COVER STORY | The Mountain Goats: Harbingers of Mystery and Absence

John Darnielle is prepared to derail our entire conversation because of his obsession with Charles Bronson. This is, in part, because I’ve let him know right away that the Mountain Goats’ 2022 album, Bleed Out, really resonated with me—mainly because I grew up watching Bronson films, like Death Wish 3, every Saturday with my dad. But it’s been a minute since I’ve seen it, so Darnielle and I go back and forth on what that installment of the Death Wish franchise was actually about. We land on it being the one with the generic punks and the legendary New York City locales. Our memories serve us right.

And memory plays a huge part in this new chapter of the Mountain Goats. The vestige of the band—a potent, cicerone songbook—has, like so many times previously, come full circle. Aside from dredging up that famous line from “This Year”—“I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me”—and repurposing it on “Exegetic Chains” on the return-to-form boombox record Songs For Pierre Chuvin (“Make it through this year, if it kills us outright”), Darnielle has largely left his characters and stories in the ether of his creative subconscious. But that wasn’t always the case. Before the Mountain Goats signed with a major label, he would cycle through various “Going to ___” songs and return, from time to time, sing about the infamous, destructive and achingly familiar Alpha Couple—who would, on the band’s 4AD debut Tallahassee, get an entire record made about them. They were then, subsequently, put to bed—and, according to Darnielle, likely forever.

When the news broke this summer that Darnielle was digging up the spirit of an ancient Mountain Goats character for their 22nd studio album, Jenny from All Hail West Texas was likely not the immediate consensus. Before her titular song in 2002, she appeared in “Straight Six” from Jam Eater Blues and then, later, would crop up on the Transcendental Youth track “Night Light.” She has existed in the Mountain Goats universe as an emblem of freedom, of chaos and of indescribable magic—qualities that many of Darnielle’s muses don’t possess. But with Jenny—and like the Alpha Couple—who she appears to us is, to some extent, Darnielle himself. It’s a truth seen widely in 19th century literature, particularly English fiction and particularly the work of someone like Anthony Trollope, who would use the same characters in four novels in a row. “If you’re a writer, your characters are a version of you, because you’re the only person you really know 100% inside and out. I’m sure there are areas of yourself that are obscure to you, but you have a relationship with your characters because they represent parts of you. To bring one back is to get to look at that part again, specifically. Otherwise, you get to keep fooling yourself that you’re telling somebody else’s story—but you’re actually telling a piece of your own.”

And Jenny is someone we know because people remember her, people yearn for her. We see her roar into a driveway on a Kawasaki and then leave just as fast. She calls on a cellphone and she’s high as a kite someplace in the Southwest. She calls again from Montana but she’s just passing through. She’s a missing person. And absences are massive and define the spaces that they leave behind. And the space of that absence can’t be filled. That’s who Jenny was, and Darnielle said to himself, “Well, it would be a challenge for me to, somehow, let Jenny be defined by her own presence.” To do that, in a way that honors the space marked by her truancy, was a challenge for him. But, he and the band meet that challenge across the dozen tracks that encapsulate Jenny from Thebes. Our titular muse becomes a person with real and believable and relatable scars, and it also illustrates Darnielle’s attempt to unite the songwriting of his past with the songwriting of his present.

“When you bring somebody back from your own past, there’s a density to this process that, if I’m talking about characters who I was writing in the year 2000, well, the me who wrote about them then is also present. And the me who’s lived all the years since then is also present,” he says. “You get this density, this unspooling thread of time that gets to be woven into the piece without any extra effort on your part. It just comes with that process. That, I think, lends a depth to the songs that you can’t—I don’t want to say you can’t get otherwise, because a 16-year-old can write a song of limitless depth. I don’t want to say this is the only way to get that, but I will say that that process lends a unique depth to the songs you get from it—from revisiting not just the old character, but the self you were when you wrote it, the place you lived when you wrote it.”

