John Darnielle, founder and frontman of the band The Mountain Goats and National Book Award-nominated novelist, did not at first find the idea of a lyric book very compelling. His agent pitched the idea during the doldrums of 2020, assuming it would be a good pandemic project.
But Darnielle knew he wasn’t going to put his name on a simple copying and pasting of the lyrics to his songs. “A lot of those are just the lyrics printed, and that seems weak to me,” he said over a Zoom call from his home in Durham. “Even if you’re a good lyricist, that’s all on the internet. And if you’re a great lyricist, I can hear it too.”
So, instead of taking the easy route to a new book, Darnielle unpicked the structure of collected lyrics as a form and landed on something more akin to a devotional. The result, which took Darnielle years of writing and refining to even find his way into, is This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days, published this month, less than four weeks after The Mountain Goats’ 23rd studio album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan.
Once he found a structure on which to hang his work, Darnielle chose 366 songs (the title, precise as it is, doesn’t account for the presence of an entry for February 29) from his dozens of albums, as well as decades of notebooks of unreleased or unrecorded work. Each song comes with some kind of commentary. There’s everything from craft notes and autobiographical anecdotes to nods to the author’s love for trees and the many subjects of his songs. The book is a playful, discursive, loosely linear journey through decades of Darnielle’s writing. INDY Week spoke to Darnielle about the process of putting This Year together, the line between fiction and memoir, affordable housing, and God. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
INDY: In the intro, you mention the structure came at least in part from a Psychedelic Furs album. Were there also some nods to medieval books of hours?
John Darnielle: Yeah, I was thinking about that sort of thing—something that you consult. I was thinking about the way that my first bassist, Rachel, when she introduced me to Rumi, she had a Coleman Barks translation, and whoever had given her the book had said, “Oh, you open this book wherever and the one that you find is talking about where you’re at now.” I don’t know where they got this idea, but it was cool, right? It was fun. It felt real. I love that kind of thing. So, you can consult this on your birthday, on your anniversary, the day you sign your divorce papers.
In the preface, you talk about selecting and arranging the songs. You say, “The shape they trace now together resembles me; the songs beside which they first appeared would form a different view of the same person, but this one seems truer.” Can you talk about that distance there?
I hired a research assistant from Duke to get all of [my songs] to me, and when I looked at the ones that I hadn’t picked, I was like, “No, my instinct was right.” Those are the parts of me that I’ve shed, in some ways. Not all of them, but some of them, I’d go, “Oh yeah, there’s a reason to write about this other one off of this tape, and not this one.”
But also, what I’m talking about there is how, when I was first doing this, if people would suggest that what I was doing was confessional in any way or was self-disclosure of any kind, I was very, very resistant to this idea. I now think of things differently. I think you can write a story about a mermaid who builds a spaceship, and you’re still talking about yourself. Any story you tell, you wind up telling on yourself in some way, right? This has informed which stories I choose to tell, actually, which I think, in turn, then shapes you.
When I was first doing this,
if people would suggest that what I was doing was confessional in any way or was self-disclosure of any kind, I was very, very resistant to this idea. I now think of things differently. I think you can write a story about a mermaid who builds a spaceship, and you’re still talking about yourself.”
I used to be much more interested in dark stories where people have dark motives. And I mean, look, I still write novels that are incredibly violent, and that’s in me, right? But the choices you make about what you write about do shape you and wind up presenting you with a picture of yourself. They present other people, also, with a picture of you—but that’s a different picture, because they bring their own stuff to it. And quite often, that can be about a 51% balance of what they’re bringing to what they see. So that’s also an interesting thing.
I think that the more I read, the more I believe all fiction is autofiction to some degree, and all memoir is also fiction.
I think that’s true. If you read Defoe, Defoe doesn’t think he’s writing memoirs, but he’s telling you a lot about Daniel Defoe. I find that interesting. To me, that would mean “Good. Now we don’t have to write memoirs anymore,” but most people feel different from me on that.
You do say at one point, “This isn’t a memoir, unless it is.” How would you define memoir?
Part of that is just me bitching about a thing that people who know me know that I’m constantly bitching about. I get galleys, right? And for about two years there, it felt like three out of four were a memoir. And that’s never going to the front of the queue for me. I want to hear fun made-up stories. I care about people. If I meet people, I do want to hear their stories. But if I’m reading, I want to read something amazing that you made up, and then I’ll actually learn more about you than in your curated and self-presented version of yourself.
