The Mountain Goats play at Metro Music Hall this Saturday, November 29, 2025. Doors are at 7 p.m.
Once lead singer and Mountain Goats mastermind John Darnielle gets started, he wastes no time repeatedly proving he’s been blessed with that rare gift of gab. It took some doing, but we caught up with him before his band set sail for a new tour recently. Luckily, he shared plenty, including creating full albums on cassette recorders, how he fantasizes about being paid to one day write a book he never has to finish, and how he and Lin-Manuel Miranda sang on the same mic together when he recorded his latest album.
No questions were left unasked, and our conversation was as refreshing as it was revelatory.
How’s it going?
All told, I’m great. I’m gonna leave for tour tomorrow, so I’m tying up loose ends and in denial about what it’s like. Imagine if you only left for work every so often, but then you had to stay there for a very long time: it’s a very different way of living. Even when I’ve been doing it a long time, it always takes me by surprise.
Is it any better when you have a new album to share?
Just different. And we’re like the Grateful Dead now, playing live a lot and always in a state of flow. When you have new songs, you practice more ahead of leaving, but we don’t often get many chances to practice together prior to soundcheck.
Want to talk about the new album, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan?
I’m always good to talk about anything.
Does the fact it’s a musical change the way you wrote it?
I think what I do has always sort of led in that direction. When people ask me to describe my lyrics, I’ve always said they’re personified narratives. Stories told by a narrator who I don’t tell you about, but it’s not me most of the time.
I’ve written records that are autobiographical. Even then I’m usually remembering a younger me, it’s a personified narrator. I’m creating a character in some way, and letting that character sing. Through what he sings about, you learn the details of his deal. So I’m already writing soliloquies. Writing solo numbers for characters inside a fictional story that I know about, and I try to fill in as much of the story as you’re going to need in the space of that song.
In musicals, you get to spread the story along more songs. You get to be a little more parsimonious with the details. Often when somebody’s writing a musical, they are brought to a story and told, here, you’re writing, oh, the Back to the Future musical. Everybody knows the story, but they needed to direct songs to go with it. There’s usually a text that they’re working from.
With me, I’m making up the story as I go along. I wrote a bunch of titles that outlined the story, and worked through those. “Fishing Boat” was the first one. I was like, OK, it’s going to tell the story of the shipwreck. The first thing I thought about was, well, when you shipwreck on an island and nobody else is there, you’re going to get cold. I started telling those stories and living through them. It’s an extended version of writing a song. We get to live in the world of the song for a lot longer and a lot changes.
You’re allowed to see it from different angles and approach it in new ways.
That’s right. When I’m writing an album, plenty of songs fall by the wayside. One wasn’t as good. I harvest what bones I can from one that was OK but could have been better. You get whole plot lines to use and not enough space for them to happen. Anything that complicates the action and makes it harder to understand, you want to get rid of.
I had a kind-of pirate song for this album. It was a cool tune, but confusing. I wanted the listener to know the basic outline of the story and be able to follow the action without me having to hold their hands through it.
And the title came to you in a dream?
Yes, and that’s what was interesting about it. I dreamed I was writing an album. The album was called Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkin, and I have an app I write my dreams down in. I woke up, typed the title and went back to sleep. That’s all there was to it. No other action. I looked at it and said, well, that would be funny if I actually did use that for my next album. And the second I say or think that, the likelihood I’m writing an album next is pretty high.
It’s as if you received a writing prompt from the heavens.
Or from my subconscious, right? That’s what’s so cool about it. Anything your dream brain sends to you is inherently deep. From the depths. It speaks to something. I loved the long title, and I don’t know if I’ve ever had an album title this long. It really was teasing out details from a dense thing that came from my cerebellum.
And you even had a heavy hitter as far as Lin-Manuel Miranda being involved?
Yes, we’ve been friends for a good while, and we send each other demos, ever since 2015’s Beat The Champ. And I don’t share my demos with everybody, but it’s really fun. You write a good one, you want to run it past a guy you know is good. He’s an incredibly giving person, and an easy person to talk to. He gave me a lot of encouragement.
We were recording in New York — and you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take — so I asked if he wanted to be on it. He came back, said “Sure” and was there for half a day doing vocals. On “Armies of the Lord,” we sang together on the mic at the same time. It was really cool, and we used a lot of his ideas.
For me to share my demos, it takes a high degree of trust. They’re fragile. There’s a right and a wrong way to respond to them. If somebody says the wrong thing when you initially play them, I might no longer be interested in the song.
You’ve spoken of an urgency of writing, of needing to get lyrics and songs out as fast as you can. Was that just at the beginning of your career, or has that continued?