Darnielle knew he was going to make an entire album about Jenny the moment he wrote the first line of “Jenny III.” It was as simple as that. “I played a chord,” he says. “I think it’s a B-minor, but I’m not sure—because I haven’t practiced it since we recorded. But I played a chord and I liked the sound of that chord. I went ‘Jenny was a warrior, Jenny was a thief, Jenny hit the corner clinic begging for relief’ and I went, ‘Oh, what if you did that? What if you do that?’ I mean—a vast amount of my best stuff comes from me saying ‘What if you did that?’ like in a role-playing game. Roll the dice, see what happens, you know?” While Darnielle has always been looked at as someone who maps out a big, conceptual vision for every record, the truth is that he’s unable to really grab onto a voice that sounds authentic and engaged unless something happens to him spontaneously and delights him in the moment.

Bleed Out was just one of many consecutive records from Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster and Matt Douglas in the last 15 years that approaches different modes of Americana, whether it be action films, wrestling, RPG games, the state of Texas or the idea of the misfit trope portrayed in goth culture. Darnielle admits he got distracted during my question by wanting to object to including Goths in the Americana part. “What was the question?” he asks. Scratch Goths from the record, I didn’t even mention it. “The experience of Goths is the American goth experience, but it’s a very UK-looking phenomenon,” he adds. But what must be said, though, is that a crucial part of the Mountain Goats’ catalog is the relationship between throughlines and contemporary commentary. So few artists in 2023 remain committed to the exercise of building out such visceral microcosms.

I’m not sure if it’s because I read Friday Night Lights in high school or if it’s because I fell in love with an ex while on a bus driving through Austin, but Texas has always been a place I’m attracted to as a writer. It’s mythical to me, even though it’s been written about over and over again. But, for Darnielle, Texas is cosmic. He opens a new window on his computer and searches the archives of JSTOR before citing Sidney Lanier’s critique of Walt Whitman—“As near as I can make it out, Whitman’s argument seems to be that, because a prairie is wide, therefore debauchery is admirable. And because the Mississippi is long, therefore every American is God.” Darnielle wants to defend the straw man that Lanier sets up about Whitman.

“When you go to Texas, the hugeness of it, there is something divine in its immensity, in the fact that it takes you two days to drive across it,” he says. “Most states, you can be in and out in a day. You cannot be in and out of Texas in a day from any side of it. Obviously at the panhandle, you can do that. But, for the most part, once you enter Texas, you’re there for a long time. In fact, there’s graffiti that you will see on dressing room walls throughout the rest of the South that say ‘I hate this part of Texas’ and it’ll be in North Carolina. The joke is you go to Texas, you play there and then, three days later, you’re still in Texas. But there’s something really incredible about that, because you grow up with the notion of a state as a place and it is a place with an identity. And Texas stipulates a much broader possibility of identity. That’s what’s funny about how there’s a Texan stereotype; it’s almost impossible to have a Texan stereotype. San Antonio is not Denton. Marfa is not East Texas.”

But what it is about All Hail West Texas and Jenny from Thebes and the stories they tell can be distilled down to when Darnielle was young and gigging through the Southwest for the first time 30 years ago, how Texas is this giant, physical metaphor we get to be present in. “If you’re a touring band, your first experience of Texas, most likely, is what mine was—where you’re in Texas and then, after the show, you have to drive a few hours to get some road under you,” he says. “And now, you’re looking up at more stars than you’ve ever seen in one place when you get out of the car to smoke or pee. And you drive late at night and you lose radio signal. The vastness of it seems to echo the vastness of the universe and of life and of experience. There’s so much to it and it represents so much of American identity that it’s worth some contemplation.”

When Darnielle made Tallahassee in 2002, it was a product of what he could offer them the quickest: an album about the Alpha Couple—because he’d written about them before and over and over again. After having left them dormant for a while, he spent an entire summer excavating the life they might have lived. When it came to writing All Hail West Texas before that, though, there wasn’t nearly as much malice or forethought from him. The only thing he noticed was, when he was recording the tracks on his Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox, that more than one of the songs took place in Texas. “I went, ‘Oh, what if they all do that?’” Darnielle says, chuckling. It’s easy to assume that, be it the prolific writer that he is, Darnielle is actively mapping the scopes of these worlds he, eventually, invites us into. But it’s not as grand as you might expect, or even want—and Darnielle acknowledges his unsatisfying answer to it all and preemptively apologizes because of his “pathological desire to please.”

