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The Mountain Goats  

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The Mountain Goats are an indie rock band hailing from Claremont, California, U.S who formed in 1991. Led by singer, songwriter and the man regarded as the best lyricist in American rock John Darnielle, they have released 15 studio albums since their debut effort in 1994.

John Darnielle was born on March 16th, 1967 in Bloomington, Indiana. At the age of two he lost his birth father, leading him and his mother to relocate to Central California where he grew up with a physically and emotionally abusive step-father. To cope with it he retreated into music and writing in a big way, but found that once high school was over, he couldn’t bring himself to stay in his hometown any longer. He found a job as a psychiatric nurse at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California and began writing songs on the guitar when he wasn’t working. He started performing live around 1990, and made a valuable friend in the form of Dennis Callaci.

Callaci was the owner of Shrimper Records, and after Darnielle gave him a boombox recorded demo tape of some of his early songs, Callaci released it as Darnielle’s first album “Taboo IV: The Homecoming”. Unwilling to perform under his own name, Darnielle took the moniker The Mountain Goats from the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song “Yellow Coat” and began to tour with only himself on guitar and his friend Rachel Ware on the bass guitar. In 1991, Darnielle started attending the Pitzeer College in Claremont to study for an English degree, and it was during this time that he started properly focusing on songwriting, becoming renowned for his massively prolific output of songs.

Between 1991 and 1995 he released a large number of cassette’s and seven inch vinyl’s and built up a devoted following because of it. However, once he left college he decided to take his band more seriously and make a go of starting an actual career in music. His debut album proper, “Zopilote Machine”, had been released in 1994, and he spent the rest of the 1990’s building his following into a proper, nationwide fan-base. While the group have never been commercially succesful, they remain one of the most critically acclaimed and respected acts in American indie rock. Darnielle remains as prolific as ever, and has grown into a truly captivating live act to boot. The Mountain Goats are a band to see as soon as possible, and they come highly recommended.

Live reviews

I’ve seen many, many live shows in my time but it’s hard to remember a band with more fanatical followers than John Darnielle’s The Mountain Goats. Darnielle’s released thirteen or fourteen studio albums since launching his band back in the early 90s, with his records normally following the same pattern of passionate and wordy lyrics, acoustic guitars aggressively strummed and communal, rousing choruses on songs that cover all of human life, from everyday vignettes to musings on religion. The likes of Tallahassee and All Hail West Texas are the apex of Darnielle’s vision, and quite the ride to listen to. When it comes to seeing The Mountain Goats live, be prepared for the person next to you to holler along word-for-word to each and every song. Darnielle switches between full-band shows and ones where it’s just himself and long-time partner Peter Hughes delivering stripped down versions of ‘Linda Blair Was Innocent’, and the biblical and beautiful duo of ‘In Memory of Satan’ and ‘Genesis 30:3’. The show is bound to finish on the euphoric sing-along of ‘No Children’, and Darnielle often goes walkabout in the crowd for the affecting ‘California Song’. It’s a rollercoaster of emotion and it’ll leave you exhausted, and you may come away as a new Mountain Goats fanatic.

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When it comes to cult indie bands, they don’t really come too much more distinguished than The Mountain Goats, which has for a long time effectively been the solo project of singer John Darnielle. Having released fourteen full-lengths to date, the band are also a fine example of good things coming to those who wait; it wasn’t until album number six, the seminal All Hail West Texas, that they really broke through both critically and commercially, and on the 2002 follow-up Tallahassee, they really solidified their position, signing to 4AD and expanding into a full band in the studio for the first time.

They’ve continued to tour prodigiously too, with Darnielle performing both solo and with the band over the years; their most recent UK jaunt came last October, when they finally got around to bringing their most recent record, 2012’s Transcendental Youth, to these shores. Not that they leaned on it too heavily, though, the setlists were genuinely career-spanning affairs, with the recently-reissued All Hail West Texas and the bible-referencing The Life of the World to Come both featuring heavily. After releasing his debut novel, Wolf in White Van, Darnielle is currently touring it in the U.S.; hardcore Goats fans will be hoping he extends that to the UK, too.

There are few indie bands that can boast the same level of cult mentality as The Mountain Goats. The Californian folk/rock outfit have been working the circuit for just over 25 years and with an unchanged lineup and consistency in their discography, they are one of the most well tuned trios currently working. It is quite surprising to believe their music has made little to no impact on the UK charts when you look around at the gathered, anticipating crowd here to see the band this evening.

The group is as unassuming and humble as ever as they step out to the growing cheers of the room, finding the whole scenario rather amusing as they begin 'Song For Dana Plato' and 'Fall of the Star High School Running Back' almost back to back and they receive double the reaction at its finale. They play a fantastically varied setlist, lifting at least one track from almost all of their albums and their time on the road has seen them develop the show into a succinct operation where all the music successfully blends. The standout performance of 'Shadow Song' is saved for the encore with its mournful tones and heavy guitar riffs really demonstrating the band's quiet power.

One of the best live indie bands around. If you like them even a little bit, see them live. Their music comes to life in unexpected ways when they perform. You think of them as kind of low key, but on stage the songs expand with great energy. I've seen them 3 times and it always feels special - even on this 2019 tour that features a lot more of their current easy listening tunes than I care for.

The whole band brings infectious energy to their shows, especially John Darnielle with this joyful bouncing and facial expressions. And his banter is first-rate, as anyone who's watched him intro No Children in a YouTube video knows well. Best of all, all this energy and excitement and fun lasts for 2 hours! Sometimes more!