I write pretty fast most of the time, if I get an idea and it’s interesting to me. I’m not the type to obsess about my own process. I don’t like to think about how I do it. I’m not reflective in that way. When you go mow the lawn, you don’t ask yourself, how do I mow the lawn? Do I mow in lines? You just do it the way you do it, right? For me, writing’s the same. I don’t question it too much. It used to be that when I sat down, songs were coming out in the next 10 minutes or an hour — and if I didn’t do it that fast, it was going to go away — but I’m not like that anymore.
You did a reissue of The Sunset Tree, it’s 20th anniversary. What was it like to revisit?
That album was such a big moment that it makes me revisit my life at that time. My assumption was that after it came out, I was going back to a day job. I assumed we were near the end of our run. It didn’t feel like it was growing fast enough or getting big enough to make sense. But we stuck it out through another album, another tour. Even then, on the Get Lonely tour, I felt like, isn’t it time to be done? Only then did people start to lock into The Sunset Tree and our audience began growing. It became more viable for us. But I think a lot about that time when I revisit it. It’s like fondly looking at old pictures of myself.
A good way to put it. Switching gears a bit, when you write books — and you’ve written a handful — does your process change? Is there a mind shift?
They’re different. The perfect book would be one you work on forever and never finish. I fantasize about that, of somehow getting paid to just be writing that book. Maybe I’d have to show them my work every so often, but I’d never finish. I’d just always tinker. There’s a line by the poet Paul Valéry — a poem is never finished, only abandoned — and when you write poetry, that’s very true.
Songs are different. Because it has a melody, hook, and rhythm, and because it’s going to be constrained within some length limit, usually three to five minutes long. A song wants to be done. A novel doesn’t. It wants to keep asking, what else could I be? And it could be anything. A novel is like sculpting. You’re looking at a big block of clay, at every idea in your brain. What shapes do you see? And that shape changes as much as you want it to.
I’m writing these books and they’re good. With a novel, you have the profound freedom to keep coming back to it and throwing away half of what was written. You might only like and keep the first chapter. I don’t do that with music. With music, if it’s working, it’s working. I get somewhere, I make it, and go forward whereas, with a book, it’s like returning to the canvas over and over again.
What compelled you to start writing books in the first place?
I was writing music criticism. If I told you what they paid you for a record review prior to the internet destroying the free weeklies, you would be angry. It was $100 per review, and $30 when it was republished. It was my second job. Writing a few reviews a week supplemented my income. If they got picked up by the outlets at $30 bucks a pop, it was good.
I was doing that, getting better at it, and David Barker wrote to me from Continuum, and said, “Every other critic has submitted for 33 ⅓ but you. Why don’t you?” I said, “But you guys don’t care about heavy metal.” They asked me to pitch them. And if a guy’s asking you to pitch, the likelihood it gets picked up is good. I pitched Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality and got a yes. I wrote the book and couched it. If you haven’t read it, it’s music criticism housed in a fictional conceit. I really enjoyed the process. It was the longest thing I’d worked on since my senior thesis. The day I finished it, I had an idea for a story, and started writing idly, pecking away at it for several years. But after Master of Reality published, an agent called and said he’d like to represent me in the future. We signed a contract, and I didn’t call him again. Three years later, he said, no pressure, but if you have anything, I could probably sell a partial manuscript. I sent him five chapters, and those became my book Wolf in White Van.
You have another book coming out in December, This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days. I’m guessing it came out in a very different way?
Correct. It’s all kinds of stuff. There’s a fictional arc, and each song has a bit of text. I hesitate to call them explanations, but each is accompanied by additional notions. That took a long time to come together, five years of figuring out what shape I would take it. When I landed on the idea of the calendar, I liked it a lot, but didn’t come up with the title until I was done. It was called Complete Lyrics for a long time.
Where did that idea come from in the first place?
I didn’t want to write a memoir. I know I talk a lot, but I’m not that into myself. I don’t want to be talking about John Darnielle all the time. There’s so many memoirs; people love reading them and people love writing them. God bless you all. Enjoy. Have a good time. I like to read fiction, however. If I’m reading somebody’s stories, I want them to be short and hopefully entertaining. But I read fiction.
When I’m introducing my songs, I make up my banter as I go along. Sometimes I get a good one in. I’ll say, “This song is about …” and then share whatever comes to mind. It’s sort of like in Catholic mass. After the third scripture, the priest will offer reflections on the scripture that are relevant to the needs of the congregation. I thought, well, I’ve got these lyrics, and I could just say something, and it would be ushered into reality. I am a writer, but also an entertainer. My goal is to entertain. I do not think 300 pages of telling my life story would be entertaining enough for me to want to present it, even if other people enjoyed it. It has to pass the “do I care” test first. I wanted to make a book that was light enough to be entertaining. You don’t have to be interested in me to enjoy it. The band is The Mountain Goats, not John Darnielle. If somebody can’t stand me personally and hears it, I want them to still go, man, that was a good jam. I want people who like or don’t like my music to still be able to read the book and be entertained by it. That’s the solution I came up with: it removes the person from the work.