“I didn’t sit down and plot [All Hail West Texas] out. It just happened,” he says. “And there are a lot of songs that were written in that phase that nobody’s ever heard. They didn’t fit in. The process of writing is fairly spontaneous for me. Once I notice where I’m going, once I find a thread, I’ll follow that to the end. With All Hail West Texas, I was writing tons and tons of songs, and I picked all the ones that fit into that story—and that became the album. Jam Eater Blues is done at the same time, one of the Yo Yo [Records] EPs is done at the same time as all that. I was pretty busy, just constantly. I didn’t have any kids, I had a day job. That’s about all I had going on. When I’m not distracted by other things, there’s no reason for me not to be banging out at least a song a day. Now, are they all keepers? No. But, if only one is a keeper a week, then you have 52 songs in a year. I wasn’t sitting down and saying, ‘Let me write another Texas song.’ But, I was giving myself the freedom to have bunches that took place in Texas and to be dragging a character back in once I started writing.”

Darnielle quotes William Wordsworth—“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”—and reshapes it to make sense of the construction of his own songwriting, explaining that only once the work is written and recorded can he really step back and classify where it’s at or where it’s going. “Once I’m inside the outline and I’m doing the thing I said was gonna happen today, the rest of the outline becomes invisible from where I’m sitting,” he explains. “People have an idea about creativity that I think, for some people who make stuff, is true, that we’re thinking about the meta picture when we sit down to write. But I’m not. As a general rule, I resist that state of play. And I’m good at resisting it now.

“Once I sit down and enter into it, I’m not thinking about the broader questions, I’m focused on the thing that’s underneath the microscope. I’ve gotta assume scientists are like this—they have the big picture in the back of their head, somewhere. But, when you are looking at something with a microscope, you have to look at it and describe it as disconnected as you can, right? You’re not thinking about where the paramecium is inside the broader biological play. You’re trying to describe the cilia on it. And, so, when I’m writing this stuff, I’m only focused on the story. I’m not thinking about any broader issues. I am assuming that, once I finish writing the song, then I can look at it from a more critical perspective and say, ‘Oh, here’s what’s going on,’ and then consider those things.”

If you’ve ever gone to a Mountain Goats show and waited in line outside four hours or gotten chummy with folks in the crowd, you know how deep the lore runs. It can make you feel small in the blink of an eye. Your undying love for “Cubs In Five” becomes instantly overshadowed by the guy with a tape recorder in his pocket who can recite setlists from 2004 gigs in states the Mountain Goats rarely make it out to anymore. But what’s beautiful about that scariness—even if you feel like your fandom is not enough—is that, much akin to the following of a band like the Grateful Dead (a self-serving allegory Darnielle sometimes makes, being that he is a Deadhead himself), there is such an undercurrent of love, affection and hope at every turn. At some point over the last 30 years, these people found Darnielle’s writing—be it via his boombox recordings or via the label-backed, concept-album concertos—and elected to devote a piece of themselves to loving these songs so much that, no matter what mix-and-matched setlist is thrown at them, they are ready to sing along with every note.

And that is why Jenny from Thebes is a pinnacle Mountain Goats record. It’s the type of project that the lo-fi oldheads and the Merge Records-era truthers can get behind. Darnielle is thinking about how new albums can serve every part of his audience, too, but not in the sense that he is actively mapping out what each nook and cranny has to sound like in order to appease the masses. No, he’s looking at how the Mountain Goats can become a springboard for a broader experience of music, how the band can celebrate the communal triumphs and expressions of recorded music and continue to participate in the form’s continuum. “It’s something I have to try and strike a balance that satisfies me about, because I think, when people are trying to do fan-service, it’s visible,” Darnielle says. And I don’t think what we do—I don’t think what people like about it—is the notion that there’s fan-service going on. I think what people like about what we do is that we make something that really comes from wherever our vision is. At the same time, there’s specific things in what I do that people like.”