It was awesome! Passionate, funny, charasmatic, interactive performance AND crowd. It was the first time I've seen an audience quiet down for, pay attention to, and really appreciate an opening band they weren't familiar with. It was also the first time in a standing room only part of the venue that I've seen nobody bump into or push each other to get closer to the stage/performer. Everyone just stood in their general places having a good time and being respectful of one another's personal space, singing along only when the songs called for it but enthusiastically when they did. It was a very unique and homey experience that I would really recommend to any Mountain Goats fan, casual or hardcore.

Great show! Their setlist was a great mix of old and new, they played with enthusiasm, and John delivered his typical, intelligent banter throughout the set. The crowd was also great, and John made mention of his appreciation several times. They played a long set with two strong encore performances, and they intertwined their slower songs well with their upbeat, faster tunes that had the whole pit bouncing around with ear-to-ear smiles. Everything you could possibly want from seeing this band!

I saw The Mountain Goats live in Amsterdam, and it was quite frankly the best concert of my life. The energy of the band, getting to see the songs I love so much come to life on stage, the banter, the crowd interactions, the kind of audience where I felt 100% safe jumping up and down to The Diaz Brothers and silently sobbing to that one song they refuse to release. The last song of the set was The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton, and it left us all feeling dazed and euphoric.

Had such a good time, the band was really enjoying themselves so we did too. I brought a friend who had never listened to the Mountain Goats and she had a great experience. Only downside was that some members of the crowd were being disrespectful, which is not something that usually happens when seeing The Mountain Goats, but overall great set and great time. We got to sing to a snake statue as the final encore, which was a plus.

There is no better experience than seeing the Mountain Goats live. Seeing them in Bloomington, IN is definitely an experience; John Darnielle was born here, so the energy is elemental. I've been lucky enough to see them just about every year since 2012, and this show delivered. The setlist featured some of Jon Wurster's best drumming on Cotton, Magpie, and Sicilian Crest. Gorgeous, emotional, healing. This tour is killer.

A gratifyingly rock 'n' roll performance from The Mountain Goats, with occasional saxophonic frenzies and frenetic guitar. Highlights from the new album included "Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back to Leeds" and "Paid in Cocaine". The high point was the second encore, with soul-stirring renditions of "This Year" and "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton".

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The Mountain Goats is not due to play near your location currently - but they are scheduled to play 10 concerts across 3 countries in 2024-2025. View all concerts.

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The Mountain Goats (solo) at Brooklyn Made on September 19

Alexa Romanowski

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• Consequence

A Quick Catch Up with The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle

Let The Mountain Goats play Saturday Night Live immediately

It’s been a busy month for The Mountain Goats , the indie rock mainstays led by singer-songwriter-novelist John Darnielle .

As they were finishing up a national tour in support of June’s Dark in Here (and also the previous fall’s Getting Into Knives , and the previous spring’s Songs for Pierre Chuvin , all recorded in March 2020 just as the pandemic hit), their song “No Children,” seminal in indie-rock circles but not exactly a Billboard hit upon its 2002 release, got big on TikTok .

At the same time, Ed Sheeran tested positive for COVID ahead of an upcoming appearance on Saturday Night Live , and Darnielle tweeted that the Mountain Goats would be available to step in.

Consequence got on the phone with Darnielle to talk about all of this, following a three-night run at Brooklyn Made. Even in a brief conversation cut short by technical problems, Darnielle gave thoughtful and eloquent answers, and testifies to his earned pride in fronting a band that doesn’t repeat the same set night after night. SNL , give him a call.

You recently tweeted that the Mountain Goats would love to replace Ed Sheeran as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live . So, I’m very sorry, I have to ask: If you were to do that, what two songs would you play?

Here’s the thing: It’s my understanding that Mr. [Lorne] Michaels is legendarily fond of being in control of what goes on the show. So I think it would just completely, absolutely scuttle my chances if I were to say, we’d do the following songs. He’d go, oh, you ruined it. [ Laughs ] He seems like the kind of guy who would not me to answer that question! Therefore, I would say, I don’t know! Even though you know and I know exactly which two songs I would play.

Lorne M please be advised that the Mountain Goats are in NY right now and are well loved by the TikTok Dancing Massive. Get well soon Ed & holler at me Lorne https://t.co/QzJPwukD9H — The Mountain Goats (@mountain_goats) October 24, 2021

I was going to say, I think I have a good idea of what the two would be, but I would lobby hard for just coming out and doing “Going to Maine” or something for the second one.

Yeah, it’s my impression that they won’t let you do things like that — that it’s not a very spontaneous environment.

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A quick catch up with the mountain goats' john darnielle.

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The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle solo tour dates announced

The Mountain Goats have announced more tour dates for this fall in support of new album Beat the Champ , which include a short run of John Darnielle solo tour dates. The solo tour is being dubbed the “All Roads Lead to Lincoln Solo Tour”, and include some places where Darnielle has never performed before, including Lincoln, Nebraska.

Darnielle says of the tour in a statement:

Did you know I lived three hours from Lincoln for a decade or so and never once played there? All that’s about to change! I really enjoy stretching my legs out on a few solo shows a year, there’s room for songs that just don’t fit into the burn-down-the-barn-and-feed-the-ashes-to-your-enemies-but-then-feel-guilty-about-it-because-your-enemies-have-feelings-too milieu of the full-band set. See you out there!

Check out the full set of dates below, including both solo and full band shows.

