John Darnielle on The Mountain Goats’ 20th Album, Hollywood Aspirations, and Why He’s Always “Looking Forward”
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The post John Darnielle on The Mountain Goats’ 20th Album, Hollywood Aspirations, and Why He’s Always “Looking Forward” appeared first on Consequence.
On Friday (August 19th), The Mountain Goats will return with Bleed Out, their bloodthirsty 20th album. It’s an impressive milestone, as The Mountain Goats have managed to remain a shibboleth for the indie scene for around three decades, distinguishing those who are “in the know” for longer than some of their fans have been alive. It’s a feat not accomplished by many acts, especially one with a fairly steady lineup. Ask John Darnielle, though, and he’ll casually shrug it off.
“I didn’t even know that was the case until an interviewer asked me about it this morning,” Darnielle tells Consequence. “It may be in the press kit, but I don’t count them.”
The thing is, his attitude makes sense. Talking to Darnielle, it’s obvious that telling stories is just what he does. It’s where his interests lie, where his passion takes him, and, simply, what he enjoys doing. So, of course he’s written 20 albums (and several more tapes, EPs, and unreleased tracks). What else is he supposed to do?
Such an intrinsic urge for storytelling is the throughline of Darnielle’s career. From Zopilote Machine to Bleed Out, Darnielle’s songwriting instincts and artistic vision are unwavering. While his techniques may change as he gains experience, a Mountain Goats song is always unmistakably a Mountain Goats song. It’s the reason why his tunes have remained relevant and acclaimed for so long, why his work has amassed a lasting, highly dedicated cult following.
Metatextually, that is exactly what Bleed Out has to offer. Beyond the action movie influences, the conceptual vengeance, and the touch of the fabulous Alicia Bognanno (of Bully), the record’s form seems to make a statement on the progression of Darnielle’s artistic journey: what’s changed and what remains constant.
“I think people struggle to hear the commonalities between the stuff I did when it was just me and a boombox and stuff I do now,” Darnielle explains. “So when I do ‘Training Montage’ and open with just the acoustic and Jon [Wurster] keeping a little time on the hi-hat, it’s to point out that you’re in that world for these songs. These ones are very much adjacent to a lot of very early Mountain Goats.”
So, while the songs on Bleed Out — well-produced and certainly more structurally complex — are sonically distinct from those on All Hail West Texas, the heart of a song like “Make You Suffer” is not at all dissimilar to that of “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton.” Darnielle can discover his love for seventh chords or stretch out his songs to seven minutes, but what he can’t do is write anything other than a John Darnielle song. And us fans are very, very thankful for that.
Below, John Darnielle discusses the new batch of songs, his distaste for fade-outs, and movies to pair with Bleed Out. The Mountain Goats are also touring off of the back of Bleed Out; pick up tickets via Ticketmaster.
Bleed Out marks The Mountain Goats’ 20th record. Does that hold any significance to you?
I mean, it’s cool. But I didn’t even know that was the case until an interviewer asked me about it this morning. It may be in the press kit, but I don’t count them. When I get called upon to write about stuff with a retrospective mind, it’s hard for me to do. I’m pretty judicious about how much I look back. I don’t look back much at all. So it doesn’t hold any particular significance for me. I mean, it’s cool. It’s good to know. But, I’m always just looking forward, you know?
This record has some really interesting things to say about revenge. I’m particularly interested in the idea that nobody in this life actually takes revenge. Can you expand on that?
The thing is, this is not my idea. This is a Greek idea. That you can do something vengeful, but that it’s impossible. Greek tragedy is largely about this, in some ways. It’s about other stuff too, but one of the things that Greek tragedy is about is that when you go to take revenge… Oh, man, I’m totally gonna do this in a didactic professorial fashion if I can. [Laughs] What usually happens when you go to take revenge? Let’s say you are successful. Do you think you repay them not quite enough? The exact right amount? Or too much?
It’s usually too much isn’t it?
It’s always too much, because revenge is senseless. It’s an irrational mode that seems very rational to us because we’re very into our own grievances. And sometimes very rightly so. You want to feel that the guilty should be punished, right? We want justice to be done. But that’s why the Bible gets big on “justice belongs to God,” because you aren’t going to be able to keep yourself out of it and mete out any level of justice, right? You are going to wind up taking more than you were given. And so that’s the paradox of revenge. That’s why revenge is actually impossible. You are invariably going to overpay, which is why any sophisticated system of ethics is going to rule out revenge as a way of being.
