It's Halloween, 2005, and John Darnielle-- preparing to lead another show as the Mountain Goats-- pulls on his costume: a priest's robe. If it's a joke, it's a kind-hearted one: Most people at Mountain Goats shows know the words and aren't afraid to sing them. Some weep while doing it. Darnielle has power over his audience, but he doesn't wield it-- instead, he posits himself as one of them: Someone moved by small stories of liquor-store clerks struggling with big concerns like salvation; a cautious optimist with empathy for the last gasp and the broken promise; someone who holds a melting candle for four-chord American folk music; a "lyrics guy."
He sings a song about best friends whose dreams of death-metal stardom are crushed when one is shipped off to school. The story ends with Darnielle crowing, "hail Satan!" Everyone under the roof crows with him. Darnielle's voice swells and his face fills with light. The irony is obvious, but I don't think that's why he's happy. (And I doubt he even registers it-- during performances, he squints, bucks, shouts "yeah!" before just about every instrumental break, and is in general totally unselfconscious.) My guess is he's happy because he's singing about two people who have found god for themselves, even if they couldn't decide whether to call their band Satan's Fingers or the Killers or the Hospital Bombers.
This is how he works: Imposing grand themes on squalor, lending dignity to those who have none, passing gentle hands over people who probably deserve the lash. He's written an album about the salvation of meth-heads and another about the bond between codependent alcoholics. Under a canopy of violins on last year's "Marduk T-Shirt Men's Room Incident", he detailed what was either a rape or a murder with a voice a prosecutor might point out as sounding almost sympathetic. On 2005's "Love Love Love", the sick feeling in Raskolnikov's stomach-- after murdering Alyona Ivanovna in Crime and Punishment-- is posited as a reflex of love. Hallmark may disagree.
This keeps him honest and makes it almost impossible for him to be sentimental. In an interview early last year, I asked him if he loved his characters. "I have loads of affection for them all, for sure," he said. "But my relationship to most of them is the relationship you have with a close friend who you know is also a chronic liar."
These themes-- forgiveness, redemption, religion generally, and the Bible specifically-- have backlit his writing since the early 1990s, from boombox-recorded albums for tape-only labels like Shrimper to full-band albums like Tallahassee, which Darnielle started releasing in 2002 for 4AD. (I've told curious friends that his music was "alt-Christian," which ends the conversation pretty quickly.) But he's never been as explicit about the Bible as on The Life of the World to Come, 12 songs about "hard lessons" he learned from specific verses.
Thankfully he's not a pedant about it, and his songs aren't songs of praise. He's a lapsed Catholic and professed nonbeliever who told Pitchfork he still chants the Hare Krishna. He is, in his own words, "into" the Bible. He makes use of the book for what it is: A series of stories used to comfort and instruct us. Joan Didion once wrote that "we tell ourselves stories in order to live." Darnielle is a professed fan.
Life's tone is quiet and contemplative. The raw-nerve hollering of his early music is gone (except on "Psalms 40:2", where there's a blast of raw-nerve hollering so forceful that he's basically excused from straining himself in perpetuity). But over the past few albums he's filed his whisper into a tool as unique as his shout. The cataclysmic shutter-rattling of fan favorites like "Going to Georgia" is replaced with songs like "Genesis 30:3" and "Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace"-- in the latter (based on a verse where god promises total fucking disaster), Darnielle's narrator ties up a hostage, drives through torrential rain, shoots up in the car as the world ends, and still never breaks out of his library voice. In these cases, the music's intensity comes from Darnielle's restraint instead of being undermined it.
He still drives at uncomfortable dissonance: A vandal realizes vandalism is his way of standing closer to god; someone all but sings "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" from a hospital bed. In general, though, Darnielle's presence is ruminative and gentle. The arrangements are simpler, too-- mostly acoustic guitar, bass, and drums, occasionally accompanied by a small string section. Sometimes, just his voice and a piano, an instrument Darnielle was trained on as a child but didn't play with the Mountain Goats until 2005. (His self-taught guitar playing was a big part of the music's primitive appeal.) Life has no marimba jollies or effects-box glitter. No reggae-esque songs like "New Zion" or anthemic alt-rock like "Autoclave". This isn't a good, bad, or even surprising thing-- its simplicity actually echoes early Mountain Goats albums more clearly than anything he's released in the past few years.
While he might elicit the specific from his listeners, his music-- especially here-- is general. This is his gift and the gift of effective storytellers: to build toward the general by using the specific. Jacob works for seven years to marry Rachel. Rachel is barren. Rachel asks him to sleep with her servant, Bilhah, so they can raise children. And now there's a Mountain Goats song called "Genesis 30:3" about the cheeks we turn and the tasks we take on for the people we love most. In a way, it's like he's giving back to his fans or anyone who wants to listen: He spends an album relating to some of his favorite stories and tacitly invites us to do the same-- to consider what we've lived through and what we've learned.
At a recent Q&A with the filmmaker Rian Johnson, who'd shot him playing Life in a Pomona College auditorium, Darnielle talked about how we'd hunted certain species to extinction, losing a relative to cancer, and valleys of paralyzing depression. He knew when to make a joke, and he made them often-- he has a really vigilant sense of humor, actually, which people who find him whiny probably don't expect. But his intensity radiates even when he's joking: One story he told involved a sound guy who'd asked him if he'd seen a particular film, and his response was, "Does it have a guy in a hockey mask hacking up teenagers?" The guy said no. "Then I probably haven't seen it."
"I'm not great with personal boundaries," he said later, "so I'm sorry if I'm making anyone here uncomfortable." Well, a little. But the discomfort isn't without redemption; it's part and parcel. It's probably what most of us came for.