Mountain Goats tour dates:

9/8 St. Louis, MO – Off Broadway (solo Darnielle) 9/9 Lawrence, KS – Lawrence Arts Center (solo Darnielle) 9/10 Lincoln, NE – Vega (solo Darnielle) 9/12 Ames, IA – Maximum Ames Music Festival (solo Darnielle) 11/12 Leeds, UK – Brudenell Social Club 11/13 Glasgow, UK – Art School 11/14 Dublin, IE – Whelans 11/15 Manchester, UK – Gorilla 11/17 Bristol, UK – Trinity 11/18 Brighton, UK – Komedia 11/19 London, UK – O2 Shepherds Bush Empire

Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.

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Best New Releases, October 27: The Mountain Goats, Sofia Kourtesis and more

The Mountain Goats : Jenny From Thebes

The Mountain Goats announce new album, Jenny From Thebes

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Inside John Darnielle’s Boiling Brain

By Sam Sodomsky

On a private floor at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, surrounded by rare editions and elaborate first pressings, John Darnielle opens his cheap notebook plastered with images of Bob Marley. He’s showing me drafts of the setlist for his solo performance the previous night, a wildly unpredictable airing of Mountain Goats deep cuts and fan favorites at a cozy venue in Brooklyn. In the same scribbly handwriting that once graced the covers of his cassette releases in the early 1990s are names of decades-old songs he had never played live before along with more recent rarities like “For the Krishnacore Bands,” whose reference-heavy lyrics about the obscure punk microgenre require an introductory speech that runs nearly double the length of the song itself. “As you can see, I wrote that one down twice,” Darnielle notes. “I was very excited about it.”

That same sense of urgency has fueled Darnielle’s music for more than 30 years. In the beginning, he recorded his songs into a boombox shortly after writing them, capturing the spark of creation on tape, his voice and acoustic guitar clipping in the microphone. This spontaneous energy offset the careful, literary observations that have come to cement him as one of his generation’s greatest songwriters (and, increasingly, one of its most celebrated novelists , too).

During his early shows, Darnielle would translate his enthusiasm by screaming and shaking, exhausting himself on stage. “I now realize the vein-popping stuff was just me being nervous,” he says. “I was expelling it, almost like a skunk.” These days, Mountain Goats shows are a lot more relaxed, with the 56-year-old basking in the moments when the audience can carry the energy for him.

Darnielle bridges the gap between past and present on the latest Mountain Goats record, Jenny From Thebes , which acts as a sort of sequel to 2001’s All Hail West Texas , a classic from his boombox era. The new album’s title character, who first appeared on West Texas as a mysterious runaway, is now the focus of an elaborate song cycle that also stands as the band’s most beautifully orchestrated record to date. Darnielle recorded the album with producer Trina Shoemaker, who’s worked with Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, and the Chicks, and longtime accompanists Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, and Matt Douglass, who have helped Darnielle’s sound evolve with each new record. “I’m the worst musician in the Mountain Goats,” he notes, before quickly clarifying: “But I’m the best songwriter in the Mountain Goats.”

In the bookstore, Darnielle is curious, self-aware, and almost endlessly engaged. He only pauses once during our long conversation, and then immediately apologies, saying, “Sorry, I got caught up thinking of the cycle of birth and death.” His creative process works in the same obsessive way. “When I talk I get more and more animated, and my brain kind of boils,” he explains. “I can sustain that boil for a long time—but it also makes you do things like leave bags on subways.”

Despite his ability to extrapolate, he says his relationship with the character of Jenny is fairly simple: “I always related to her: She had a motorcycle I want.” He’s talking about the yellow-and-black Kawasaki mentioned in the lyrics of 2002’s “ Jenny ”—a description that’s inspired plenty of tattoos and fan art. “She not only gets to have one, but she gets to ride it very fast and abandon her entire life. I think that’s a basic conflict: between your responsibilities and the infinite freedom that you feel as a human spirit.”

While Darnielle might be revisiting characters from the past, he is hardly cashing in on old ideas; the new album’s pristine sound is a complete 180 from the stark atmosphere that first introduced the Mountain Goats to listeners. This type of progression is crucial to the project’s longevity. “I’ve been married for 25 years,” he quips. “I’m into long experiments.”

John Darnielle: There’s a James Taylor song called “ That’s Why I’m Here .” Do you know this song? There’s a lot of received wisdom about James Taylor, but he’s actually kind of a badass. “That’s Why I’m Here” is about acclimating to your role as a person with an extant audience, which is not a relatable topic generally. But James Taylor is so human that he can really do it. In the last verse, he’s talking about his audience:

Some are like summer Coming back every year Got your baby, got your blanket, got your bucket of beer I break into a grin from ear to ear And suddenly it’s perfectly clear That’s why I’m here

This is true with us—and it’s not true with every band. People say all the time, “I saw several guys at the show who were in their 60s and a lot of young people.” It’s a huge blessing. Our audience is growing in unpredictable ways.

Young men especially think serial killers are intense. We use the term “edgelord” now, but many young men have always been drawn to this, and I was certainly one of them. If you knew the details about John Wayne Gacy, you had a certain currency among the friend group. “Going to Georgia” has that, and we have enough of those stories out there: the guy whose suffering is so intense he harms himself or somebody else. I don’t need that story in the world anymore.

I appreciate that. Although it’s funny. People used the term “nostalgia” a lot when they were reviewing [2017’s] Goths . I bristled at the time, but it’s true. It wasn’t a nostalgic record, but it was engaging questions of nostalgia, or opening the door to nostalgia.

What happened was, I wrote a new song about Jenny and said, “Well, either this song is going in the garbage or you’re making a whole album out of it.” And I liked the song. This is the great rule in life: Half measures are generally useless. In Revelations, the Lord says, “If you are neither hot nor cold, I shall spew you forth from my mouth.” You have to commit.