But Jenny from Thebes is not a sequel to All Hail West Texas. It’s a continuation or, maybe, a separate organism that just so happens to exist in the same cosmos as the record that helped make John Darnielle a fixture in the indie world 21 years ago. Seven people, two houses, a motorcycle and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys. That’s what Darnielle gave to us in vignettes of folkloric wonder and harrowing bleakness; fits of romantic inquisition lodged into the crevices of sprawling, auspicious lifetimes bustling forward through tragedy and destiny. There’s a reference to “Color in Your Cheeks” in “Fresh Tattoo,” but it’s not clunky or forced. It’s serving the story, and Darnielle is letting the reference be the song’s presence.

If you’re reading this, you’re likely—at the very least—relatively familiar with the output of the Mountain Goats, with the macro of Darnielle’s still-growing universe. It looks a lot like the real one that exists just beyond the music, and it is filled to the brim with people who live, love and die just like the rest of us. And, yet, that familiarity and that immense population can often feel daunting to wade through. And Darnielle didn’t go into Jenny from Thebes with the intent of leveling up the origins of All Hail West Texas. That record and those characters exist in a place in time that is affixed to its creation and, simultaneously, eternal. And this record stands on its own as a brand new set of adventures, heartbreaks and lifetimes. The Kawasaki is back, the Southwestern ranch-style safehouse is still standing, the big orange sun still remains positioned at Jenny’s back. That’s not to say that Darnielle couldn’t go out and make another boombox record and give the Southwestern part of the Mountain Goats’ world a touch-up. But Jenny’s story required something more.

“Doing something like this, I thought, ‘If the previous album involving this character was 100% boombox, the only way to go, sonically, is to take it to the opposite end of the spectrum, to make it big, widescreen, 70mm. And that’s what we’ve done,” Darnielle says. “I can certainly match—or, I think, actually excel—the energy level of All Hail West Texas, which, despite having [‘The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton’], it was actually the least yelly of the lo-fi records back then. ‘Fault Lines’ gets pretty loud. But, for the most part, it has ‘Pink And Blue,’ has ‘Riches And Wonders,’ it’s a fairly wide-raning bunch but with less of the high, peaky end than The Coroner’s Gambit which, on ‘Family Happiness,’ gets really incredibly aggro. I think [Jenny from Thebes] hits that early energy level, but it does so at a much more broad and expansive sonic level. If you’re going to please the people you’re writing for, I think the one thing you need to not be thinking about is ‘Are these people going to like it?’ What people came to was not that you were trying to please somebody, but that you were trying to chase down a vision.”

Darnielle hears his son making noise in the next room, so he steps away from his computer to make sure he’s doing okay, only to return a few moments later. “Wouldn’t it be funny—objectively funny—if I had just gotten up and come back in seven minutes?,” he says. “Then you’d have a story. You go, ‘Yeah, we were having a great conversation and then he said he had to check on his son. He left and it was just dead silence.’ And then you Google and go ‘He doesn’t even have a son.’ No, I do have two children. He’s fine.”

Much of the sonic vision of Jenny from Thebes was inspired by Bertolt Brecht, Shadow Morton, David Johansen and The Rocky Horror Picture Show—occult figures who wove mythical, hidden threads in rock songwriting that was much more accessible that prog music. It was operatic, but it also tried to be deeply—chronically—rock ‘n’ roll, relatable yet not too concerned with tempo shifts. Darnielle wanted to tap into Morton’s intentions to make something elaborate and theatrical, songs that can be operatic arias in the common tongue that are understood by working men who go out drinking. He was intentionally courting Steinman’s strain of ‘70s music. Something like “Fresh Tattoo” is the most ornate song the Mountain Goats have ever put out, as its arrangement modulates to a different key and then retreats to the tonic. It starts sparsely on the piano before erupting into a giant, widescreen place.