But at the same time, it’s a very human impulse. I mean, with “Training Montage,” when people heard the chorus, they all went, “Oh! I’m into that!” Because it’s a real feeling. It’s not a wrong feeling. The important thing about this is that when I say it’s irrational and it’s not possible, people say, “Well, John Darnielle is against revenge.” No. [Laughs] Everybody wants revenge. Obviously, everybody wants revenge on somebody or something. It’s absolutely normal and human, and often you want revenge for one person on behalf of another person. That doesn’t have anything to do with you and you still hope you get even with that motherfucker. But you can’t get even. You always get more.
The Mountain Goats in 10 Songs
Speaking of “Training Montage,” I read that the first two songs you wrote for Bleed Out are the first two songs on the track list. As someone who belabors over album sequencing, was that purposeful or a coincidence?
When I wrote “Training Montage,” I sort of had a feel like this sounds like a first song. But I often think that along the way and it doesn’t wind up being the case. The second song just happened to be. I mean, we have a song like “Wage Wars Get Rich Die Handsome.” Saving that one for later is kind of a precious move. Like, you want to put that one as close to the top as you can. There was indeed pressure on me from within camp to lead with “Wage Wars.” I was like, “No.”
Because if you lead with “Wage Wars,” then you’re writing a check you’re not gonna be able to cash. Then you want 12 more songs exactly like that. And I’m not interested in that. But other than that, it was just a total happy accident. I don’t sequence the albums ahead of time. We record and then you look at what you have. Though, I try to do it quickly these days. I think belaboring sequence winds up in ponderous album sequences.
The one in my catalog I always think of was how we absolutely flogged the Get Lonely sequence. It was hard to figure out how to make it work. I think where we landed is good. And obviously it’s canonical at this point. But I ran across old emails at one point about how, for like a month, we said, “No, you know what has to be first is Maybe Sprout Wings.” Every sequence was pivoting off “Sprout Wings” first. That [would be] such a chasm to be opening from. Instead it opens with “Wild Sage,” a light one that does a thing that a lot of Mountain Goats songs do where it’s a pleasant, major key progression, underneath which is a big sadness. And there’s a tension between those two things. “Maybe Sprout Wings” doesn’t have that.
“Training Montage” works well for that then, since it starts out very classic Mountain Goats, with you and the acoustic guitar, before it expands into the full band. Was that the intention behind that decision?
That’s for two reasons. One, the demo sounded good that way. But beyond that, I’m always wanting to — whenever I’m going to say something that suggests anybody has listened to something without enough attention, I always want to hedge what I’m saying. I don’t want to say that people have it wrong or anything, but I think people struggle to hear the commonalities between the stuff I did when it was just me and a boombox and stuff I do now. I think it’s hard for people to see through the commonalities.
And there’s a lot of things that aren’t common at all, right? As a songwriter, I’ve grown in a lot of ways. Most of the old songs didn’t have bridges. Most of the old songs were very religious about get in and get out; there’s no instrumental break. The instrumental break is just that I can strum very hard for a minute, you know?
And now I’m much more interested in more complex song structures. But I think when people think about energy, they equate energy with volume in a lot of ways. They think that the energy of the old stuff, where it was so untethered in a lot of ways, they’re unable to find that [within the new songs]. Like, for us, Heretic Pride had so much old Mountain Goats energy on it. But I don’t think people heard that because of the way that it was presented.
Old Mountain Goats songs often seem to be chasing their own inspiration in the moment. Now, that involves some craft in actually doing and it doesn’t mean it’s being written on the fly. But the thing you’re trying to sell when you track it is that it sounds like it’s just spontaneously coming into being. That’s sort of the magic of those tapes.
So when I do “Training Montage” and open with just the acoustic and Jon keeping a little time on the hi-hat, it’s to point out that you’re in that world for these songs. These ones are very much adjacent to a lot of very early Mountain Goats in terms of their energy, in terms of their immediacy, and in terms of how much they allow themselves to have some anger and spite. Because in recent years, I don’t really want to engage in anger and spite that much, it’s not really where I’m at. But it seemed like the vibe for most of these tunes. And I wanted to situate them in that universe of early Mountain Goats songs that maybe have a little bone to pick with somebody.
Something that seems to break from that universe is the fact that there are two songs on this album that extend past seven minutes. To my knowledge, that makes them some of the longest songs in the Mountain Goats catalog. What was it about “Hostages” and “Bleed Out” that lended themselves to such a composition?
They are pretty different cases, insofar as “Bleed Out” is a very simple chord progression over and over again. It’s a chord progression where the chorus and the verse are the same. It’s like a Leonard Cohen song in that way. So, with “Bleed Out,” the feat is almost entirely lyrical until you get to the studio. That song was [recorded] live, we’re all playing together at about two in the morning after a week together. You can hear me turn a page at one point. It’s literally 100% live.
So, it is as old school as it gets in those terms. And every time I would write a new verse, I liked it too. I thought somewhere four or five verses in, “What if you just kept going?” Normally, I would trim it. I sort of wanted it to be leisurely to mirror the content of the song where a person is bleeding out, which takes a long time. Takes a lot longer than seven minutes.
