John Darnielle is one of the most imaginative lyricists of his generation. Since he sat cross-legged in the early nineties with an acoustic guitar in front of a boom box, and pressed record for the first time, skewed characters, vibrant images and perfectly-framed narratives have flowed in their hundreds. In that time, he has conjured - from laconic, blazing phrases - insights into a multitude of vivid alternative realities. He has inhabited the minds of murderers and suicides, prophets and emperors. He has documented a disintegrating, alcoholic marriage (in the 'Alpha' series), the inner lives of teenage metal fans ('The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton') and the final moments of prehistoric sacrificial victims ('Tollund Man'). He has even brought to life a world so improbably perfect that the Chicago Cubs could win a World Series ('Cubs In Five').
John Darnielle was born in Bloomington, Indiana, during one of the state's periodic locust infestations. His family drove out to California in a blue Chrysler convertible with John, as yet unable to walk or speak, riding in the back. He spent most of the next 20-odd years in and around California, buying Gun Club albums and weird Hawaiian guitars from a couple of blind brothers who ran a music store in a strip mall in Norwalk. This sounds like it must be a lie, but, surprisingly, it isn't.
Releasing music as The Mountain Goats in various permutations - first as a quintet, then as a duo, often by himself - Darnielle's songs generally dwell on one or a combination of five subjects: conflicts within relationships that lead to irreducible contradictions, food, water, the mythology of pre-Columbian Mexico, and animals that can talk. This list changes every time you ask him about it but the talking animals are usually in there. His early tapes on the Shrimper label were aggressively low-tech presentations, recorded on a Panasonic FT-500, a dual-cassette with built-in condenser microphone. Lots of people insisted on calling the stuff made using the Panasonic "4-track recordings," and trying to convince people otherwise has proven utterly pointless.
Since 1995, the general rule was for Mountain Goats albums to feature a mixture of home-recorded and studio songs, but that changed in 2002 - which saw the release of All Hail West Texas (the first all-boombox Mountain Goats album since 1994's Zopilote Machine), and also saw the Darnielle signing to 4AD and finding himself able to spend more time in recording studios.
The first fruit of this new relationship was Tallahassee, recorded in November 2002 and released two months later. The album found Darnielle and Hughes locked in Tarbox Road Studios in upstate New York with producer Tony Doogan (Mogwai, Belle And Sebastian, Mojave 3) using great big pieces of equipment to conjure paranoid visions of a couple permanently on the cusp of divorce. The characters that populate Tallahassee (the aforementioned 'Alpha Couple') are two people who are fairly well convinced that they were once in love, but who have now stayed drunk so long that they're not sure of much beyond the mutually destructive urge that continues to hold together their house (a two-story affair in Northern Florida). Some of the songs were funny in a guilt-soaked sort of way; most of them featured either radios, outdated modes of transportation, or howls of anguish disguised as requests for spare change.
It's a mark of his extraordinary creativity that, of the 400-plus songs that Darnielle has written and recorded, only a handful directly concern his own experience. But his second album for 4AD - 2004's We Shall All Be Healed - marked a change in approach by revisiting and reconstructing a dark period in his early life. It was a time of seedy apartments, makeshift friendships, cheap substances and unscheduled trips to hospital. All of the songs were based on people John used to know. Most of them are probably dead or in jail by now.
Five of them once set up temporary camp in his studio apartment in Portland, Oregon, sketching out plans for their weekend and openly discussing how much they might be able to get for his stereo, were they to steal and sell it. One of them, responding either to the Muse or to the staggering quantities of methamphetamine in her bloodstream, sat herself down at John’s desk and saw fit to compose a doggerel ode in praise of a speed-metal band. She pressed her ball-point pen so hard against the paper as she wrote that the words are still visible on the desk’s walnut surface today. A few of these people may have righted their ships by now and sailed on to calmer waters. They may even have changed their names and become famous. There is always hope.
A year later came The Sunset Tree, inspired in part by the death of John's stepfather in December 2003. As The Mountain Goats toured Europe shortly afterwards, a set of new, intensely personal songs started to flow. They were conceived in a Paris hotel, worked on in dingy dressing rooms and hired vans, and four of them were road-tested in a wonderful session recorded for John Peel at the end of the tour.
In its final form - recorded with producer John Vanderslice in Northern California towards the end of 2004 - The Sunset Tree was the most richly rewarding album in The Mountain Goats' wildly extensive discography. It's a collection of songs about the house that Darnielle grew up in and the people who lived there - an ensemble cast which includes Darnielle himself, an ex-girlfriend, his mother, stepfather and sister, old friends and old enemies. "I've put off writing about this stuff for years," he says, "because I'm a little squeamish about milking my own trauma for art, and getting good songs rather than cry-fests from these experiences is a really excruciating process. And also because my stepfather was still alive."
