‘It’s the song that God put me on this Earth to write’
Tristram Fane Saunders talks to John Darnielle whose 2005 work is now a lockdown sensation
If there’s one lyric that captures the spirit of 2020, it’s the chorus to The Mountain Goats’ This Year: “I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.”
John Darnielle has been singing that line for 15 years. When he sings it, his light tenor leaps up into an urgent, needling head voice – sharp as a surgical implement – that he uses whenever he wants to cut straight to the listener’s heart. It works.
For his fans, that line is a mantra. People tattoo themselves with those words. But, since March, the song has enjoyed an unexpected resurgence, on Youtube, on Spotify, where it has been streamed more than 4.5 million times, and on social media.
“That is the song God put me on this Earth to write,” says Darnielle, 53, when I phone him at home in Durham, North Carolina, where he lives with his wife Lalitree and two children. “My function, as a person, has been to write a song that is useful for people.”
Darnielle has been recording music as The Mountain Goats for almost three decades – sometimes alone, sometimes with a band (there are currently four Goats), but always with an uncanny ability to create light out of darkness. And, although they have never much troubled the charts, they have attracted a fair few famous fans, including chat show host Stephen Colbert and The Fault in Our Stars author John Green, as well as a great deal of critical acclaim.
Darnielle is “rock’s best storyteller” ( Rolling Stone), “America’s best non-hiphop lyricist” ( The New Yorker), “a poet of the underdog, whose passion, empathy, rudimentary guitar-strumming and at times abrasively nasal singing voice, have reduced me to a blubbering wreck on more occasions than I would care to admit” (Tristram Fane Saunders).
In conversation, the singersongwriter is polite, thoughtful, a little geeky, eager to share his interests. But This Year recalls a very troubled childhood, when he lived with his mother and an abusive stepfather in Claremont, a town 35 miles outside Los Angeles.
“Things got very violent in my stepfather’s house,” he says. A pharmacist, the man would beat
Darnielle’s mother every night.
For years, Darnielle resisted writing about him. But after his death the songs came flooding out. “He died, then I’m on tour two months later. I’m in a van, I’m not sleeping, and poor sleep is a great recipe for getting tons of stuff done. I started writing these songs…” The result was his best-known album, 2005’s The Sunset Tree.
His writing is also inspired by his time working as a psychiatric nurse in the Nineties. Although he tells me that he has never written directly about the people he met on the ward – “it would be unethical” – he admits they did influence his writing. “Sometimes, if somebody’s in a psychotic state, they have this internal logic to the things they’re saying. And I think hearing people talk like that for years at a time, you get a sense of how to speak elliptically, a different way of casting your metaphors.”
In some ways, in fact, his songwriting is a continuation of his nursing.
At its best, he says, it can be a way of helping people.
Fans have told him about listening to Mountain Goats songs that they treasured with a parent who was dying, and singing them together.
“I know of two instances where people have done that, and that makes me feel like I’ve made something really of profound use,” he says.
Darnielle’s music is inspired by his time spent working as a psychiatric nurse
The Mountain Goats’ latest album, Getting Into Knives, is out now