John Darnielle perfects the art of storytelling
John Darnielle found his band’s name, the Mountain Goats, in a “Screaming” Jay Hawkins song, but the moniker has proven a good fit for his writing: his are sure-footed tales about uncertain people.
Darnielle may be the closest thing popular music has to a shortstory writer. He’s penned dozens of songs, most of them intricately drawn character studies. He then spins about 10 or 12 of these stories into thematic collections that become a Mountain Goats album.
Darnielle returns time and again to ideas of identity and the self. So two years ago, he followed that theme in the grandest way, with a collection of songs about professional wrestling. True to its title, the new “Goths” is populated by characters drawn more inward. The stories are sometimes drawn from Darnielle’s youth, though not always. But at 50, he has great clarity in his recall for youth, while presenting it with the long view that comes from being older.
“That’s who I was,” he sings on one “Goths” tune. “This is who I am.”
“There’s a very American idea that there’s some central ‘you’ that you have to be true to your entire life,” he says. “And that’s a weird idea to me. I’m heavily interested in our subcultures. With a subculture, maybe you’re this one person for six months. But that idea, that there’s an authentic self, is childlike to me. If you’re growing, you’re changing. So we grow, we go back, sometimes those things are for the better. Sometimes they’re not. And we look back fondly, but maybe we shouldn’t. One of the things about past selves, they can come back to haunt you. They’re not always who you want to have been back there.”
Darnielle has produced an enormous amount of music in the 22 years since he first started making rickety Mountain Goats recordings on a boom box. There have
been nearly 20 albums or collections, a very well-received novel and a novella for the 331⁄3 book series in which he spun a fictional story around Black Sabbath’s “Master of Reality.”
The sum of his work can be daunting to those who haven’t yet found the Mountain Goats, but over the past 15 years, Mountain Goats albums have become more polished things and points of entry abound, starting with the beautiful “Tallahassee.”
Darnielle’s writing has remained constant: wrenching, funny and contemplative. At times, he’s drawn from autobiography greatly, as on “The Sunset Tree” in 2005, which documents a tumultuous adolescence in a home with an abusive stepfather. Even when Darnielle isn’t a cast member in the songs — like “Beat the Champ,” the wrestling album — the content still reflects his broad interests. How close were the personae of wrestlers inside the ring to their lives outside it?
So “Goths” looks at a range of a particular black-clad subculture. Some disappear into it. Others do not. On “The Grey King,” Darnielle sings, “I’m hardcore, but I’m not that hardcore.”
“That’s the thing, with hardcore there’s a point at which it crosses over into being unhealthy,” he says.
In the song, a character scrapes his car against a guardrail.
“I would say that’s too hardcore,” Darnielle says, laughing. “It’s one thing to burn your finger with a flame. It’s another playing chicken in traffic.”
Darnielle’s own biography — at least as presented in song — swings toward and away from being too hardcore. That abusive childhood developed into a period of addiction, with an absence of direction befitting a guy who was born in the Midwest and grew up all along the Pacific Coast.
“Probably, by most reckonings, yes, I was too hardcore at times,” he says. “But to me, no, I’m not dead. So, no. I only had a couple of brushes that were close, but I always backed away before things got too dangerous. I guess I have too much self-preservation. As a goth, you’d judge yourself for too much self-preservation. And to some of my friends, maybe there was a period of two years where I was too hardcore. But it always seemed like somebody else in the graveyard.”
So he backed away and took a job at a psych ward — a setting that showed up in his Black Sabbath book and also the occasional song — got an English degree and set about writing songs. Darnielle took to writing with an almost natural aptitude: He’s proved capable of dropping all manner of words into a three-minute song with Tetris-like precision. And he’s the perfect vessel for them. While Darnielle’s nasal voice is a deterrent to some, his enunciation is clear and loud. There are no murmurs on Mountain Goats albums. That said, “Beat the Champ” required a certain forcefulness to reflect the puffed up nature of wrestling. “Goths” possesses a more subtle sound.
“I think one difference between the records is this one is more about the way people think of themselves, their perceived self,” he says. “Wrestling is so performative. So is goth, but in a different way. The interior states are different. And the common thread is telling stories about people. We think of entertainers and goths as caricatures. And that’s dehumanizing. I think characters should be given the full measure of humanity.”