So many of the memoirs will be like “Warts and all, he really lets you know what a piece of shit he was before he became good.” Yeah, but you’re picking the parts of that that you can stand to tell me, or you’re playing them up to look tough, right? My other problem with memoir is that identity and self are malleable over time, and they’re huge, right? They’re huge. I think fiction does a better job of presenting the self by letting you have all these multiple selves that you made up doing various things [rather] than attempt[ing] to just basically put on your makeup and say, “Here’s what I look like when I describe myself.”
So both of your artistic mediums, music and storytelling, are traditionally very experiential art forms. They weren’t physical things for so long.
Is there any dissonance for you between making these things that are meant to be experienced with people and having to force them into physical things?
That’s a great question, and I will eat up the rest of the interview on it. So here’s the thing: What you’re asking intersects with one of my hobbyhorse questions about the notion of spontaneity and what’s “real.” Big old scare quotes around that. Everything’s curated, everything’s gathered and organized, right? Language does that also. Language is a performance of something that, before it becomes language, is formless. And so storytelling replicates what we do when we speak at all. It takes a bunch of chaotic notions and organizes them into a picture that we can both look at and have different reactions to. In making the book, what was interesting about it is how that stuff seemed to be then, versus looking at it now.
You talk a lot about the old version of you that you’re dealing with in this book, the person who wrote these songs. What is the difference between confronting that person in writing versus in performing these songs?
The thing is, a lot of these don’t get performed at all. A lot of them are unlikely to get woken up like that. But performance is so much its own space. It’s very different. Because I am thinking about the words when I perform, but not in this way. I’m inhabiting them. I’m acting, but I’m acting something that I wrote, which is an unusual position for an actor.
I don’t like to talk about performance being therapy, but there’s a therapeutic aspect to it. It’s sort of as if you’ve been told, “I want you to speak if you were this person.”
Whereas writing—writing is infinite. Writing is gathering every thought you have and trying to bring it down to one point. That’s the miracle of it, right? Some people find that daunting, but I’m like, “Oh no, you go to the desk, and then you open up the world.” I love it.
I loved the little asides throughout the book where you’re like, “I’m not gonna get going on this essay.” In one of those, you say, “All writing is correction.” I love this idea, but not sure I’m following you all the way. Give me the thesis to this craft essay?
I don’t think I talk about this in the book, but I liked to come up with poetic theories back then, because a lot of the poets that I would read belong to schools. You know, the Polish poets were always having theories and stuff, and I developed an ethos whose details are lost to history called the theory of nonimagematic poetry that mainly concerned using phrases to advance the action and avoiding images where you can. As you’ll note, I don’t wind up pursuing this.
But when you do anything like that, I think later you look at it and ask yourself not just where did it succeed or not succeed, but you’re responding to it. You’re responding to what you wrote as you go. You also respond to how it was received as you go on—to whether it got not just praise or condemnation but also to the feeling you think it evoked.
Maybe you’re getting or not getting the ego gratification that you want, because some of that’s going to be in writing that you choose to share. But I do think every time you write, you are, in some sense, rewriting what you wrote before.
Now that’s in a broad sense. It doesn’t mean you’re always telling the same story. It means that when you write, you are in some way correcting on your earlier attempts. I hope for myself that that is true. Because I don’t want to do the same thing twice. If I’m doing something in the same vein, I want it to be better than the previous time.
It says that “neither impulse can win. They can only conspire to push the style forward.” I think that is true. If you land on a side, you become still. You become static. It’s funny. Everybody wants franchises, right? People want to read books in series. And I have very little interest in this. That’s not a comprehensible aesthetic urge to me, the desire to hear the ninth story, see the ninth movie.
Oh, this is a damned lie, though. I’m lying to you outright because of all the Friday the 13th movies—all of them. But partly what I like about that franchise is, with Halloween III, for example, the makers will go, “What if it wasn’t in the franchise at all?” It doesn’t have Michael Myers in it at all. I think the people who own the property were like, “Do we got to do the mask guy again?” And that’s my favorite, really, of the Halloweens, because that’s what I think you should do. “Say, here’s what I did before. How can I interrogate that? How can I be in conversation with that, instead of just restating it or making it bigger?”
