Diving Deep into Distraction with John Darnielle
The Mountain Goats frontman can't stop creating
Photo courtesy of Merge Records
For most, a Mardu Magic: The Gathering deck, good old-fashioned noir movies, and semi-concept albums have little in common. For John Darnielle, frontman of The Mountain Goats, these things have everything common; each, in their own way, feed his obsessive creative drives. And as he feeds each individual obsession, each feeds into the other.
Take, for instance, the announcement for The Mountain Goats’ new album, In League with Dragons: In January, the band participated in a live-stream Facebook and Twitch.tv event to spill the beans on the record’s release, hosted by the good magicians at Wizards of the Coast. It’d be easy to connect-the-dots regarding Darnielle’s source of inspiration and conclude the album is simply a reaction to his hitherto unknown fondness for Magic and Dungeons & Dragons.
Of course, the truth is knottier than that, and Darnielle isn’t too keen on casting In League with Dragons’ conception in concrete. “That’s for the reader to judge!” he says of how his current geek fixations tie into the album’s origins; frankly, to hear him gush about Magic, and RPGs, and his music is to understand that the influences comprising the Mountain Goats’ latest are woven together on a molecular level. They’re no more easily delineated from one another as each new edition of Magic’s Gideon Jura.
“When you’re thinking about what you’re gonna do next, as far as making records go, you have a couple options.,” says Darnielle, “I write songs and I wait for them to tell me what the idea is.
But for In League with Dragons, he went the other way, starting out with designs to write an entire rock opera called Riversend, about “a seaside community governed by a benevolent, but aging of course, wizard,” whose powers, which protect him as well as the community from invasion by sea, are on the decline. Enter a gang of raiders, who assault the wizard’s peaceful hamlet by sea.
If that’s not a classic setup for a D&D campaign, nothing is. But In League with Dragons isn’t Riversend. It’s its own thing. Getting from point A to point B in this instance sounds like a massive creative leap, but Darnielle has a secret weapon at his disposal for making long-distance jumps: Distraction. “The best work I do,” professes Darnielle, tongue somewhat in cheek, “is the stuff I distract myself with from the other work I’m trying to do.”
This, at face value, is a bemusingly contradictory philosophy for getting anything done, whether building Magic decks or composing rock operas, but Darnielle isn’t exactly kidding. For him, this works. Proof: All Hail West Texas. He wrote the lyrics during employee orientation at Beloit, where he used to work, in the mid ’9os. “Distraction,” he proclaims, “is a potent muse.” Debating the hypothesis with a dude whose discography runs 17 albums deep feels like a fool’s errand.
As Darnielle worked more and more on Riversend, he heard a false note in his efforts, realizing that he was writing songs just to set the stage and introduce characters. Enter Sicilian crime novelist Leonardo Sciascia. It so happens that Darnielle was reading one of Sciascia’s books at the time, and, inspired by the sprawling scope, inconclusive outcomes, and amorality of crime and noir literature, Darnielle abandoned himself, as he puts it, to “the mystery of evil,” allowing the details of Riversend to mingle unexpectedly with the details of Sciascia’s writing; neither genre fit together well with one another at first blush, and yet the fruits of their union work.
That alchemical approach probably won’t work for most folks, which might explain why nobody’s ever asked him to direct a productivity workshop. “When people ask me how I do what I do, I’d say, ‘Well, don’t sit down and stare at a piece of paper. Go for a walk, or play videogames!” he says with a chuckle.
Darnielle recalls that he used to write songs while watching movies on VHS; listeners can hear them on early tapes because he includes samples of them at the top. Everything about how he creates sounds practically designed to prevent him from actually creating anything. But this is where his personality-specific advice takes the shape of universal sage wisdom. Creators, no matter what they create, are vulnerable to distraction, and according to Darnielle, “the distracted mind comes up with all kinds of interesting stuff.” The trick is recording that “stuff” and saving it for later.