Mountain Goats |
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Tue. January 28.2003 4:53 PM EST |
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Mountain Goats: Boom Box Bard Goes Hi-FiIowa songwriter discusses his drunken characters, California speed freaks, and his Grammy picks. by Gil Kaufman |
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Mountain Goats (VH1.com) |
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If you were writing a primer on how to be a pop star, it probably wouldn't include any of these strategies: release cassette-only albums recorded on a boom box, write voyeuristic songs about a crazed couple’s descent into alcoholism, record
Of course, Ames, Iowa’s John Darnielle (a.k.a. The Mountain Goats), has never been concerned with being the next John Mayer ... or even the next Dashboard Confessional for that matter. But, after more than a decade of releasing said lo-fi albums, Darnielle felt he needed to give the new Tallahassee (4AD) a richer feel. The exceedingly prolific singer/songwriter and part-time psychiatric nurse says he owed it to his dysfunctional "Alpha series" couple to up the ante. Darnielle begun writing songs about a desperately troubled twosome circa 1991, and retired the pair from his canon in a 1994 song ("Alpha Omega"). But last year he decided to fully chronicle the booze-soaked end of their relationship with a warm, acoustic album that falls somewhere between the dim worlds of Nick Cave and Raymond Carver. With his nasal voice and penchant for lyrics that read like short stories, Darnielle illustrates the particulars of the couple’s exploits on songs such as "Idylls of the King" and "No Children," where he sings, "I hope that our few remaining friends give up on trying to save us/ I hope we come up with a failsafe plot to piss off the dumb few that forgave us." The follow up to last year's acclaimed All Hail West Texas, Tallahassee was recorded in the woods of upstate New York; it threatens to bring Darnielle a step up from the underground, where he has amassed a modest, but highly devoted fan base for his music (he also works as a gonzo rock critic and publishes the fanzine, Last Plane to Jakarta. In a review, Rolling Stone praised the album for the way it mixes "pathos and humor." Taking a break from spinning Swedish death metal and Nelly's latest disc, Darnielle explained why he couldn’t let go of his dissolute pair, why he thinks Spandau Ballet are brilliantly vapid, and what he would say if he met Bob Dylan in a dark alley. VH1: Your stuff is truly literate. It that sometimes a curse? Do you ever just want to write silly pop songs? John Darnielle: I don’t think I have the gift for that. But I don’t sit down with the intention of doing something literary. It’s pretty natural to me. I don’t say, ‘It’s time to make my next great work of art.’ VH1: Who is this Alpha couple you’ve been writing about all these years? Do you know them? Darnielle: No. But I think everybody knows these people. They’re about to get divorced, that’s where the feeling comes from. I grew up in Southern California in the ‘70s and everybody’s parents were divorced. I based them on that and my own darker periods with liquor. VH1: Since you don’t have a real-life muse, is it harder to keep writing about them? Darnielle: At this point, they really do exist in my brain, which is why I stopped writing about them in 1994. It got too painful. When you wake up ... these characters you’ve been writing through for a long time, you hear their voices. They seem like they must be real people and they do things you didn’t expect. The difficult part in writing about them is that I feel like I’m doing harm to someone I know. Nothing good ever happens to them. All they ever do is destroy each other. VH1: Would you want to meet them if you could? Darnielle: No. When you meet people who are willfully delving into self-torture like that, you want to avoid it. They wouldn’t be cool to hang out with. VH1: You had them split up in 1994 on the song "Alpha Omega," so why bring them back now? Darnielle: This album is a series of scenes that take place towards the end of their relationship. They mean to get a divorce - it’s just a matter of who will file first. He wakes up one morning and she’s gone. Once you have the end of the story, there’s an infinite number of details you can examine. VH1: Did you feel like you had to get rid of them? Darnielle: It had gotten really painful to write about them. I had doubts about whether to rouse them from their slumber for this record. But there’s a sadistic pleasure in writing about bad situations. For this album, I wanted a setting where the gentler moments of their time together might come out. They’re not just constantly boring into each other. They’re trying to recapture something they can’t get back and they know that and they’re sharing that pain. VH1: Was there literature that inspired you in writing this series? Darnielle: John Berryman’s "Dream Songs," which has a similar character in a self-contained world. Maybe a bit of Raymond Carver. VH1: Do you have a favorite album about dysfunctional couples? Darnielle: [Richard and Linda Thompson’s] Shoot Out the Lights is pretty great. Early Nick Cave stuff, like Your Funeral ... My Trial. "The Last Time I Saw Richard" by Joni Mitchell, lots of Steely Dan songs and some stuff off Donald Fagen’s first solo album. VH1: So many of your lyrics sound like overheard conversations, especially in "No Children," with that line "I hope you die/I hope we both die." Darnielle: It’s a dark one. That song is actually from a willful misreading, which is a great way of writing. I heard [Lee Ann Womack’s] "I Hope You Dance" on the radio on the way to the airport the summer I was writing the album. It has this nauseating sweetness to it; it’s about reaching for the stars and it's full of empty, self-helpy platitudes. It’s easy to hear I "hope you die" instead of "I hope you dance." I thought, "Christ, that’s funny." It has that line, "Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens." What if it was, "Whenever one door closes, I hope it stays shut"? I held that in my head because I didn’t have a pen and when I got to my hotel room in Athens, Georgia, I wrote down, "I hope you die/I hope we both die.’ VH1: This album has been referred to as "the Great American Novel condensed into an album," but did you ever try to expand these characters into a full-fledged book? Darnielle: No. These people belong in songs. It would rob them of their voices if you were to flesh it out like that. It’s a pretty voyeuristic thing to do, and I don’t know if I’d want to suffer through a whole novel like that. VH1: You have a history of writing songs that connect like stories. Any new ones on the horizon? Darnielle: Now I’m writing a series of songs about a loosely knit group of speed freaks in Pomona. VH1: Do you go out and do research for these songs, do you go out and hang out with speed freaks? Are you a method writer? Darnielle: [laughs] I did my research. There’s no call for further research, I don’t think my marriage would survive it. I have done a significant amount of time with the sorts of people I’m writing about now. I’m not a person who goes and observes. They’re remnants of significant events that have been lying around in my head. VH1: Does your wife ever look at you and worry? Darnielle: She knows I’m just writing for an album. A few of the tunes on this album got some raised eyebrows, "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" and "The House That Dripped Blood." If you were in these relationships they wouldn’t seem as dark as they do from the outside. There’s a bloody, slapstick humor to them. VH1: Do you have a favorite book about a rock star, or written by a rock star? Darnielle: I don’t read a whole lot of music books. Right now, most of my reading is novels or history. VH1: Any particular topic you favor? Darnielle: [laughs] Painful divorces. Joan Didion is one of my favorite living writers. I appreciate how the people who are suffering in her books are incapable of explaining what’s causing their suffering to the people trying to help them. VH1: You lavish a lot of attention on your liner notes. Why? Darnielle: I grew up around a lot of old jazz records on Blue Note, which always had an essay on the back explaining where they were recorded or telling some patently false story about the process of writing the record. Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather are great. I’ve always been album oriented, I think an album should be something you can sit down with and puzzle over the notes. VH1: You’ve been recording these lo-fi albums on boom boxes for so long, why give that up now? Darnielle: I wanted to do justice to these people and give them a lush setting. I had secret hopes that something would come out with some resolution. VH1: How did the boom box thing start? Darnielle: I was living in Norwalk and working at a psychiatric hospital and playing with my friend Mark in a band. He moved, so I started working by myself for the first time. I was writing songs and I wanted to record them and I had this boom box. I liked the way it sounded. A lot of friends thought differently. I think every format has something to say for it. People talk about bad sound, but I don’t know what bad sound quality means. There’s a sense of immediacy you can’t get in a studio on a boom box recording. You get the sense that something is coming into being right as you listen. VH1: Releasing albums recorded on a boom box could be seen as a dodge to keep from getting too big. Are you afraid of rock stardom? Darnielle: I don’t suppose rock stardom’s ever threatened me. There’s something really nice about small things. I think fewer people are put off by bad sound quality than the music industry would have you think. [Decades ago] 78s sold like hotcakes sounding more or less like boom box recordings. VH1: What’s with your Spandau Ballet fetish? Darnielle: They’re just so great and their lyrics are so puzzling. They have these songs that are very successful, but the more you listen to them, the less you understand what they are saying. They seem dedicated to this proposition of lavish production with soul and emotion and not actually saying anything. Duran Duran also had extremely meaningless lyrics that were popular. "Wild boys never chose this way?" What is he talking about? What in the world is "The Reflex?" Examine "Save a Prayer," and it’s just a step before utter gibberish. VH1: Imagine this: one of your songs gets used on E.R. next week and you’re the next Dashboard Confessional, what’s the first thing you splurge on? Darnielle: This will sound self-serving, but I would give a lot of money to vegetarian charities. And I’d buy DSL and spend a whole lot of money on records. VH1: You meet Bob Dylan in a dark alley, what do you say to him? Darnielle: "I know what I’m doing here, I’m poor. But what are you doing here?" VH1: Who is your Grammy pick? Darnielle: I haven’t paid a lot of attention to them. Is Mr. Lif up for best hip-hop? Talib Kweli’s album is great. For best metal album I would say Dark Tranquility, a melodic Swedish heavy metal band. It’s a flatteningly good album about suicide, though it would have to tie with Immortal Sons of Darkness’ disc. VH1: You’ve been praised for rescuing Ace of Base’s "The Sign" from the slag heap of stupid pop songs. What’s a song so big and dumb even you couldn’t save it? Darnielle: I don’t think I could improve upon [Afroman’s] "Because I Got High," that song accomplishes everything it set out to accomplish. VH1: Do you have a guilty pleasure? Darnielle: "Hot in Herre." Guilty pleasures are just pleasures. Pop songs are the currency we deal in when we talk to each other. I don’t believe in guilty pleasures, although, when I listen to and enjoy Virgin Steele, I do feel a bit guilty. |
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