it's stops being art and makes you..." he trails off, searching for the right metaphor: "...a kept woman."
It's not as though Darnielle suddenly went funk-punk on our asses, though: '...Healed' is still a sparse, controlled affair. He agrees, but adds. "Look, I'm a big Nick Cave fan, and I know that when Nick Cave made the jump from me and ten friends knowing about him in the US to lots and lots of people knowing about him, it's tough to deal with - suddenly some meatheads think he's great also and it's not just you and your smart friends," he laughs. "But you can't even worry about that, you've just got to put your focus on the work."
While the 'Goats are doing some US and European shows, there are no immediate plans for Darnielle to return to Australia. "I spent six months on the road last year, which is not the greatest thing in the world for a marriage," he laughs. "But we survived! The ideal situation, which is something that we do a bit here, is that I get on the road with my wife. I'd love for my wife to see parts of Sydney and Melbourne - and in Adelaide, the architecture really struck me as realy cool: like, the Grace Emily has that really low balcony, where I woke up and went out that morning. So yeah, there's a real appeal to that - but then, we also have a couple of cats..."
Andrew P Street
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'We Shall All Be Healed' is out now through Remote Control/Inertia.
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