The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle on the Guitarless Goths
Why the Mountain Goats Shook Up the Formula and Headed to Nashville for Their Latest LP

John Darnielle can’t pinpoint exactly when he realized that none of the songs on the Mountain Goats’ new album, Goths, included guitar, but the singer remembers how he felt. “It was a very liberating thought to me,” he says.
One reason for that is the Mountain Goats’ enduring, if long outdated, reputation as a purveyor of “driving lo-fi guitar tunes,” as Darnielle puts it, quoting from an imaginary boilerplate review of the kind that continues to follow the band. That description was accurate 15-plus years ago when he was recording entire albums at home by himself on a boom box, but a lot has changed.
Mountain Goats albums have grown almost lush since 2002’s Tallahassee, the first LP Darnielle made in a recording studio, backed by an actual band. Subsequent releases have often featured as much piano as guitar, with ornamentation from strings and horns. With 12 new songs written almost entirely on keyboards, Goths is full of lithe arrangements and luxuriant musical touches: a choir on “Rain in Soho,” woodwinds on “The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement” and the late-night gleam of a Fender Rhodes electric piano on several songs, including “Shelved” (which also features bassist Peter Hughes’ first lead vocal).
With Darnielle’s distinctive voice and his wry humor, there’s no mistaking Goths for anything but a Mountain Goats album. At the same time, it’s the band’s biggest step yet away from the forceful, propulsive acoustic guitar strumming that helped define the Mountain Goats in the early years. Darnielle calls that sound his “default rhythm,” and he used to employ it frequently, on songs including “Up the Wolves,” “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” (which you can listen to in the player below), “Going to Georgia” and plenty more, until drummer Jon Wurster told him there were only so many ways to accompany it.
Writing songs on keyboards helps Darnielle keep away from musical tropes that have become too familiar on guitar. “It’s easier for me not to drop into a comfort zone on piano, in part because I’m less adept on piano,” he says. “On guitar, I could do a default rhythm right now. I could do one right now that people would like, and that’s pretty tempting. But it’s also good to always be thinking about growth, about doing things you haven’t done.”
As usual, he made demos of the songs and emailed them to the rest of the band: Hughes, Wurster and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who plays woodwinds, keyboards and sings. Goths is Douglas’ debut as a full-time member of the Mountain Goats, though he also contributed to 2015’s Beat the Champ. “He’s a ringer,” Hughes says admiringly. “He’s one of those guys who can just pick up anything and play it and sound awesome.”
Says Darnielle, “When you bring in people who are better than you, it’s always a good idea.”