Well, no, because I was writing the whole story. It’s not like there was a backstory written in 2001 and I waited until now to tell the whole thing. You become a reader of yourself once it’s written, so I started asking questions in the way you would write a sequel to a book.

Up until now, Jenny was mainly known by her absence. She shows up on All Hail West Texas , and the narrator gets on her bike and leaves. That’s all we know about her. The next time you hear from her is in [2001’s] “ Straight Six .” She’s calling and something is wrong. Same thing in [2012’s] “ Night Light .” So I thought it would be interesting to fill in the character. I didn’t tell people I was doing it, and if I thought anything was corny, I would stop.

Any hint of self-pity. I don’t want people in my songs to seem enamored of their own pain, or to think that they’re special. And in that way, the characters are me: I’m not special and my pain isn’t special.

People are just going to do that with public figures, but that was funny because everything was pretty good around that time. I got into the Grateful Dead that year, fun stuff.

I don’t really write songs about romantic difficulty anymore. It was an endlessly fascinating subject to me for a long time, and when it stopped being interesting, I stopped writing about it. But it’s those songs in particular that people assume you wouldn’t be writing if you didn’t have something to get off your chest. Whereas I think when you have something to get off your chest, it comes out in weird, elliptical ways.

The main thing these days is saying, “What would the younger you say we don’t do? Do that!” As a writer, I get kicked in the haunches by feeling that I’ve somehow transgressed my own rule. That’s one thing about writing this new record: I don’t usually [revisit a previous record]. People have asked for a Tallahassee sequel. No. Absolutely not.

Same question: Why? Because everybody does that! Everybody winds up leaning on the thing that people like. That’s why I liked doing an All Hail West Texas sequel better, because it’s a beloved album by the fanbase.

Anyone who follows me even casually can tell I don’t want to do the obvious thing. I want to do the thing that is unexpected. I’m proud of never following up something with, “Here’s more of the thing you liked!” When you do sequels that’s the big risk. But now I’m like, “If I were to do [a Tallahassee sequel], maybe I would pick just one character, because they’re going to get divorced and have a life after that. What does that look like?”

What it probably means is that, often with writers, you find what the characters are like and where they’re at in their lives, and that’s the point where the writer had some sort of trauma that he hasn’t resolved. It’s that simple and embarrassing.

Vonnegut had a line that I read early on that left a big impression on me: “High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.” I think that’s true. Because so much of your identity can be formed around musical taste—having these transcendent experiences with music and saying out loud, “This is who I am”—there is an assumption in music that you’re giving voice to youth. Art is inherently youthful. You’re always ageless. Everyone from Jenny From Thebes is in their 30s, but I don’t know if they feel that way.

There’s this notion in Jewish thinking of healing the world. I’m almost always writing about situations that you as a person would prefer to avoid. And then I want [the characters] to heal. Because all your characters are eventually you anyway. There’s no way you can write a character who doesn’t somehow come from you. Nobody has that kind of vision. So I want them to learn something from their hard times and wind up someplace better. When you tell a story, you imagine yourself in it. And when you imagine yourself someplace, you hope you come out of it OK.

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John Darnielle Wants to Tell You a Story

By Helen Rosner

John Darnielle, the leader—and, at times, the only member—of the band the Mountain Goats, writes songs that are narrative, literary, and full of recurring lyrical motifs: cruel stepdads, grief, sci-fi, death metal, small southern towns, religious ephemera, delusion and ambition, the blurred lines between love and hate. It sounds teen-angsty, laid out like that, but Darnielle, who is now in his mid-fifties, has had from the time of the band’s formation, in the early nineties, a knack for avoiding the maudlin in favor of the uncannily precise. His songwriting style drills into the intimacy of small moments, telling stories about specific people in specific times and places. One of the Mountain Goats’ most famous songs, “This Year,” from the 2005 album “The Sunset Tree,” is the semi-autobiographical story of a teen with a miserable home life, finding joy where he can. The refrain is an ecstatic threat: “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.” In 2020, when the pandemic turned the world upside down, “This Year” broke out, reaching beyond the Mountain Goats’ passionate, occasionally insular fan base, to become an agonized anthem of the moment. Readers of the Guardian voted the track to the top slot of their “Good Riddance 2020” playlist.

Darnielle grew up in California and moved to Portland, Oregon, after receiving his high-school equivalency. He returned to California following the darkest period of a drug addiction and worked as a psychiatric nurse. In 1991, he enrolled at Pitzer College, where he studied English and classics, and began recording as the Mountain Goats. After four years of prolific lo-fi releases, the Mountain Goats started recording in a studio; three decades and twenty-odd albums later, the band is a pillar of the indie-rock world. Today, Darnielle lives in Durham, North Carolina, and when he’s not making music he is writing novels. (His second book, “ Wolf in White Van ,” was long-listed for the 2014 National Book Award.) I met up with him recently, when he was visiting New York on tour, in the uncommonly luxe indoor-outdoor greenroom above the newish venue Brooklyn Made. A bandmate floated in a small body of water on a rooftop deck. (“Listen,” Darnielle said. “I would never tell anyone what to write, but, if you didn’t mention that you found my bassist lounging in a hot tub, I’d be so unhappy.”) Later, when Darnielle was back home in Durham, we continued our conversation by phone. He was on a break between tours and preparing to release his latest novel, “ Devil House ,” an elegant and unsettling story of a true-crime writer unravelling a nineteen-eighties Satanic Panic killing. We spoke about art as labor, the value of religious faith, the beauty of Chaucer, and, more or less, the secret to happiness. This conversation has been edited and condensed.

[ Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » ]

Was that early-pandemic hiatus the longest period you haven’t been on tour?

In pretty much my adult life, yeah. I mean, I started my “adult life” late, because I was a nurse before. But in my Mountain Goats life, yeah. It was really bad in a lot of ways. For one, you worry about money, because this is what I do for a living, and sales of records doesn’t make it up, although our fans were incredibly good to us during the downtime. At first you go, Wow, I’m home for three months, and I’m sleeping well—it’s great. But then I miss my band, and I miss playing. What goes on specifically between the Mountain Goats and our audience is a circuit of musical communication that’s really precious and amazing, and it’s pretty rare. We’re not the only band that has a connection to its audience, but we do have a unique one. If you’ve been to a lot of Mountain Goats shows, you know: there’s a thing that happens. There are people who get something from what we do, and it’s very important to me to provide.

Does having been a nurse make you more attuned to that?

You become a nurse because you’re already the kind of person who wants to do something for people. You feel like you have something to bring. They’re called the caring professions: providing care is the thing, and you don’t go into the profession unless that’s something you want to do. It becomes a big part of who you are. You see some amazing things happen. Spiritually, I think, to be able to help anybody, your existence now has some kind of meaning. I don’t think of my audience as patients, you know, but I do think that, in my nursing years, I learned to identify myself, or to be happy with myself, based on how much good I had done for somebody. The good that I did back then was helping people medically, and the good that we do now is entertaining people. It’s different. But to me, when somebody entertains me, I get a feeling that fills in the pieces of something I didn’t know was missing.

In a YouTube video you uploaded last year, you mentioned that you often think of the titles of your songs as keys to unlocking what the song is actually about. This idea of solving a puzzle—playing games, uncovering secrets—is a through line in both your songs and your novels.

I work in reveals. The reveal is a big part of what I do. The unveiling and the unmasking is a constantly recurring theme, I think. As with a lot of stuff for me, I think it ties in with my spirituality, which is Catholic. I left the Church a long time ago, but you’re always Catholic, right? This is what we say in the mass: “Let us celebrate the mystery of faith.” Catholicism is all about mystery. It’s about approaching the unapproachable, it’s acknowledging that, when you get close to that, it’s not definable, not knowable. Yeats uses the word “mystery” in some amazing ways. That’s the stuff for me, always. I like things that I don’t understand.

With some of my work, to some people, this is frustrating. Especially in the Internet age, people want to annotate things, to say “this means this, this means this.” With my stuff, I always want it to reach a nexus of, Can you sit with something that doesn’t resolve, and be happy there? Or not even be happy, but be present. That’s what I like, in art. That’s what I like in novels, especially. With songs, if the lyric doesn’t resolve, the music does. When that happens, that’s mystery itself; you can’t state what the music did, but it completed the thought. This is the job of music: to express things that are beyond language. It also plays into primal stuff. Remember in grade school—it depends on your grade school and what your background is—remember when some kid came in one day in December and went, “Santa Claus isn’t real”?

I’m Jewish, so it didn’t quite go like that.

So you already had this knowledge. But I was at Catholic school when this happened. The kid who does that is a kid who doesn’t like mystery, and he’s extremely happy to demystify things for you. And I knew, but I was still bummed: You didn’t have to tell me that. You didn’t have to say it out loud. You don’t have to go around saying “There’s no God.” What good does that do? We all very strongly suspect that we’re alone, right? We really don’t have to go spoiling things for people and taking away so many nice things. Don’t get me wrong—I also want to note that in the name of religion so many atrocities have been perpetuated.

The negative proselytizing of the Internet atheists is sort of—

I was one of them, briefly. In my brief apostasy.

There’s something very adolescent, and I mean that in a value-neutral way, about awakening to something, or seeing something, and feeling angry that other people are not seeing it, too.

What it took, for me, was people reminding me of the role of the Church in the civil-rights movement. And then you look at that, and you look at the tradition of charity in the Jewish tradition and the Islamic tradition. You can dwell on the Inquisition; there’s plenty of terrible stuff being done in the name of Christianity, all the way to today, but it’s really a matter of focus. And you can’t weigh it, either—only God could weigh things like that. What you do is you focus on—well, you get to some bromides like, “if you don’t like it, make it better.”

They’re bromides for a reason.

What you come to understand is that, within a religion, what you’re looking for is a progressive organization—something that understands its own complicity in the past. It’s one conflict I have with my own lefty discourse: People want the Catholic Church to do a complete about-face, and I go, Hey, you can’t ask that of the Catholic Church. What you can ask is that they atone for bad things, and acknowledge bad things. But you can’t ask them to be you. I won’t be going back, because I’m relentlessly pro-choice. It’s a big part of my identity, but I cannot, in good conscience, ask the Catholic Church to respect that. I can ask them not to work to outlaw things that are none of their business, but I can’t ask them to have my position on every topic.

I think some of this has to do with the fact that so much discourse is being driven by younger people—which is not bad—but I think loose, abstract ideas are less interesting to us until we get a little more secure in ourselves. You look at a thing when you are young, and it’s very clear to you. And then later, things are thornier. But who knows. Maybe the young people are right, and we just got soft and no longer understand what is righteous.

For me, lately, becoming soft feels like a virtue.

No, I agree. Very strongly. And I learned that very late. I think a lot of people place a high value on remaining true to an idea, but I think actually, maturity is the ability to go, You know, I hadn’t seen it that way. Obviously I’m not talking about my core values. I’m not going to be seeing the Nazis’ point of view. But I do think that the errand of life is to be able to understand as many perspectives as you can.

