There are some artists who lend themselves well to various strains of fiction and fable. Their pasts are have become mythologized by their loyal adherents, while their work in the present only serve to fortify the legends, all while continually drawing in new fans. John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats is one such musician, whose personal plot arc traces from his earliest days of recording songs into a boom box and selling cassette tapes in hardcore DIY fashion to his current status as one of the most prolific and literate lyricists on the planet. AMPLIFIER spoke with Darnielle recently to talk a bit of songwriting shop and to inquire about his new album Heretic Pride.
AMPLIFIER: Heretic Pride is an album full of intricate stories from a variety of engaging sources. What does the songwriting process look like in your world?
John Darnielle: It varies! Some of them I write in an office I share with a printer & a filmmaker - my office is like a cave, no natural light can enter it. So I get some really hermetic little stories in there. Others, just out of necessity, I write in hotel rooms - I started doing that when I wrote the Sunset Tree and it worked out okay so now I make a point of getting my notebook out pretty quick after we check in. I guess the process is kind of like knitting or needlepoint really - just something I'm always working at, chipping away at whenever I get a spare minute.
It seems like you absorb a great deal from your surroundings. How you do distill your experiences into becoming specific melodies and songs? Furthermore, is there some great backlog of songs in your musical "vault" that you've yet to tap into, where you've written more songs than you've placed on albums?
Well, I'm not usually writing about my experiences - I'm just makin' stuff up. I did one album of direct-from-experience stuff, and it was a pretty grueling process, but for the most part I'm just sort of snatching ideas out of the air - little phrases I'll hear or things I'll remember being obsessed by when I was a kid, like lake monsters or religious cults.
I have written lots and lots of songs for sure but I lose interest in a song if I haven't done something with it within a certain period of time. When I go over the old tapes with unreleased stuff, I don't usually find them very interesting, and I usually erase them. I'm just always more interested in whatever I'm doing at present than in excavating whatever I was doing a while ago.
Musically, Heretic Pride is a more traditional folk-pop record than most anything you've released in the past, with the addition of drums, keys, strings, and harmony vocals. How did you arrive at such arrangements, as opposed to the stripped-down sound you typically feature in your material?
It just sort of seemed to suggest itself. My usual concern is, I want to be able to hear every instrument and what it's doing - I hate hearing instruments used just as textures in some big sound-stew. I like to be able to hear fingers hitting strings, sticks hitting cymbals, all that kind of physical stuff. But when we started playing these songs it seemed like we'd figured out how to arrange them so they could be "bigger" and still preserve that bloody-fingers sort of feel that I like so much.
There are times during Heretic Pride where you sound less urgent than you have in years past. Are you intentionally pursuing a mellowing of your material or are you trying out a new direction/focus by becoming a bit less strident?
Well our last album was sort of "the quiet record" - which happened totally by accident, it just sort of developed that way and we were all surprised by it, and we really liked that feel. It was a pretty new thing for us. I'd had a song or two every album that was quiet all along but a whole album full of slow-smolder stuff was really different and we got a real charge out of it. The new record only has one or two like that but we really like trying to stretch things out a little now - being all high-octane all day is only cool if you're still interested in it, otherwise it's fraudulent. You have to follow what interests you to stay engaged.
What are your goals and/or plans for this album in 2008? Any touring we should be expecting?
Oh yes. Much, much touring. Then, more touring. Then a week at home. Then more touring, followed by touring. We pretty much live out there.
-- Adam P. Newton
The Mountain Goats' Heretic Pride is available now on 4AD Records.
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