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The Mountain Goats.
At the risk of losing whatever claim to journalistic integrity
I may ever have had, I will happily declare that there are few
pleasures in my professional life as sweet as interviewing John
Darnielle. It's not just because I love his music (which I most
avowedly do: I may have come to The Mountain Goats relatively
recently, but I've spent the last two years or so assiduously
exploring their voluminous back catalogue), or just because
he's an uncharacteristically articulate rock musician. No, the
thing that sets Darnielle apart from the rank-and-file interviewee
is this: he's just so damn charming. "Hey Andrew, good to hear
your voice," he begins in our second interview in three months.
"It's good to keep in touch."
See what I mean? How could I not love this man? It sounds like he's been keeping busy since we last spoke. "Well, it's been more of the same, really. Touring and writing, touring and writing, touring and writing," he shrugs. "Oh, and we shot a video for This Year! We flew to LA - it was filmed in the house of the drummer from Reel Big Fish."
It's a step up in Darnielle's marketability, particularly considering he's spent decade or so releasing determinedly low-fi records through a slew of tiny, tiny labels. "It's the first [video] I've had anything to do with the making of, more or less. People have made videos for my stuff before, but that was people writing to me and saying 'hey, I wanna make an animated video for your song,' or something and I'd say 'go ahead!' but for this one the label paid to fly me and Peter [Hughes, bassist and only other permanent Mountain Goat] out and flew the drummer [Alex DeCarville, who plays on the record] from San Francisco and a cast of thousands. Well, dozens."
And what does this indie luminary do in his cinematic debut? "Hey, I don't want to give it away because I'm sure it'll get marketed over there with whoever shows videos and I don't... see, it's just... we... OK, we get kidnapped and forced to perform. It's pretty great," he laughs.
Our previous interview had been about The Mountain Goats' album 'The Sunset Tree' - Darnielle's stunningly candid and uplifting album-length meditation on his childhood at the hands of an abusive stepfather - and I had raised the question of where he could possibly go after plumbing the depths of his own dark experiences. After all, he'd been circling around it for the previous few albums, so now having plunged headlong into musical autobiography, was he concerned about how he could hope to top it with the next album?
"August is always a really productive month for me," he explains. "I sort of wake up on August 1st with ideas for songs, and suddenly the question of 'what should I do next?' seems kinda silly: I just sit down and write and see what happens. So I'm just writing and seeing where it goes." He pauses, then laughs. "I'm sorry, I know that's not terribly exciting."
He pauses again when I ask if we're likely to hear any of these new songs at the gig. "Well, Peter is coming this time, and he's heard them but we haven't practised them. So it's doubtful - but possible."
I tell him that the solo show at the Grace Emily had been a musical epiphany for me, and so I'm expecting double the epiphany this time around. "Oh, the epiphany is Peter," he laughs. "He's a real salesman and a great performer and he's a lot of fun to have up there. And it just sounds a lot better with me and Peter. I hadn't played solo in a long time [when he did the first Australian tour], that was the last solo show I did, whereas Peter and I are playing together all the time so we have all the advantages of a working band, like we're really locked in. It's really fun."
Given that Peter's only been on board for the last three albums, I was curious as to how far back into the 'Goats catalogue they go. After all, there's something like fifteen album's worth of music there, including the early cassette-only home recordings.
"We go back to the first Ajax album [1996's 'Nothing Got Juice'], at least, and I think last tour we dipped into some cassettes - I mean, Peter's been listening for as long as I've been playing, so if we want to do an old one all we have to do is spend an afternoon working it up. That said, people go 'hey, play that song!' and we both go 'we don't know that one'. And they get very angry and go 'you know the song!'" he laughs. "I can't just launch into a song and hope that Peter can follow me. I mean, we have done it - I mean, my songs aren't exactly the theory of relativity - but it's usually an unsatisfying experience for us and the audience."
Andrew P Street
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The Mountain Goats play at Jive on Thurs 15 Sept with Special Patrol.
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