In your songs you often inhabit the persona of someone who makes choices or feels things with a degree of strident conviction that is very much the opposite of that.

I like to speak to people who are thornier—there’s a transgressive thrill in that. It’s underdog stuff, where you want to give a voice that might seem monochromatic some three-dimensionality.

What is the value of that?

I don’t want to sound pretentious, but the value of that is that mercy is the greatest thing that humans are capable of. And that means understanding people who are ignoble, damaged, broken. Damaged people do damaging things—they hurt people. To be able to see those people as whole, as people who didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to be all damaged, that’s what makes—well, I didn’t expect to be going here, but that brings you closer to God. Because that’s who God is. That’s what God does every day: understanding you as you. He sees you, the bad parts and the good parts, and feels the same way about you. For me, I don’t even have to fully believe. Nobody up there? Strong possibility! But the idea is so real. We know that’s a logical possibility, but when you and I talk about God we create Him, and that’s right there, hanging in the air between us. He’s there. He’s real in that space. The God that I understand is all of our better characteristics personified.

Almost all of your songs are sung in the voices of these characters—

Personified narrators.

That’s the term. Which, to me, is rare outside of that folk-music cliché of stating who you are at the top of the song: “Virgil Caine is my name”—

“Sam Hall,” by Johnny Cash! “My name, it is Sam Hall, Sam Hall. My name, it is Sam Hall, and I hate you, one and all. I hate you, one and all. God damn your eyes.”

Why is that an appealing songwriting model for you?

I think it’s because I’m a writer of fiction. The second people start writing fiction, that’s what they do. I can’t think of who my models would be, except for Lou Reed—Lou Reed, who’s going out of his way to try and convince you that he’s just telling his own story, you know? One thing I did notice quickly, in music, is it’s hard to convince people that you’re not telling your own story. You spend a lot of intellectual energy going, No, no, this is not my story. But then you grow up and you go, Look, if I tell you a story, there’s a piece of me in it. I have come all the way, full circle, from “none of my work is autobiographical” to really believing that all work is, to some extent, nonfiction. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing; you’re telling me something about yourself. I used to find this terrifying, and now I find it kind of comforting. It means down there, at the bottom, at your core, there’s something that’s you , and it always tries to make itself known in everything you do.

This is a minor spoiler for “Devil House,” but one of the late-appearing characters in the book seems an awful lot like it’s you. Like, it’s literally you.

Yeah, that’s right—it’s me. In any of my books, you can probably find the character that I prefer to think of as the most me, as the one, as my dude. But working on the voice of me was fun. That section was originally much longer—it had so much stuff in it that actually happened, in real time, in January of 2020, and my editor read it and he was, like, “I think we need a lot less of John Darnielle here in the end.” I was glad to hear it, because the last thing I want to do is give people too much of that.

It works a bit like that framing conceit in late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century novels in which the author says, “What you are about to read was found in the papers of so-and-so.” This way of distancing themselves from authorship, in service of the story.

I love that conceit. It’s a version of something that was super common in the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages took it from Rome. In Rome, the idea that you had made a story up meant that you didn’t know any of the good stories and you’d made up some trash. All the Roman writers say, “Well, I got this story from Homer,” “I got this story from Aristophanes.” They’re very careful about pedigree. By the time of Chaucer, it had been totally codified: “If you find anything in this story you don’t like, don’t blame me. This is a Boccaccio story and I’m just passing it along.” I think it’s a fun conceit. I like that sort of disingenuous, playful quality in writing.

Playing around with conceits and tropes are key to genre writing. “Devil House” is about true crime, and your previous novels have dealt with role-playing games and indie videos. You write songs that are about death metal, or about punk, even though the songs themselves arguably aren’t death metal or punk songs. What’s the draw of exploring these genres and subcultures?

I like the fact that the economies of subcultures—the emotional economies, I want to say—are different from mainstream culture. There is that feeling of “We have a secret.” It’s one of the reasons gatekeeping happens, where people go, “You’re into this for the wrong reasons,” which is always just nonsense.

I think that often goes hand in hand with a sense of “You’re getting into this too late, you didn’t see it when I saw it, and I resent that.”

Though there are some times in history when that can’t be denied. Take the Williamsburg scene in Brooklyn, before it blew up. There were these parties that spread by word of mouth, and these bands would play, that had just formed that week, and they would do an amazing set. It wasn’t just there. This happens over and over again, and then there is always a moment when, well, now people know about it. The problem is not that people know, but that expectations form, both within the community and outside of it. Expectations are death. Before something has a full-on, identifiable identity—that’s the exciting time. That’s the time when you don’t really know where something is going, but there’s a feeling, and you can’t quite name it. Those times are exciting in subcultures, and that’s where the gatekeeping comes from, I think—the knowledge that these things can’t last. But it’s not that they don’t last because of people crashing the gates. They don’t last because nothing gold can stay. It’s hacky to cite that poem, but it’s also so true.

Does something like your song “No Children” blowing up on TikTok, as it did last year, contribute to that? Does it collapse the identity of that song, or of the Mountain Goats, into something easy for people to understand?

No, it expands it. I’m going to step into my nineties-PoMo “Utne Reader” mode. When somebody takes a text and makes it their own, they are showing that the power rests in the hand of the reader. I do have a complicated relationship with this, though, because, specifically, of a song on the album “Heretic Pride” in which people thought a rape was taking place. I was, like, “No. No, no, no. Never. It’s not my style.” And then people would say, “Well, but here’s my reading,” and I would go, “No, absolutely not.” I found the limits of my Utne pose.

Which song was that?