Of course, the Mountain Goats catalog has always been gliding upwards into the baroque multiplex that lingers in Darnielle’s reliquary heart. But to balloon his career and look at each end of the spectrum, the progression from the Panasonic boombox to Jenny from Thebes—this massive, relentless explosion into full-bodied, splashy concertos—is, to say the least, immense and improbable. A route from lo-fi to grandiose is practically non-existent. There are many folks who pick up a guitar and try to self-record, but 99% of them never make a record as dense and distinctive as Jenny from Thebes. But, for the Mountain Goats, their momentum towards making big sonic shifts is, by design, cautious and slow. When Darnielle and Hughes added Wurster into the band in 2007, it’s because they played a show with him and thought it was fun. Up until then, they’d been borrowing drummers from the opening acts to play on “See America Right.” It took another five years for them to add a fourth member. Darnielle isn’t a guy who has his next five moves planned. He’s just working on five things at any given time.

For Bleed Out, the Mountain Goats welcomed Alicia Bognanno—the Nashville shredder who performs as Bully—into the fold to produce the record. It was a match that made perfect sense on paper and in spirit, as the mid-to-uptempo jams like “Training Montage” and “Mark on You” properly aligned with her home base inclinations of noisy, anthemic indie rock. This time around, on Jenny from Thebes, Trina Shoemaker—who has engineered projects by everyone from Sheryl Crow to Queens of the Stone Age—to take a crack at shepherding the sonic directions. Shoemaker’s addition was aces, as she was able to help Darnielle and the gang strike a balanced bounty of raucous jams and delicate, stirring musings. Bognanno joined the band again for Jenny from Thebes, but this time as a player—and her voice is most evident on the softer cuts, especially “From the Nebraska Plant,” where her guitar figures showcase the melodic sensibilities she has that, often, get absorbed in the energy and identity of Bully. In Darnielle’s own words, Bognanno and Shoemaker together gave a “wistful” life to Jenny from Thebes.

There are rewards to each approach, to coalescing the riotous with the tenderness. When Wurster joined the band for Heretic Pride in 2008, he, Darnielle and Hughes were happiest when they would play through slow-opening, pensive songs like “Sept 15 1983,” a truth that can still be felt on a track like “Mobile” from Dark in Here. “The slower, longer songs that give us room to stretch, those are really enjoyable to play,” Darnielle ays. “But I’m also real conscious about what audiences like—the stuff that punches you in the face. And that’s what Bleed Out was 100%, nothing but that, except for the title track. There’s a lot of bet-hedging going on there. I will say, ‘Well, I don’t want to just do all uptempo things in a row, I think the story has a lot of sadness in it that’s best represented by songs that give space for that sadness to breathe. But, at the same time, if you’re working with Jon Wurster and you make him only play slow and sad, that seems like a waste of resources. The guy is one of the best pounders in the business, but he’s got a lot more art to him than just the pounding. When he does that final fill on ‘Fresh Tattoo,’ my God, to be in the room with that is a privilege, as a musician.”

Since Darnielle was a child, he’s preferred a record that has a wider range of sonic checkpoints rather than a streamlined, narrow one. He wants range; he seeks range. And, when it’s all said and done, John Darnielle wants to be noted for range. “I want a record to offer many moods,” he says. “Bleed Out, for me, was a fun thing to do for a change, to say ‘Okay, it’s all this. This is what we’re doing.’ But, generally speaking, I want my books and my records and the books that I read and the records I listen to to have a breadth—even inside of the metal that I listen to, most of what I listen to is this more progressive that has that range, that has spaces to breathe but also spaces to be incredibly aggressive.” But that isn’t to say Darnielle doesn’t have awe and respect for the one-note types of bands. “The Ramones, for most of their career, go ‘It’s the Ramones, you know what you’re getting.’ There’s something awe-inspiring about that,” he adds. Though, on End of the Century, the Ramones would seek out broader ranges—even if categorically nobody considers that album their best.

