He’s already sitting there on screen when I connect the Zoom call. He’s immersed in a book.
“It’s a collection of weird fiction from the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” John Darnielle informs me. “Bizarre ghost stories. Strange English stuff that is not far off Aleister Crowley. Do you know who Sheridan Le Fanu was?”
I admit that I don’t. But I’m about to find out. It’s an early indicator of how the conversation with the 59-year-old singer-songwriter will go. Over the next hour, he will digress, apologise for the digression, then digress again, in entertaining asides that encompass his fondness for the ’80s output of Dionne Warwick, the huge influence of The Rocky Horror Show on his life, his enduring love for children’s TV icon Mr. Rogers, and more.
He’s speaking from his home in Durham, North Carolina, ahead of an Australian tour by his band, The Mountain Goats. Their latest album has a strange title that came to him in a dream in early 2024 – Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan.
“I dreamed that I was writing songs for a new record, and I saw those words come up as the album title,” he says. “I woke up and typed that into my phone, then went back to sleep. In the morning I looked at it and thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be a funny thing if I actually did write an album with that title?’”
That’s exactly what he did. It’s a concept album about three men who survive the wreck of a fishing boat and wash up on a small, barren island. They know they are going to die, and that realisation, and how each of them deals with it, becomes the crux of the story.
This is no Yellowjackets or Alive or Lord Of The Flies. There’s no cannibalism, for starters. Yes, there is darkness and fear as they face the inevitable, but there is also grace, tenderness, redemption and beauty. As their situation worsens, the narrator enters an almost hallucinatory state, but there’s also a clarity to his thoughts, as he cares for the dying captain, Peter Balkan. When I tell Darnielle that I thought it was like Gilligan’s Island re-imagined by Denis Johnson, he’s very happy.
Darnielle is no stranger to taking a concept and running with it. Beat The Champ (2015) took its cues from professional wrestling; Goths (2017) was inspired by an adolescent love of The Cure, Bauhaus and Siouxsie & The Banshees; In League With Dragons (2019) used Dungeons & Dragons as its springboard. And 2005’s The Sunset Tree, probably Darnielle’s most personal album, was based on his childhood and teen years in an abusive household.
That album’s most enduring song, This Year, was a vivid reminiscence of the young Darnielle finding momentary solace with a girl, before returning to the prospect of impending violence from his stepfather. Set to uplifting music, and revolving around the defiant line “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me”, it has become a song that fans tell Darnielle saved their lives when they felt like ending it all. What does he say to these people?
“I have a line I say about that, but I say it because it’s true. If you are at the end of your rope, and you find something that pulls you back from the brink, the thing you found is not what gets credit for that. You did that. I am intensely proud that I managed to hook into a feeling and then make something that could be useful to people in that way. It’s a huge honour to have made such a thing. But I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, let me save some lives with this one.’ ”
He was taken by surprise five years ago when his 2002 song No Children, which is about a divorcing couple, and features the line “I hope you die”, started racking up millions of streams, eventually overtaking This Year. It turned out that it was being used in TikTok dance videos and had gone viral.
“I’m a gentleman of a certain age, so I have nothing to do with TikTok,” he says. “But I noticed younger people at my shows doing this dance whenever I played No Children. If I was a young artist, I might think that I need to cash in on the new popularity, and re-release it as a single or something, but there’s no dignity in that. This is something the kids are doing with my song, and that’s beautiful. Let them do their thing, and I’ll just keep playing the song.”
The new album features guest vocals on four tracks from Lin-Manuel Miranda. Back in 2012, the man who would go on to global fame as the creator of Hamilton posted something online about how much he loved The Mountain Goats’ album Transcendental Youth, and the two became penpals and then friends who would share their new songs with each other.
‘To turn it into a musical would involve letting it go, and I write books and make records and tour, so I’m used to a pretty high level of control.’
John Darnielle
“Although he is a very famous person, at heart he is an artist, and when you start talking to him about music, he’s this guy whose brain crackles with inspiration and ideas,” says Darnielle. “He’s obviously very talented, but he’s from theatre, where you share ideas and collaborate with others so they can be brought to life.”
As Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan has three main characters, a setting, high emotions and songs that tell a story, has Darnielle discussed the idea of a stage musical based on the record with Miranda?
“No. I imagine he has people every day of the week saying ‘Hey, I have a great idea for a musical!’ I don’t want to be that guy. We’re friends, so I wouldn’t ask him. Anyway, to turn it into a musical would involve letting it go, and I write books and make records and tour, so I’m used to a pretty high level of control.”
In 2014, Darnielle published his first novel, Wolf In White Van, about a reclusive, disfigured game designer. It was nominated for the National Book Award. He has since written two more novels, Universal Harvester (2017) and Devil House (2022), and last year he published This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book Of Days, where he dissects and expounds upon many of his songs.
Daily practice is sacred for Darnielle, no matter what he is doing. In a recent interview, the journalist noticed how excited Darnielle was to meet up with a “prayer buddy” after a show, and how energised he was afterwards. When I ask him about his faith, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his prayer beads and holds them up to me, going through each bead to explain what it represents.
“I’m a man of the 21st century, and I’m an intellectual, for better or worse, so I work in the world of ideas,” he says. “God is infinite, but I need to understand God in my own narrative terms. But my faith doesn’t invalidate any other faith. All faiths are compatible. They’re all trying to do the same thing, which is to attempt to understand something that defies understanding.
“When I speak to God through Jesus and his mother, I realise I’m participating in a sort of play. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We know this when we fall in love. We know this when we listen to music. It’s all the same thing. In all of them there’s a greater reality we can barely contain.”
The Mountain Goats will perform at the Metro Theatre, Sydney on April 13; Princess Theatre, Brisbane on April 14; The Gov, Adelaide on April 16; The Forum, Melbourne on April 17 and Freo Social, Perth on April 19.
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Barry Divola is a journalist and author who specialises in music, popular culture, the arts, podcasts and travel.Connect via email.
