Mountain Goats' excellent new album finds John Darnielle exploring familiar territory
by Lee Stabert
Mountain Goats' singer/songwriter/only permanent member John Darnielle concocts elaborate metaphors, uses big words and tells detailed stories brimming with ideological heft. So it's ironic that his songs' best moments are often breathtakingly simple. (Sunset Tree's essential line, "I will make it through this year if it kills me," still devastates and reassures on every listen.) Out of nowhere—like the passionate punch of an underdog—Darnielle's mini-mantras wield unexpected power.
The text of the Bible, which serves as part inspiration, part touchstone and part adversary on Mountain Goats' latest, The Life of the World to Come, also oscillates between elaborate and austere. In an epic and complicated story, the base sentiments still resonate: sacrifice, love, exodus and death. On this album, a beguiling blend of nostalgia, obscure fable and elegy, those themes also take top billing.
Each of the record's 12 tracks is named for a specific Bible verse, but none necessarily started out that way. "The theme of an album sort of announces itself organically over the course of the writing," Darnielle says. "I think you can always tell when a person had the idea first and then started writing the record, and it grew tiresome—it seems like they wanted to have this story, and then started plugging in all the aspects. So, I just write until a few songs sort of look like they're friends, and then I populate the neighborhood until [there's] a nice street full of songs."
Darnielle has used Bible verses to title songs before, and the idea intrigued him. "There's just something portentous about having a title that refers to this big book that is central to so much culture and so much literature, and has spawned so many big ideas," he says. "To refer to Bible text opens a bunch of internal doors."
Through those doors is loss, in many forms: A friend withers and dies from cancer; new residents inhabit a former home; lonely creatures—the last of their kind—wait for extinction. Darnielle wrangles sorrow into precise phrases. For his friend, in "Matthew 25:21," he strips the grandiose religiosity and finds something beautiful: "You were a presence full of light upon this earth / And I am a witness to your life and to its worth." On the repeated five-word chorus of "Genesis 3:23," he proclaims, simply, "I used to live here." And he captures the loneliness of losing those who are most like you by ending each chorus of the extinction parable "Deuteronomy 2:10" by inhabiting a different doomed narrator and admitting, "There'll be no more after me."
That kind of simplicity takes restraint. Darnielle admits that some of his most seminal lines actually began as sketches. " 'I used to live here' was going to be a much, much longer chorus—and the song was going to be considerably more complicated," he says. "I sort of had that chorus in there just as a placeholder, but when I came back to it a few days later, I was like, 'Don't be silly. It's done.' It's kind of like working in the kitchen, which I do a lot. Often you lose a sense of whether something tastes like it's finished. You want to keep working on it forever. So often the real discipline of writing is knowing when to stop."
There are countless of those less-is-more moments on Life of the World: On "1 John 4:16," Darnielle sings, "I won't be afraid of anything ever again," as if to will it so. And, with a few more words but no less forthrightness, he promises, on "Genesis 30:3," "I will do what you ask me to do / Because of how I feel about you."
Seeing the words here—stripped of Darnielle's careful diction and the context of all those metaphors, big words and narrative heft—it is impossible to translate their impact. It must be heard to be believed.
Sonically, many songs share the lilting, ramshackle acoustic-guitar shuffle that's become a familiar Mountain Goats sound over the course of their last couple albums, but quite a few others showcase Darnielle on piano. It seems no coincidence that two relics from his youth—the piano and the Bible—pair so well. "I know what I'm doing a little more than I do with the guitar, where I really am kind of like a caveman," he says. "I used to have some decent piano technique when I was a kid. I can hear in my fingers that they want to do smarter stuff, but the information in my wrists is from many epochs ago. That's kind of what makes it interesting to me. It does have this halting, damaged feel to it."
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