The Mountain Goats have been on an impressive run of making their albums at legendary places recently. 2020’s Getting Into Knives was laid down at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, Dark in Here came to life at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Bleed Out found a home at Betty’s, Sylvan Esso’s Chapel Hill recording space. This time, the band convened at the Church Studio in Tulsa, the studio Leon Russell created and has long been considered a crucial part of the “Tulsa Sound.” The initial idea was to record Jenny from Thebes in Texas. All Hail West Texas wasn’t made in the Lone Star State (it was recorded in Darnielle’s Iowa home at the turn of the millennium) two decades ago, but it was a spark aimed at harnessing a fun, spiritual continuity between the two projects.

Ultimately, Darnielle didn’t want to do an album in a big city. He, Hughes and Wurster made The Life of the World to Come at Sonic Ranch in Tonillo, near the border in El Paso, but they didn’t want to go to Austin or Dallas or San Antonio. Marfa was considered but, when the Church Studio was brought up, they pounced on the opportunity to work in a historical space and with an incredible Neve console, all while leaning into the brief imagery of Oklahoma that crops up on All Hail West Texas on a song like “Pink and Blue.” And, in “Jenny,” the titular character heads someplace on her motorcycle—east, north, west, who knows—but the magnificent silhouettes and 900 cubic centimeters of raw, whining power Darnielle captured was against a backdrop of the Southwest, and that same energy was translated at the Church Studio. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers signed their record deal with Shelter in that building, Bob Marley stopped in once upon a time. “Being able to stand in a place where Bob Marley stood is a pretty amazing thing,” Darnielle says. “Wurster and I, especially, we like to be in rooms that have some historical presence within rock music or soul. We get a charge out of that.”

To spend time with John Darnielle means that you are destined to make tangents in droves. He makes note that he could never get into Vine because of how every video was on loop. “The fact that it auto-repeats is a deal breaker for me,” he says. “I don’t want the thing that made me laugh to kick back to the beginning immediately. Just in terms of my nerves, I can’t deal with that. That’s the nature of humor, it’s the nature of experiences—and I get that but, for me, once something lands, I need a rest. What the rest looks like on the staff, I need that.” Given that “No Children” went viral on TikTok in 2021, Darnielle is well-versed in how an app like that can greatly shape the nature of performance and the trends of culture. “I’m certain that stand-up comedians are recalibrating their craft, in order to maximize on this,” he says. “I also think the reach that that stuff offers to comedians, they would never have been able to reach as many people as they can. TikTok reconfigures what’s possible in comedy. It’s Topher Williams doing his thing where he just gives readings of signage—signs where things are spelled wrong. It’s quite remarkable.”

I kick the conversation back to Jenny and ask Darnielle a long question about the intersections of improv, RPGs and his approach to character-building for his novels—which includes asking five questions and letting those answers open up the possibility to more questions—operates when it comes to making a record. When I interviewed Darnielle about his last novel, Devil House, in 2022, he used RPGs and Magic: The Gathering as checkpoints in the methods of his sketching madness. But he makes a startling admission:

“Sorry, I messed you up. I said Topher Williams, but I think it’s not the guy’s name,” he says while scrolling through his Instagram. “It’s Tober Williams. There is a Topher Williams who exists in publishing somewhere, but the guy I was referring to is Tober Williams. He’s a Florida-based comedian, and his bio identifies him as a ‘Mountain Dew sommelier,’ which I really like.” I think, at one point in my life, I would have considered myself the same, and I tell Darnielle that. “The thing is, there’s so many Mountain Dews now,” he responds. “I’m not even a big Mountain Dew fan, but I get sucked in if there’s a little grape flavor or something. They had these smaller cans that were supposed to be some sort of bespoke, limited edition Mountain Dew—that I can be sucked in by. That is such a broad, general kind of condemnation of me as a consumer. But it’s still—okay, what was the question?”

