John Darnielle, the major songwriting force behind lo-fi indie duo The Mountain Goats, will headline a benefit for Watkins Glen’s Farm Sanctuary. The fundraiser, titled Zoop! A Benefit for Farm Sanctuary, runs from Saturday, June 16 through Sunday, June 17. Darnielle will perform two shows, accompanied by bandmate Peter Hughes and The Prayer & Tears of Arthur Digby Sellers’ Perry Wright.
Ever the prolific recording artist, Darnielle has been releasing CDs, CD-Rs, cassette tapes, and vinyl records under the moniker The Mountain Goats since he was a nursing student at a small college in Southern California in the early 90s. In the last 15 years, thanks to his loyal fanbase and an increasingly nuanced writing approach, Darnielle has reached an almost cult-like status within certain indie singer-songwriter circles.
Darnielle’s latest record, Get Lonely, was released on 4AD, a label known for dream-pop but home also to noted songwriters Scott Walker and Red House Painters. Since it was released last summer, Get Lonely has been a major success, despite Darnielle’s dark, painfully intimate songs. Get Lonely signals a major departure from his more rambunctious lo-fi outings of past years; produced by Scott Solter, the record best highlights Darnielle’s plaintive singing.
Citing both musicians and writers as inspirations — Joan Didion, John Berryman, Trey Azagthoth and Sarah Dougher are all favorites — Darnielle is also moved by smaller, day-to-day occurrences. “I get inspired pretty easily, like by the sight of an iris I planted in the fall blooming in spring,” Darnielle recently wrote in an email. “And practically everything I read or hear leaves an impression. The list is infinite.”
Much like the writers whom he admires, Darnielle has developed his own quintessentially American writing style. On his songwriting, Darnielle assents, “I think it’s very American — the obsessively inward-looking narrators, the manic energy, the basic blues structure of so many of my songs. I actually think there’s a very heavy west coast sensibility to my writing, or that it’s informed by being from the west coast, but that’s a complex subject.”
Darnielle is currently working on his first book, a volume in Da Capo’s ever-expanding 33 & 1/3 series. The slim volumes, which are one person’s intensely personal account of a connection they have with a specific record, have been penned by contemporary musicians in the past: The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy wrote about The Replacements’ Let It Be and The Pernice Brothers’ Joe Pernice wrote Da Capo’s best selling volume to date, on The Smiths’ Meat is Murder. These connections seem fairly straightforward, one indie rock band writing on another, but Darnielle’s contribution is more surprising — he is putting forth a book expounding upon Black Sabbath’s debut album, Hymns for a Dark Horse.
Indeed, despite his literary singer-songwriter bent, Darnielle has extremely eclectic taste in music. Today, he tells us, he is listening to “a lot of gore-grind metal,” and his favorite 90-degree weather music is “death metal and roots reggae.” But from listening to his intimate, reflective songs, often framed only by acoustic guitar, it would be hard to tell.
“I write about whatever I’m enjoying, provided I think I have something interesting to say about it,” explains Darnielle. “Those are the only criteria: I only write about stuff I like, and I try to be somewhat entertaining. I don’t write about records I don’t like; it strikes me as a waste of time and energy.”
Identifying himself as both a music writer and musician, Darnielle is a self-professed music aficionado. For many years now, Darnielle has helmed the popular music website, Last Plane to Jakarta. (”LPTJ, I should say, is one of the longest-running music crit sites online,” Darnielle adds. “It wasn’t really a blog when it started, because the term didn’t exist yet.”)
But the dynamic between the two practices seems less clear. “I started writing when I was a kid — I got a typewriter for my sixth or seventh birthday,” says Darnielle. “I just write. Sometimes songs. Sometimes criticism. Sometimes recipes!”
Darnielle has often called himself a “storyteller” with regards to his vivid, narrative-driven lyrics, and in the tradition of classic singer-songwriters, that title would be fairly accurate. “It’s true that I started writing songs just to sort of house my poetry, but as I learned the craft, I began to view the two as different,” Darnielle explains. “I seldom write poetry anymore. It’s infinitely more demanding, and very few people care to read it. I like writing stuff for people to enjoy.”
In the end, Darnielle’s success with The Mountain Goats is best attributed to his devoted, rabid fans, and he takes great pleasure in connecting to his audience. “I’m very moved when people write to say that they spent some of their darkest hours with my songs; that feels like real success, the immeasurable kind,”says Darnielle.
In a world where the feigned coolness and blasé attitude of rock bands reign supreme, Darnielle’s often heartbreakingly intimate stories, in his trademark lucid and unflinching writing style, strike a powerful chord in his audiences. And though his songs can seem self-involved and personal, the themes Darnielle sings about — death, violence, rebirth and broken families — are universal.
“I think about ‘my listeners’ a lot — the people who write to tell me that they’ve gotten something out of my stuff,” says Darnielle. “I always want to write more songs for them. And, like a lot of the people from the ‘lo-fi’ boomlet or however you want to describe it, I think I write with my friends in mind — people with whom I play music. I want to always write things that they’ll like, or that they’ll be impressed by.
“Personal image is less important with these crowds, I think. I’ve always tried to be as open as I can stand to be without compromising too much of my privacy — I treasure the feeling of having made a connection with an audience, of arriving at some point of real communication.” His fans want to connect, and Darnielle is happy to open up his world to them.
Whether through subject matter or his activist inclinations, Darnielle reaches out to his audience in many ways. Darnielle’s 2005 full-length, The Sunset Tree, deals with his difficult childhood and domestic abuse. “I did not expect people to want to hear songs about a violent family home,” Darnielle admits.
“I’m proudest of being able to draw attention to Farm Sanctuary, or Vegan Outreach, or the Joyful Heart Foundation — I know it’s something of a cliché for a person to get a little success and become more interested in charity, but as clichés go, it’s a decent one, I guess.”
With seven full-length albums in this century alone and a career that spans over 15 years, Darnielle shows no signs of slowing down. “[It’s a] pleasure, really — I still love making records,” writes Darnielle. “I love watching an album take shape as I write, and I’ll never outgrow the thrill of seeing the album hit print.”
Darnielle will be recording a new album in August, and he promises that it will be a huge departure from the pervading moroseness of Get Lonely. “I am very excited about it — the songs are more uptempo, kind of weirder and more colorful than Get Lonely, which was like this extended season at the bottom of a swamp,” says Darnielle. “I’m very, very fond of Get Lonely, I’ve always wanted to make a relentlessly sad album, but the new one is shaping up to be a sort of higher-octane remedy to that — it’s kind of like an anime storm on the open sea or something. Lots of excitable people and creatures in the songs.”
In Darnielle’s book on Black Sabbath, he describes Hymns for a Dark Horse thusly: “Only once every ten years or so does one hear a new band this good, this bursting with ideas, this audibly in love with music.” To be honest, that could describe The Mountain Goats, too.