Catching Up With... The Mountain Goats

"The way I talk transcribes so badly," says Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle. "You will find out. My sentences are very, very long. and you don't know where to put any punctuation marks. I just wind up sounding stupid." This erudite-yet-modest singer-songwriter apparently has more confidence in his skills as the creator of the "heavy metal of dudes with acoustic guitars." Darnielle and his rotating cast of supporting players' devoted following has grown steadily since the release of the first Mountain Goats cassette in 1991, and its easy to see why. During our interview, through his self-deprecation, he ably discusses the latest Mountain Goats release, Heretic Pride, his forthcoming Black Sabbath book, a new collaboration with Aesop Rock and his religious worldview.

"I think I was the first guy to interview Devendra Banhart a few years ago," he says, describing his shortcomings giving interviews. "Did an e-mail interview for a sidebar in Magnet. His answers were from way the hell out in space. I didn't know what to do with it. You never know what questions to ask. I don't like to ask people, you know, stuff straight out of the press kit. I didn't want to be that guy who says 'so it says here' and then the answer is 'so it says there, and if there were any more to say about it it would say it there'."

Paste: Describe your book about Black Sabbath's Master of Reality.
Darnielle: It's a narrative. It doesn't stop and talk about the album critically. And when it does talk about the band's history, it sorta weasels that information in. Not to call any other albums out, but those first few Black Sabbath albums, especially Master of Reality and Paranoid, are seminal records. There aren't a whole lot of records out there that made bigger ripples in the pond than those two. When I thought about that, I thought, "Why is it that those haven't been covered?" And it's because they still carry the stigma of being dumb-guy music. The name "Black Sabbath" carried all of these spooky connotations for me. I was all ready to be frightened by it. I was kind of confused by it. That's what I grew to like about them. I wasn't sure how I was supposed to relate to it. Same can be said for metal in general. You don't, even though their stuff is blues-based, you don't process it the same way. The blues hits you in the pelvis, right? You just feel it or you don't. Black Sabbath sort of hits you in the places where you feel alienated. It sort of teaches you to ride them like waves and get into them.

Paste: Would you ever head into metal territory?
Darnielle: If everybody is only making the kind of music they listen to, then that'll make for a lot of very boring music. The thing is to do whatever comes naturally to you and filter your interests into that. My music is the heavy metal of dudes with acoustic guitars.

Paste: What do you think about fans getting on Wikipedia to look up the references you drop into your songs?
Darnielle: It's fun, but I have resentment about it. The reason I'm like that with all of these kinds of weird references is that that's the kind of music I like. To pick out all of the references in a Steely Dan song, you used to have to be very well read and be up on a lot of subcultural stuff. And be willing to do some work and go, "What the hell does that mean?" and go to the library and hunt it down. Or ask people and shit. Now, you can pack as many references as you want into an album and anyone can figure it out in 20 minutes. Just go to Wikipedia. I miss the process of chasing stuff down, even though I'm not going to be a purist and refuse to type it into Google. There's stuff that you wish people were engaging in dialogue about. I miss finding out 10 years later what something was about and letting it hit you. Like Steely Dan becoming your favorite band four albums in. Going, "Where the hell did they get that name?" and it turning out it's from a Burroughs book. And you go, "Oh my God, it's a dirty joke."

Paste: For your new song, "Lovecraft in Brooklyn," you can apply H.P. Lovecraft's hate of Brooklyn to a bunch of situations where (pause), "I'm having a shitty, fucked-up day."
Darnielle: Oh, I'm sorry man.
Paste: I mean the character in the song can be projected as that overall statement.
Darnielle: Oh, I just thought you were getting really emo.

Paste: Why do you mention a Marcus Allen jersey in that song?
Darnielle: This is giving the game away. If you like to keep mysteries, either don't listen or stop reading. The original title of the song... I should never say these kinds of things because then people want to show how hardcore they are by referring to the song by that title and stuff. I was keeping lists of phrases and titles and stuff. I had written down "Eddy Grant t-shirt," which is an inspiring image to me. When I went to write the song, I tried "some kid in an Eddy Grant t-shirt." Notice what happened to the words when you try to say "some kid in an Eddy Grant t-shirt"? "Kid" and "an" run together, and you sound like you have mud in your mouth. And I found that "Marcus Allen" sounded a lot better to me. Pops out right, refers to my favorite football team, for better and worse. Saw Marcus Allen play during the year that the Raiders won the Super Bowl. Yes, that's right. I'm old enough to remember when the Raiders won the Super Bowl.

Paste: Are any other hip-hop collaborations in the pipeline like the one you did on "Coffee" with Aesop Rock?
Darnielle: Do you like hip-hop?
Paste: Yeah.
Darnielle: Turn that recorder off.
[Plays "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" remix featuring Aesop Rock]

Darnielle: I just got that the other day. The reason the end of that song is long is because I was hoping to get him up to the studio to rap over the end of it during the session. You always plan for more than you can get done. I wound up sending him the raw parts and then he... The only thing that remains from the original is the vocal and some cello parts. There are a few cello passages that he kept. Other than that, it's all him.
Paste: I was waiting for something coming back from that.
Darnielle: We need to do more. It's fun, but it's hard to find time. If we lived in the same city and didn't already have careers and stuff, we'd probably have more done. I actually sang my verse from "Coffee" on stage with him in Baltimore. Fucking awesome. I'm hoping that sometime when we're on tour we'll be in the same town and he can do that. Although the music's so different, I don't know if we would play that music or would he try and put it over the regular music. We'll figure it out. It's a great rap if you can follow it. It's always hard to follow Aesop Rock the first time through.

Paste: Your vocals sound really loud on the Heretic Pride version of the song.
Darnielle: That's the loudest I've ever sung on a record. Ever. You can't hear it because we didn't mix it that way. The last verse, I was in the vocal booth. Peter could hear me out in the driveway. This is through "soundproof" walls. Not technically soundproof, obviously, but he was like, "Dude, I could hear you outside." I was just standing there. If you listen to that last verse, I'm really at peak volume, ever. It's kinda fun, because I get to sing it really loud.
Paste: Is the remix going to make it to the masses?
Darnielle: Somehow, somehow.

Paste: A lot of Heretic Pride's content includes religious themes. How does that relate to you personally?
Darnielle: I think a lot about religion. I really enjoy it. I'm one of those dudes. I guess they had some sort of research a couple years ago to determine that there are people who predisposed to think about religion or to be faithful. Like most people, I would guess, I have a hard time believing much of anything. I'm sure polls indicate that more people are believers than aren't. But you can't poll the inside of someone's heart. I've always envied zealots. The depth of their faith, the imagery. I find most mystical explanations of things more interesting and appealing than the true ones. I'm always interested in hearing the lie. I've always been interested in that, and cults and heresy. As a Catholic by birth, the notion of learning something is true all of the days of your life and then one day going, "I don't agree with that"... A lot of Americans prefer to think about things in terms of what is called "spirituality," which often has very little to do with source texts. I'm not pious, but I'm more interested in texts and rituals and prayers that I didn't write. Songs are totally different. Songs are kind of like satellites to texts. How they relate to something depends on where you are standing when you hear them and where they are in their orbits when you hear them.