It was “Marduk T-shirt Men’s Room Incident.” It’s a very dark song, so it does sound like something bad happened to the woman in the bathroom. But the man who sees her is just projecting thoughts onto her. But, of course, my songwriting style is to leave details out. I saw how people were interpreting it and I was, like, “That’s not going to be my narrator, ever.” We’ve had quite enough of that.

Is that why you stopped playing “Going to Georgia,” which is sung from the perspective of a man driving to a woman’s house with a gun?

I’m going to talk about this with you, but the less I have to think about it the better. For one thing, I had been playing it for fifteen years. I’d taken it to all the places I really felt it could go. But beyond that, I stopped playing it, I think, sometime after Sandy Hook. It’s not like I think there’s a prohibition on guns in songs or in art. I think that would be a silly way of thinking of it. But the fact of the matter is, the way that song reads to me, it takes it rather too easy on its narrator. The narrator is doing this for love, but I want this guy to get stopped before he gets in the car. So, even though the gun’s old and he’s not going to hurt anybody, I became much less interested.

I think young men, as writers, are very interested in this sort of intense guy who’s going to do something intense and everybody will see his intensity . I think that that is a symptom of the masculinity that you inherit and experience and learn to parse, and once you have worked through your issues on that, hopefully, you leave that “my dude must be intense” behind. All these stories of young, intense men—they just seem like the worst kind of romanticization to me. I don’t think “Going to Georgia” is a terrible song that’s going to hurt anybody, but it just doesn’t fit in with what I want to be doing anymore.

I’m over fifty. Being over fifty is miraculous. You get just a broader view on your previous iterations of yourself, and they all look like miserable failures. But I’m told that the next errand is to have pity on them. I don’t know about that. People think you should forgive them. I don’t expect to get there, but you at least get some perspective on your motivations. I think young people do practically everything out of fear, whether it’s fear of missing out, or fear of not becoming what you want to become, or fear of not getting away from what you want to get away from. If you keep working spiritually, you think, “Oh, wait, if I work and I’m able to provide for myself, what do I truly have to be afraid of?” Not so much. And, well, then you can approach something like freedom, I guess.

Why do you think you connect so deeply with culture outside the mainstream?

From a very early age, I had a weird relationship with the idea of greatness. Of course, you want to read the great writers, and you want to understand why they’re great, but I always wanted to know about the ones who are left off the list, the secondary and tertiary names. I think there’s something hardwired in a person, maybe. You know Ursula K. Le Guin ’s “ Very Far Away from Anywhere Else ”? Neither of those people in the book are cool people, but you go, “Yeah, but, they are. They’re cool to me.” You hope to have a relationship like that. You develop your hopes. My outlook on the world was so intensely formed by being bookish as a kid that I got a sense of what’s valuable in the world as “not what’s out there .” That’s not where the action that’s going to feed your spirit is.

For the past few months, I’ve been reading Croatian authors and Serbian authors—people reckoning with some very heavy stuff. The absolute worst of these is still just a literary writer of the first rank. Genre fiction is different. It’s not that it’s worse, it’s different; it has different expectations. It’s been so jarring for me to get back into the genre world. I see that you’re establishing your characters. This is the scared one, and this is the overconfident one, et cetera.

Is this why you write literary novels about people who are creating genre content, rather than working in those genres directly? “Wolf in White Van,” for example, is about a person who creates a play-by-mail narrative role-playing game. What’s the difference between creating a game, and creating a person who creates a game?

I have written a couple of beginnings of games, but writing a game that actually is playable is a whole different skill set. You come up with a way of playing, with a set of rules, and the rules say to the players, somehow, how the author of the game feels about the situation. That’s incredible, but that’s not what I developed. There’s a geometry to writing games, and I’m a words guy. We know this from my other life in the Mountain Goats. What I do is I write words. I’m really into words and phrases and sentences. That’s what I’m good at. That’s what I want to do. There’s something about the word “story” that really feels like it’s not big enough to contain what we’re talking about when we talk about stories. But I dislike the term “narrative” very deeply. Storytelling? The weaving of tales? This, for me, has been a joy since I was very, very small. If you have language that pops, language that slashes, that’s what’s for me.

How do you know whether a spark of an idea or of a character is destined to become a song or prose?

Or nothing! Nothing is the third option. I don’t think anything has ever been an idea for a song that I wound up putting in the book or otherwise, except for one part of “Devil House” that concerns kings and castles, and the notion of the kingly court, and all that. That’s something I’ve been interested in since college, because I love Chaucer. I did start trying to write some poems, a long time ago. I had an idea for a sequence of a thousand poems, and every time I would bring it up, [my editor] Sean McDonald would be, like, “Yeah, yeah, thanks, John.” He did not want to deal with my idea for a one-thousand-poem cycle. I don’t blame him, because you can’t sell poems to anybody. But I wrote a bunch of them. I didn’t think highly of them. They involved a murder and some teen-agers, as “Devil House” does, and it slipped a couple times into this Arthurian parlance that I liked. I knew it wasn’t going anywhere, and eventually I stopped returning to it. Then, when I started writing this book, when it came time to populate the “Devil House”—the place in Milpitas where the main stuff is going to happen—I went and retrieved some of those ideas.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that part in “Devil House.” The Arthurian interlude —

“The Gorbonian.” The courtly romance part.

It shows up more or less in the middle of the novel, it’s in a different font than the rest of the book, written in a sort of faux Middle English, and then it ends abruptly, in the middle of a sentence.

The last four words of that section do give you a key to reading this book. I feel weird giving it away, except that I’m sure nobody will find it on their own. The last four words of the Gorbonian section are “til on a day—”. Those are also the last four words of the Tale of Sir Thopas from Chaucer’s “ Canterbury Tales .”

