An interview with John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats)

Ok, so I missed the proper press day to have a chat with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats but, the lovely people at 4AD allowed me to drop him a couple of questions via email. So, thanks to them, we have an insight into his songwriting inspiration, his future plans and what he thinks about the future of the recording industry.

Congratulations on Heretic Pride, it’s a great album. What were the main ideas behind it and do you think you’ve fully realised them?
I wanted actually to just write a collection of songs – I’d been writing around a central theme for so long I thought I’d just sort of do like I used to do and write about whatever occurred to me.

It feels a “bigger” album than Get Lonely. Was this a concious decision or something that happened?
Sorta both – I mean, when I started writing the songs, most of ‘em had that forward-momentum feel that leaves room for lots of other stuff. Unlike Get Lonely where every song seemed to be saying “give me some room.” But we only went in with some vague ideas about orchestration & arrangement, ideas come up when you’ve got ten days to just record and listen.

How do you approach recording an album? Did you originally make a concious decision to sound “Lo-Fi”?
No, I just wanted to record my songs, so I got a boombox. But that was, at this point, a long time ago; the last time I recorded anything that might qualify as “lo-fi” was 2000. It was really funny when people called Tallahassee “lo-fi” (“lo-fi as ever!” etc) because the guy who produced that is the guy who produces Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, and so on.

These days I write & record the songs at home, and then I send them out to everybody concerned, and we have some practice sessions, and then we have an idea of what we want to do by the time we get to the studio. It’s less immediate than recording directly into a boombox, which I usually did within seconds of writing the song. I do miss that. But you can’t really do that with other people – the boombox can only absorb so much sound before it just turns into a muddy mess, whereas when it’s just guitar & voice, you actually get a kind of clarity that’s sometimes lost in a studio.

Has the fact that you’ve found increased success and awareness, and with it more money/power when recording, allowed you to make “better” music? Especially now The Mountain Goats are a fully realised “band”.
Well, it’d be hard for me to say – I think most every writer feels like he gets better as his time in the field gets longer, and certainly I like my newer songs heaps better than my older ones. But I think that’s probably mainly a function of writing more than anything else. Hard to say without an alternate-universe JD who didn’t have as much increased awareness etc: if we could hear that alternate-universe version of me, and see if he were still writing the same songs, then we’d be able to answer this question. So, therefore, the Mountain Goats support increased funding for scientific research.

Have you put a huge pressure on yourself to produce and release albums within such short time frames? Do you ever feel like you need a break?!?
One a year doesn’t really seem like that much to me! I mean, it’s only slightly over a song a month. Any songwriter who can’t get at least one good song a month is a lazy bum, that’s my opinion! Also, we are sharks, if we stop moving we’ll die.

Are you ever worried that you might run out of inspiration? Where do you find it at the moment?
There are so many wonderful small things in the world that it feels like the whole place was created just to inspire. You know what I mean? Like, look around the room you’re in. Practically every object in it has about a dozen stories to tell! If you go outside or down to the store, the number of stories increases a millionfold, right? What to speak of opening a book or listening to some great music, there’s so much inspiration everywhere. Right now I get big thrills from old pictures of the American west: cowboys, old barber shops, dudes on horses with rifles, Native Americans on the plains. Also, the cult scare of the 70s is, like, a constant source of inspiration. Constant.

Do you think you’ve made your definitive record yet or is it still waiting to come out?
God, it’d be doom to think you’d already made your definitive statement, wouldn’t it? I always like the new one 2nd best, right after whatever half-formed idea I have kicking around in my head.

You have recently written a book about Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality for the 33 1/3 series, do you plan to write fiction in the future?
Yes, actually, I do!

In fact, what future plans do you have for both yourself and The Mountain Goats?
We will be touring through June, or until our feet fall off, in which case we will take a break to have our feet reattached, then resume touring. I have two studio days scheduled for May, during which I am doing something secret and wonderful. But for the most part, for the next six months we are the property of the tour van & various audiences.

Changing tact slightly, what do you make of the current trend of bands giving their music away for free on the internet (Radiohead, NIN etc). The ongoing digital revolution seems to have turned the industry on its head. Other artists we’ve spoken to recently seem to see it as a positive thing. What are your thoughts?
Well, as an object fetishist, it’s hard for me to get excited about the decline of the album-as-physical-entity. There’s lots good & exciting about digital distribution models, but there’s also a lot about it that’s dead boring, you know? Myspace, for example: does anybody actually feel excited about listening to somebody’s Myspace? Really? I don’t, I can’t; if we’re giving stuff away online, that could be great, but only if it were done in some way that had some inherently more interesting interface than a hideous inline player embedded in a very ugly page. I tend to think that the evils of the industry are overstated, but what do I know: I’m kind of practical. Most of my music business relationships haven’t been with your stereotypical/quasi-mythical longhaired-guy-in-a-suit; they’ve been with people who love & are passionate about music and hope to make a living out of it, which doesn’t seem an inherently “evil” prospect to me.

Still, there are limitless possibilities for making digital distribution interesting, whether for free or otherwise. As yet nobody seems interested in this; the aesthetics of it are kinda moronic at this stage of its developments, and I kinda have a contemptuous pity for anybody who doesn’t think that aesthetics of presentation are way cool.

And finally, outside of making this album, what books, films and albums have you been reading, watching and listening to? Anything to recommend?
Well, I’ve been listening to a lot of really raw black metal. My favorite right now is a French band called Peste Noire, an album called Lorraine Rehearsal, which is exactly what it sounds like. I’m reading Canetti’s “Auto-da-Fe,” which is pretty brutal, and I saw There Will Be Blood a couple of weeks ago. Loved that. I think the main thing to recommend though is this mashup/re-doing of Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie where somebody turns it into a duet with Danzig. That thing is unbelievable.

mp3:> The Mountain Goats: ‘Sax Rohmer #1′

Links
The Mountain Goats [official site] [myspace]