"I'm in the living room watching the Watergate hearings
While my stepfather yells at my mother.
Launches a glass across the room straight at her head
And I dash upstairs to take cover;
Lean in close to my little record player on the floor
So, this is what the volume knob's for.
I listen to dance music, dance music."
('Dance Music')
Even though he only takes centre stage in a few of the songs, John's stepfather is a baleful presence throughout The Sunset Tree. He is asleep on the couch at the opening of 'Hast Thou Considered The Tetrapod?', spit bubbling on his lips, oozing menace, even unconscious. He is waiting on the driveway as John drives home in 'This Year', about to provoke "a cavalcade of anger and fear". And it's his memory, sometimes sweet and sometimes stinging, that mists through the painkillers and wine coolers on the album's opener, 'You Or Your Memory'.
Crucially, John's darkest experiences are garlanded with some of his sunniest melodies. 'Dance Music' is as jaunty as it is brief, skipping along hand in hand with a playful piano part that offers an impossible counterpoint to the unblinking honesty of the lyrics. 'This Year' borders on the anthemic, its swaying confidence in telling contrast to the backhanded bravura of the refrain: "I'm going to make it through this year, if it kills me." 'Lion's Teeth' captures an ancient split-second of domestic violence in a nervy, staccato march which renders everything that happens newly urgent and almost unbearably vivid. "There's no good way to end this", deadpans the singer.
But he doesn't mean it, quite - experienced as a whole rather than as a series of terrifying, frozen moments, The Sunset Tree is a redemptive rather than a remorseless record. The final three tracks are meditative in tone, bittersweet rather than just bitter, and the 'Pale Green Things' of the closing song are, perhaps, the frail shoots of a tentative new hope being born. As the sleevenotes say: "You are going to make it out of there alive."
As well as John Darnielle, The Sunset Tree featured Peter Hughes (bass, backing vocals, guitar), Franklin Bruno (piano, guitar), Erik Friedlander (cello), Alex DeCarville (drums) and Scott Solter (keyboards). The album was released in May 2005 to a rave reviews, including a profile in the New Yorker which declared that John is "America's best non-hip hop lyricist".
2006’s Get Lonely met the challenge of following up on the great success of The Sunset Tree by sounding completely different.
If The Sunset Tree derived its power and energy from an unblinking exorcism of personal demons, Get Lonely was perhaps the quiet, haunted aftermath. It’s a reflective, intimate record; the mood is one of tender resignation rather than cathartic release. It saw Darnielle modulating his perspective away from the unequivocally personal – the album’s elegiac vignettes undoubtedly sprang from emotion deeply felt, but emotion this time – as the poet once had it – “recollected in tranquility”. The songs are spooked and spectral, driving at night past signposts which point towards forgotten promises and remembered losses. There are striking visions - of the fraught past, the splintered present and the daunting future :
The first time time I made coffee for just myself I made too much of it
But I drank it all just ‘cause you hate it when I let things go to waste
And I wandered through the house like a little boy lost at the mall
And an astronaut could have seen the hunger in my eyes from space
('Woke Up New')
These moments of lucid verbal drama rub up against the sombre mood of Get Lonely, disrupting the album’s dazed beauty, casting light into its shady corners. These constant contrasts meant that, even at its most languid, the album was never merely pretty, and even at its most troubled, never merely dark. Get Lonely was a delicately nuanced triumph – an uncannily coherent and subtle record that confirmed John Darnielle as a cult phenomenon.
Heretic Pride, released in 2008, saw Darnielle move away from the nakedly personal perspective of The Sunset Tree and Get Lonely, delighting long-time fans by retreating into his imagination to conjure a suite of songs about mythical creatures, imaginary cults, slasher films and pulp fiction novelists. The record featured some of the most anthemic, impassioned and downright catchy songs of his career: 'Sax Rohmer', 'Autoclave' and 'Lovecraft In Brooklyn' joined a long line of glorious Mountain Goats shouters.
Heretic Pride was produced by Scott Solter and John Vanderslice, who also contributed some additional percussion (Solter) and some synth (Vanderslice). The album was recorded by Solter along with Aaron Prellwitz at Prairie Sun and was also mixed by Solter.
Musicians included old associates like Peter Hughes (bass) and Franklin Bruno (piano); Jon Wurster (Superchunk) provides drums, and the incredible Erik Friedlander plays cello. Annie Clark (of St Vincent) contributes some guitar and backing vocals, and, in a development that amazed the faithful, Rachel Ware Zooi and Sarah Arslanian - aka The Bright Mountain Choir - add vocal harmonies to a Mountain Goats album for the first time since 1996.