This is one of my favorite shticks. Sir Thopas is the tale that the character of Chaucer tells, within the “Canterbury Tales.” He’s asked to tell a story and he says, “Well, I don’t really know any good stories, just some old stuff that nobody really cares about.” So he launches into Sir Thopas, which is very long, and it’s all very much not as good as the poetry that all the other people have been using to tell their stories.

Now, of course, you and I know Chaucer wrote all those other stories, too, but, in the fiction of the “Canterbury Tales,” Chaucer is this guy who’s, like, “I only know this one poem, here it is.” He’s making fun of a type of poetry that is passing out of style—poetry that his innovations, his studies, his knowledge of Italian poetry, are going to put an end to. His telling the Tale of Sir Thopas, it’s going on and on, nobody cares, he’s not that good. “Sir Thopas goes over here and does this, Sir Thopas goes over here and does that, till on a day—” And there’s a dash. The host interrupts him, he does not let him finish the story. He says, “ This may wel be rym dogerel .” Doggerel, he calls it! “  ‘By God,’ quod he, ‘for pleynly, at a word, / Thy drasty ryming is nat worth a toord!’  ”

This is literally my favorite moment in all literature. I went to U.T. Austin on tour once, and they had an original copy of the “Canterbury Tales” where I could look at that very page, and it was one of the most emotional moments of my entire life. I was, like, “There it is.” Because that changed the way I read and the way I write: the idea that you have this narrator who is the writer, but he’s the writer having made himself into a character, and the characters are speaking to him, and he’s speaking to them, and it’s all incredibly complex. You can really definitively say you enter into a space of infinite play in trying to parse that. And infinite play is what I like. That’s what I want. I want stories to be a place where you can go in, and root around, and never get a hundred per cent satisfaction. That’s why the middle section ends with the words “til on a day,” and it breaks off. That’s a tip of the hat to the guys that broke everything open for me, who are Chaucer and Barry Sanders, to whom the book is dedicated—the man who taught me Chaucer.

Do you consider your song lyrics to be poetry?

No. I think songs are songs. Songs are their own genre, and they predate poetry. They are the earliest of forms. Probably painting is earlier, though it depends on how you count singing. Sylvia Plath described her child’s cry as a “Morning Song,” in that poem: “Now you try / Your handful of notes; / The clear vowels rise like balloons.” To me, we start singing as soon as we’re born. The song is everything. Every other form aspires to the natural condition of the song. Kids do it by themselves. Sure, they’ve heard a song or two in their cradles, but you see a kid playing, and they’ll make up a little song. You won’t know what it is, and it just belongs to them.

When “Wolf in White Van” was published, and received so much acclaim, did you have any sort of existential reckoning with yourself about being seen as a novelist instead of as a musician?

I was proud. I was really very happy. I had wanted to be a writer long before I wanted to be a musician, and I became a musician kind of accidentally. Once I got into writing “Wolf in White Van,” I found that pleasure in writing a big book, and in actually seeing the project through to a satisfying conclusion. It doesn’t give you the giant adrenaline hit you get from a song. You can never get that from writing books, as far as I know. But you get the sense you get when you build a house: “Well now, here’s a whole place you can go live.”

Songs and books are completely different. A song is something you take possession of. You own it, and you carry it with you—you as a listener. A book, I think, is much more sadistic, in the sense that you have freedom, as a reader, to read it as you like, but you have to live inside my brain while you read my book.

Do you feel romantic about the idea of creating art?

I consider it work. I don’t know how other people are about it. To me, it is work. The word “work” is degraded by capitalism—capitalism takes work and makes it the thing you’re doing to get money so you can do the stuff you enjoy doing when you’re not working. But I don’t think of it that way. Some of that is because I have a gig that I want. But some of it, in a much more mundane and probably more productive sense, I think, working is just one of the things we do. Psychologists say that play is the work of children. You do not have to teach children to play—they just go out and do it, and they love it. That’s how I feel about work: I want to be working. I’m not miserable when I’m idle; I’m able to be idle, and I enjoy it. Work is one good thing and rest is the other one, but it’s a balance of those two that I think inspires the spirit.

When I say work is self-expression, I don’t mean it’s anything automatic, like this idea of when people say, “Well, the book was writing itself.” I never believe that. No, you were writing the book, you were doing your work. I cherish the notion of all art as labor, because I think labor has an inherent dignity. There’s a version of human labor where we’d all be just extraordinarily happy to be working, because we’d be contributing to one another’s welfare, and it would feel incredible.

Do you think of yourself as happy?

Yeah, I do. Well, I think of myself as lucky. I don’t think I was really supposed to be alive this long. In my druggie years, I got into a couple situations where I should have died. I really, really should have died, and I didn’t. I didn’t have a come-to-Jesus moment about it back then, either, but I made it out of there. So I consider every extra day that I get just a gigantic blessing. And I’ve gotten the things that most writers dream of. I’ve written a few things that people tattoo on their bodies, and which help people understand themselves in the world. People have told me that my music helped them tell their orientation to their families, or to understand the family situations they came from. Even one of those instances would be enough to go, “O.K., I got adequately paid for this life,” but I’ve had a number of those, so I just feel extremely fortunate all the time. I’m a father of two who makes music, and people enjoy it, and I get to write books, too, and I feel like I’ve actually gotten somewhere with those books. So yeah, yeah, I am happy.

An earlier version of this article misstated the sequence of Darnielle’s book releases and contained a transcription error in his answer about faith.

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