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 Click for music events Dark Secrets The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle gets personal
For nearly a decade, John Darnielle only had his guitar.
Then, after teaming with musician/producer John Vanderslice, came
the release of 2003's "Tallahassee," and he expanded his Mountain
Goats with elaborate instrumentation--drums, lead guitar,
piano--elaborate, that is, for a songwriter who built a hardcore
underground fan base without ever recording in a typical studio. The
first several hundred of his songs were put to tape on a basic
boom box--get comfortable, press record and spill your guts--so much so
that on the first few Goats' records you can hear the actual tape
reeling. After building a reputation of being a star lo-fi artist, and
maybe even more so a gifted storyteller than musician, he might have
been expecting a backlash from even the noblest of fans for stepping
into a new age.
"I was at first, yeah," Darnielle says, "and there were a fair
number of old-school fans who sort of expected me to be the last man
standing for guy-and-an-acoustic-guitar `lo-fi' stuff, but I figured
eight years or so tenure in that station was enough work in one area.
You have to expand your vistas to stay hungry." Has that changed his
songwriting process? "I still write the way I always did," he says.
"Me and a guitar and a notebook and my throat. The difference is that
now if I like the song, I send it to Peter [Hughes, Darnielle's partner
in crime and on-tour accompanying bassist] and he starts working up his
part."
Darnielle bounced around record labels for his entire career,
releasing full-length records at a rapid-fire pace--not to mention the
countless contributions to compilations--until he found a home in 4AD.
And now "The Sunset Tree." Arguably the first "all-personal" record
in the John Darnielle collection--most of the other Mountain Goats
stories lie on the side of fiction--"The Sunset Tree" recalls
Darnielle's troubled childhood, raised with an abusive stepfather and a
suffering family, and finishes as one of Darnielle's most complete
works. He even inscribes a message in the jacket's modest liner notes:
"Made possible by my stepfather, Mike Noonan (1940-2004): may the peace
which eluded you in life be yours now." And the dedication: "Dedicated
to any young men and women anywhere who live with people who abuse them,
with the following good news: you are going to make it out of there
alive--you will live to tell your story--never lose hope."
"It was both difficult and deliriously easy," Darnielle says of
exposing himself with the dark, intimate subject matter. "[It was]
painful at times, but I didn't have to make up stories like I usually do
because I already know how all these stories go. So from a craft
standpoint, the only challenge was keeping things formal and not
venturing into some yawnsome, speak-your-mind stuff. Personally, yes, I
did find myself in some dark alleys of the brain, but it felt kind of
good, too." That's not to say the new record is all gloom and
doom--Darnielle often keeps it musically light, daring to invoke a
head-bob here and there, or even a supportive fist shot in the air in
unison with a chorus. "I'm a music listener first and an artist second,
so I'm always conscious of how something would sound to me... . I try to
keep things light and trust the stories to tell themselves without me
telegraphing my punches."
How does his surviving family feel about his excursion into his
past? "My mom's heard it," he says. "She liked it but it made her
cry. Obviously I felt a little conflicted about it, but my first
responsibility is to my songs and to the people who might get something
out of them, so I didn't really worry about anything else."
Often described as "prolific"--a term that makes Darnielle
cringe--the sheer volume of recorded work he releases increases the
possibility of misfire, which makes The Mountain Goats that much more
impressive given its consistent catalogue. At this point, it would feel
strange if Darnielle began releasing records every three or four years,
instead of annually. "The difference between me and those other artists
is that they are lazy. It isn't asking much of a guy to write, say, one
song a month. If you're only doing one a month, then you should be able
to do twelve terrific songs per year. If you have any work ethic, it
should be more than that, especially if you've been doing it for a
while. I've been on this job for a minute now and I don't think it makes
me `prolific' to be able to do it quickly without getting all
languid-artist-dude about it."
And after all this time and transformation, Darnielle's still the
beloved man at the top of the mountain. "I really love the people that
come to the shows...There are some people who've been along with me
since I was playing to rooms with about ten people in `em, and those
people are kind of the core on which the whole big, sticky enterprise
got built. And the new people--it's always so exciting to see somebody
who I haven't seen before who's so into it now that they've muscled
their way down to the front row and they're down there livin' and dyin'
with the songs. It's hard for me to think about how much I love my
audience. They're my blood." The Mountain Goats play Logan Square Auditorium, 2539 N. Kedzie,
(773)252-6179, on May 13.
Also by Tom Lynch Tip of the Week
The Chicago Public Library presents its annual Poetry Fest at the
Harold Washington Library Center this weekend for a morning and
afternoon of readings, performances, workshops and discussions
Soundcheck
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War of the Worlds
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Stagecraft
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