“When we spoke before about Devil House, we talked about character building and you mentioned approaching it with a process of improv and RPG-style technique, which is asking five questions and letting those answers open up the possibility to five or six more questions. How close do you operate in that same universe when it comes to making a record? When you flesh out a character, are you approaching it with the same kind of scope, which is practically limitless?” I ask.

“With songs, it’s really amazing that the character gets to speak for themselves as you write,” Darnielle replies. “They will come out just from the process of the writing. All you really need is to be working on a song and being—and I hate to use the term ‘mindful’ to describe what’s going on in the chaos of how I write songs—aware and open, being aware of the space you’re in and the story you’re trying to tell. At some point, a record like [Jenny from Thebes] goes into the space of Tallahassee—‘Why is “No Children” called “No Children”?’ Well, because I was asking myself questions about the characters. ‘Did they have some kids?’ ‘Oh, God, no! They have no children.’

“The first song I wrote for [Jenny from Thebes] was ‘Jenny III,’ where I played a chord and sang the first line out and everything follows after that. But, then, you have the story and you go ‘Okay, what needs to happen? If the other character from All Hail West Texas, the male speaker, is going to be in the house, he has to have a first day there, right? What’s that look like?’ And that becomes ‘Fresh Tattoo.’” Darnielle then started asking himself more questions. Does Jenny have tattoos? Maybe she has one. What’s the tattoo of? Maybe it’s the Seven Shields from Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. “That’s where my brain does its own special thing,” he adds. “It just reaches for my points of reference and brings in things that wind up informing the entire story.”

Much of Jenny’s life—and that of many who inhabit the Mountain Goats universe—resembles a Greek tragedy. Darnielle’s understanding of the structure is, if the characters in these stories were able to read the messages and symbols correctly, they’d be able to avert the tragedy—but the only way they can develop the language necessary to read them is to go through the tragedy and be destroyed by it. It’s a paradox that’s cyclical and demanding yet crucial to the continuum of humanity. Darnielle sang about this 19 years ago on We Shall All Be Healed. The line from “Palmcorder Yajna” that goes “It will be too late by the time we learn what these cryptic symbols mean” speaks largely to how the tragedy gives us our own lives. “You would make a lot of different choices, had you been able to know what those choices meant for you right before you made them but, unfortunately, to know what those choices were going to mean, you had to make them in the first place,” Darnielle says.

In Jenny’s case, you can read her tragedy a few ways. The first is that she can’t understand who she is until she has made the choices to live according to her own values that, as a result, cause her to experience unbearable, immeasurable loss and pain. Across the album, she’s, in Darnielle’s own words, under siege. Her story is immediately inspired by Seven Against Thebes—particularly a moment when, while Thebes is under siege, a messenger arrives and describes what he saw on the shields of the seven warriors approaching the city. The tragic part is, if Eteocles had read the first shield correctly, he would get ready for battle. But he doesn’t. Instead he listens to all seven and they each describe his own ruin. “The main thing about the tragedy is that you can’t read the message you’re getting until you acquire the language with which to read it,” Darnielle concludes.

We finish our talk by Googling “Steely Dan versus Slayer,” but I can’t help but think of a moment from “Clean Slate” that has stuck with me since Jenny from Thebes came out in October. “This world is sad and broken, gotta fix a crack or two,” Darnielle sings. He’s made a career off of finding the misfits and rummaging around in their psyches. It’s a greater examination of the corners of the world so often left out of the equation of an overarching narrative. Jenny from Thebes is an album about a woman whose absence has now become a presence, but it’s also about how we must destroy ourselves in order to live. She kills the mayor and holes up with her crew as their clocks tick away. She sings Peter Pan songs and floats downstream. And yet, we still don’t know much about Jenny, nor are we meant to. The glow is in the gaps, in the space left behind by the roar of a Kawasaki splitting the pavement in half. Her life is slippery, misfortunate and devastating. But to remember is to repair and, in John Darnielle’s world, to forget is to bid farewell.

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Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.