April 28-May 4, 2005

music

Raw Power

WE SHALL ALL BE VEAL: "I am always amused when people think of me as some wide-eyed innocent," says John Darnielle (right), with bassist Peter Hughes. By: Steven Dewall

John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats is finally telling the truth.

by Patrick Rapa

"Author Wishes She Hadn't Blown Personal Tragedy On First Book." As with most Onion headlines, the overall fakeness is balanced by a truth relevant to every art form. Reveal your deepest pains early and you risk becoming defined by them. For over a decade, John Darnielle wrote lyrics about forgotten gods, vicious spouses, baseball, the healing power of music and the awesomeness of riding a motorcycle very fast, and he reminded his audience that he was making it all up. These songs, hundreds of them — mostly just a savaged acoustic guitar and a voice raised to conjure anguish, desperation, surrender — were made safe by their fiction. With a smirk, he'd apologize in concert for inventing characters only to run them through the ringer.

Darnielle's no sadist, but he could only keep things comfortable for so long. So, starting with 2003's We Shall All Be Healed, he began telling the truth. That album recounted, sometimes in explicit terms, his past troubles with drugs. He made it clear these were true stories; he put a needle on his tour shirt for good measure. And now here's The Sunset Tree, Darnielle at his most forthright. (And you want overt? Bye-bye obfuscating album art: There's a tree at dusk on the cover of this one.) Most of this 12-song disc examines Darnielle at age 17, oppressed by an abusive stepfather and retreating to the warm embrace of good music and an equally messed-up girlfriend ("twin high-maintenance machines," he calls them). There are enough animal metaphors to stock a small zoo — wolf, magpie, lion, something called a tetrapod — but the complicated horror remains unmasked. The closest thing to an upbeat moment is the repeated mantra, "I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me."

Of course, however scarred, the boy did survive. And, despite this dear-diary kick he's on, Darnielle has by no means forsaken the aspects of his songwriting that gathered unto him a cult following in the first place: the clever lines, the memorable images, the elevation of everyday moments to supernatural status. And if you didn't know any better (though if you've read this far, you do), you'd guess The Sunset Tree belongs right there next to all his storyteller stuff. A Northern California kid recently relocated to North Carolina, Darnielle finds himself on the verge of a new artistic frontier in a land with no major league baseball team. We spoke over e-mail.

City Paper: Is there a benefit to waiting to turn your most serious pains into something creative?
John Darnielle: Absolutely there's benefit: Any time a person shares something personal with others, it feels really incredible, so for younger writers, there's often a confusion of how something feels to the author vs. how it feels for the audience. This is why there's so much bad confessional poetry. For me, putting off writing about myself for 10 years or so enabled me to hone my craft, so that by the time I came around to the raw stuff, I'd know what to do with it.

CP: Now that we're getting these clearer glimpses into your personal life, one theme that carries over from your first 15 years of songwriting to your current work is that of music as a means of healing and escape. Is that right? What music got you through?
JD: People keep putting it like that, yeah — I've always looked at the word "escape" with extreme suspicion, because when I listen to the stuff I like, it's not like I'm suddenly in some bliss-realm of dancing ponies and whatnot — I tend to enjoy music that makes me cry or feel dread, y'know, the kind of stuff that rakes a person over the coals. But I suppose thrill-seeking like that also qualifies as a kind of escape. Back in high school, it was my Lou Reed collection every day. I had such sweet bootlegs: Blondes Have More Fun (Australia '74), Liquid Air (NYC '79), Bowie (most especially Diamond Dogs and Aladdin Sane), the Birthday Party, the Stockholm Monsters, Gustav Mahler, Schubert's symphonies (it took me till later to get to the nonsymphonic Schubert stuff), Christian Death, Iron Maiden's Piece of Mind and The Number of the Beast. It's a very long list of things.

CP: As much as you use animal metaphors on The Sunset Tree, you never reduce anybody to "monster" status. Is there no "villain" on this CD?
JD: This is a really interesting question because the songs I'm writing now are all about monsters. Though like a lot of writers I always sympathize with the monster — "monster" for me doesn't usually carry negative connotations, though of course there is always the fact that no matter how much you like the monster, he's going to kill you if he gets his hands on you. But on The Sunset Tree, no, there's no full-time villain, I hope. That was kind of important to me; the public version of abusive households is a kind of nightmare Disney flick that's still Disney — good guy, abusee; bad guy, abuser. The dynamics are a lot more complex than that. Like, a lot more complex. At the end of the day, absolutely, the guy who abuses you is an asshole, but is that all there is to it? Only for people who don't have the stomach for the full picture, but it's only the full picture that'll yield any useful information.

CP: Since you're laying things out personally, do you want to tell your own drug history? Last time we talked you hinted that you'd been in jail.
JD: Naw, man, getting too public with this stuff is a mistake, I think. I am always amused when people think of me as some wide-eyed innocent, though.

CP: Of course, The Sunset Tree is a different animal in a lot of other ways, too. "Dilaudid" is just you and a cello. It's the first time we're hearing you without a guitar since those early Casio-based songs.
JD: Me and at least four cellos! The growth of that track was weird: It started out with drums, guitar, bass and vocals — I overdubbed vocals after doing the instrumental part. Then we added a second guitar, and then I didn't like my guitar part. Then we added the cellos. This is all over a period of days, returning to things. I was off in the TV room playin' Zelda when I thought to myself, "Geez, they sure haven't called me in for a while," and so I poked my head into the control room and [producer John Vanderslice] was all goin' crazy with [cellist Erik] Friedlander, and there we were. Much, much debate over how to deal with the excess of parts we had when it was all done; in the end, we stripped everything but the cellos. Live we do it guitar-bass-vocals.

CP: You are a very vocal fan of death metal and hip-hop, yet to my knowledge, you've never covered any Christian Death or Tupac. You know you want to lay down a version of "Hit 'Em Up" — what's stopping you?
JD: Haha, we actually flirted with doing exactly that song for a Peel session once. But I don't feel like I have anything in particular to bring to either of those, and that's what ought to govern one's choice of covers: Do you, the artist, have anything special of your own from which the song might benefit? If not, then hands off, I say. Nobody can improve on "Hit 'Em Up," and nobody did Rozz better than Rozz, so leave the masters to their masters work is my opinion.

CP: And now, the requisite baseball question: How do you like the Phillies' chances this year?
JD: I always like the Phillies' chances, but I vote with my heart, not my head. Even in a bad year you gotta watch out for them Braves. If the city of Philadelphia would declare Mitch Williams' birthday a civic holiday, it'd do loads of karmic good I think; that poor guy got run out of town on a rail, but he was just doing what he got paid to do: close his eyes and throw the ball as hard as he could. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it gave up bases-juiced HRs in the postseason. But, yeah. Show love to Mitch. Let water go under the bridge and do not hate on the Phanatic. Success will come.

Wed., May 4, 7:30 p.m., $10, all ages, with Shearwater and Erik Friedlander, First Unitarian Church, 2125 Chestnut St., 866-468-7619