Whereas with “Hostages,” it’s a simple question that I wrote the music first. I had a progression that I was working on that I liked the sound of. And it was slow. It’s not a slow song, but it takes its time getting back to the tonic. And when it does that, it sort of dictates what the pace of the lyric is gonna be. This, again, is stuff that I would not have understood as the younger songwriter.
What’s most interesting is I think the story that winds up getting told owes its shape and movement somewhat to the dictates of the music. The music is saying how the narrator is going to get his job done. That, to me, is super interesting, that you can’t really [force] your own lyric onto the thing. In the earliest times, I think I more or less was. And now, I sort of understand better the relationship between a lyric and the structure, the musical structures underneath it. And so when we played it, we just kept playing. It felt good at that point. There was no set stop point. You know, you can always fade it if you want to, but The Mountain Goats generally don’t do fade-outs. We’ve got one or two but I don’t like them.
No fade-outs for the Mountain Goats? Is it so as not to take the easy way out, or just for aesthetic reasons?
I’ve always been against them. I’ve often had people trying to sell me on them. Actually, when Ajax sent in Zopilote Machine to the people that mastered it, the guy put fade-outs on every track. He assumed that nobody involved would want them to end the way they did. Like, “We just got the master back. The songs… they mostly end pretty abruptly.” It was like, “Yeah, not many of them fade do they?” “No, none of them fade out.” And he said, “Yeah, no, the guy put fades on them.” “You gotta send it back!”
The thing is, I heard that original mastering job and it ruins everything. It really points out to you that the music and the presentation were all part of the deal.
This album is heavily inspired by cinema. You’ve had some success branching out from music into the literature world, so any aspirations to take on Hollywood next? Any secret screenplays lying around?
Well, there’s no screenplays. I have no desire to write a screenplay. Some people have said that I can act a little. I don’t have any real ambitions about that. That world is, I think, very different from the world that I inhabit. I think the people who are doing it get different things from what they’re doing. They have different needs from the art that they make. So, I don’t have any ambitions in that way. I mean, every book I write gets optioned for a movie, and maybe at some point, some of those will get made. But I consider myself a person of sound and words more than more than visuals.
Any film recommendations to pair with Bleed Out? Some homework for the hardcore Mountain Goats fans?
The thing is, I will be thinking of movies that I haven’t seen in a million years. So I can’t really speak to how good they are. Like, the one I’ve been thinking of this week is I Come in Peace, which you can’t find on streaming. There’s one song on this record that is in the science fiction/action realm, “Incandescent Ruins,” and there were these movies in the ‘70s and ‘80s that sort of wanted to inhabit both worlds. Westworld was one of them, I Come in Peace and Universal Soldiers… man, that movie kicked ass. All the Van Damme movies, honestly. Kickboxer. Lionheart. I mean, for “Training Montage,” those ones are hard to beat.
You know actually what is kind of fascinating for personal reasons, but Rocky III. It’s the Russia one, the very anti-soviet one. This would have been in the early Mountain Goats days. [I was at] a Vietnamese restaurant and it was showing on their big screen TV. I ate my lunch and asked for the check and they said, “Well, aren’t you gonna watch the movie?” And I was like, “Uhm, yeah, sure, why not.” And they brought me an iced coffee and it was kind of this wonderful thing. The restaurant was almost empty. It was mid-day, a summer day in southern California and I’m in my early twenties with nothing better to do. And the movie formed a special bond with me.
A Quick Catch Up with The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle
It sort of turned me on to the slightness of something like a movie where everybody watching it knows that it’s dumb. But it’s enjoyable. It’s a good way to pass time with people, whether you know them or not. During this record, we watched The Taking of Beverly Hills together, and it was a blast. And if you have ever seen this movie, it’s got one of the most bonkers endings ever. That movie goes completely off the rails in the last half hour. It’s really wild.
I would recommend pairing that one with, I wanna say “Bleed Out,” even though for “Bleed Out,” you should probably just put it on a loop and watch this movie called The Human Condition, a Japanese movie. It’s eight hours long. It’s a very bleak movie. I mean, a lot of Japanese post-war movies are addressing difficult realities. And the main guy spends the last long part of the movie crawling across the snow, dreaming of his wife. And I think “Bleed Out” is the one for that. The thing is, I’m proud of “Bleed Out” as a song, but this movie is actually a masterpiece. So it should be watched on its own terms first. And then later, if you want to put some Mountain Goats in there, that’s fine too.
Bleed Out Artwork:
John Darnielle on The Mountain Goats’ 20th Album, Hollywood Aspirations, and Why He’s Always “Looking Forward”
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