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.
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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.”
Oh.
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.