You become the storyteller versus the story.
That’s right. And, look, I think highly of the storyteller position. I’m not claiming to be egoless. I think of it as a responsibility to do work that is useful in some way, even if it is helping pass somebody’s time in a pleasant way. That’s what I’m trying to do. Self-expression often is a pathway to that, but that’s not my primary goal. That goal is to make something that entertains me first, because I’m the only person I can test it against, and then whoever’s listening.
Any intention to create a musical Broadway creation of the album later on?
I don’t make plans like that. I am quite happy in my lane. I have two good jobs: I write books and I write songs, making records and touring. I wouldn’t be against it, but at the same time, I’m a big advocate of letting things be what they are. For example, everybody loves superhero movies, but I like comic books. I’ve never had a superhero movie inspire me the way the 200th issue of The Incredible Hulk did when they went inside Hulk’s brain. I’ve never seen a superhero movie inspire me the way the death of Adam Warlock did. What you can do in comics, you can’t do in movies, in part because of time. You have to wait for the story to develop. You have to wait a month or three weeks to find out if somebody’s dead. The temporality of comics is interesting, and movies exist in a different zone. Look, I’m not against the notion, but what I was trying to make was an album that felt like it was just a musical. And turning it into a Broadway production might require changes to it that I would struggle with.
You had a predilection to putting your albums out on cassette tape in your early days. Was there a reason?
Cassettes were popular, and they were cheap. With me, there’s often not a lot of planning; I do what’s in front of me, and take the chance that arises. I didn’t have a grand theory of cassettes, but I developed one. It was a hip thing at that time, kind of anti-industry, and I was extremely anti industry at the time. Nobody was going to make a million dollars on these tapes. There was a very communal feel to the cassette scene, as broad as it was. It was very non-careerist, an important value for us then. Now, it’s very different. To make an album on cassette is cool, but it’s a hobby. And when you buy a tape deck, you’re doing so with great intention. Everybody had a tape deck in their car back then. Once they stopped putting them in cars, that was kind of their end. And even if you were still making albums on tapes, it was no longer a popular format.
And many of the tapes you made on the same machine, something you owned, right?
Yeah, the Panasonic RX-FT500. It’s a boombox I bought at Circuit City with my friend Mark, who I made music with. He thought he’d be able to trick it into working as an ad hoc 4-track, because it had a line in and two decks right next to each other for dubbing tapes from one to the other. When I got song ideas, I started recording using that. I still have the original and its replacement. I did an album in 2020 on it that sounded really cool. It’s got its own sound.
What keeps you continually producing and so energetic about your projects?
I just enjoy working, I really do. Touring grinds you down. Novels, I love to write, though I don’t know that I have to write songs. At the same time, earlier this year, my wife went out of town to do a music residency. I was at home alone with my sons and, being alone, I got restless. I sat at the piano or played a guitar, and wrote five songs while she was away. That’s what I do, you know? I enjoy it, and I do consider it work. When people think of creating in terms of inspiration, they feel differently about it. To me, it is work. It’s like making tables or binding books. I get better over the years and I’ll never be as good as I want to be, but I can keep going. I can keep at it.
So you’re not seeking perfection, but just a better end result.
Same thing with being a human being, right? You know who you are inside. You know you’re probably not the person you hope to become eventually. In Scripture, it says there’s none righteous, not one. Still you hope, by the end of your life, to be a righteous guy most of your days. You’re always working toward that. Trying to build on who you are, to become a better version of yourself. It’s the same thing with my work: I’m always hoping. I know that if I stay vigilant and work hard, if I keep my focus on working instead of feeling, focusing on what it is, I know I have to get better. That’s how it works. You work at something to get better at it.
You are shaping the version of yourself you hope to present to God. Right now, I don’t even know that I believe that, though. It increasingly seems like we’re all alone down here. Still, it’s useful to think of it that way: bettering oneself as an agreeable offering. It’s the same with my work. I’m trying to make something people can enjoy. That’s all I’m trying to do.
That’s way better than just trying to sell more albums.
Trying to sell albums is a fool’s errand, my friend. The industry collapsed in 2001. If that was my goal, I’m in the wrong business.
This concert is sold out, but some resale options are available.
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