Reading this, I was thinking red-pen correcting, like in school. But the way you talk about it sounds more like a course correction, like we’ve got to shift the rudder a little bit to make sure that we’re staying where we need to go.
Well, we’re finding new waters. Make sure that we’re not going to the island we’ve already visited and filling out the map. Because you’re not going to fill out the map. You have a limited amount of time, right? And you will not get to all the places you could go, so you want as many as you can. That’s the way I look at it. There’s, you know, there’s other ways of looking at it, but that’s it for me.
They got to send me more grad student interviewers. They gotta, because I had some experiences yesterday…
To bring up another one of your asides . . . I would love to open the floor to anything you have to say about mixed-use residential housing, perhaps in Durham, North Carolina, specifically.
Oh my God, you really want to hear it?
I do. I’ve only lived here for five years, and this city is unrecognizable. It’s crazy.
Yeah. I mean, look. We moved to Durham in 2003. We moved to Durham because we could not afford to move to Chapel Hill. We had looked at houses in Chapel Hill, and they were out of our price range. And so we moved to Durham, and it was hip as hell. You would not recognize what downtown was. And Durham had this feel of like, nobody was quite sure what they were going to do with it, so empty buildings would remain empty buildings.
Mixed-use residential is only good if it contains an affordability component, and the affordability component should not be the one unit that we settled on so that we could say we’re making housing affordable. Affordable housing in Durham—anybody who drives 885 can see at the off-ramp, we need affordable housing. There are people who have no place to live in our affluent town, right? And new construction is inevitable, but we should be building affordable housing. That’s what we need in this town. And we should be building places with walkable space. We should always be putting sidewalks in. All this stuff is important, but [they’re] making money instead, and that is a choice. And people don’t actually like the results of that choice, except for the people who take the money home.
You’ve talked both in the book and more generally about God and your radical politics. I’m also dealing with progressive faith in the age of MAGA and just wanted to ask: How are you doing?
Yeah, it’s funny. So, I’m a Jesus guy too, and—I don’t think my wife will mind me sharing this anecdote—I was bewailing these people who would put, like, “The science isn’t in on whether vaccines cause autism” on the CDC website. And my wife, rather witheringly, says, “Yeah, but these people believe in God.” She had me dead to rights on that. It’s an absurd proposition, right?
But I’m fine, is the thing. When you have enough privilege to be fine, you should state that first. Like, when I’m scared, am I scared for myself? Well, next year I’m traveling internationally. I don’t know how that’s going to go when I come back in. But I’m not scared like the 20% of families that stayed home from Durham Public Schools today. And I’m angry about that. I’m angry that there are people whose children don’t get to go play with their friends today. Young children, 5-year-olds. If you’ve taken kids to kindergarten and preschool, you see them playing, and you go, “Oh God, we’ve ruined the world. That’s what we should be doing, playing together and supporting each other, the way that classes of kids do.” And instead, they’re literally saying, “You can’t go to school today, and I can’t go to work today.” This is a horrible state of affairs. We should be very angry.
People will say, “Well, what are you doing?” I can’t do anything. I’m just a person. We can only do things collectively. What I do, what I say, is only meaningful in the sense that I have a bit of a platform, so maybe some people will hear it. But until we unify and take collective action, we can’t do anything. Nothing. Individually, we are nothing. Collectively, we are strong. And we know this, right? The bad guys know this, too. They wouldn’t put it that way, but they know this. So, yeah, that’s where I do feel hopeful.
I went up to Compare Foods, and there was a group of people who looked like me, younger, but they looked like me. And they were there to bear witness and protect people if they were trying to shop at Compare or work at Compare and were getting hassled by fascists. And that was beautiful. That was collective action, so I’m seeing that in my community. It’s beautiful to see Durham affirming that it is who we say it is. It’s a place where we’re trying our best to come together to protect our people. The privilege to see that and to be part of that in whatever small way. We need to keep that carrying forward, to protect every disenfranchised class, you know, from immigrants to trans people to whoever else you can name, who’s on the receiving end of abuse from this administration.
Like anybody else, once I get started about this, there’s so much to say. The backwards gift of this is you’re learning what your politics are right now. If you didn’t want to think about him, that’s too bad. You can’t really Pollyanna this moment. And you see this in the comments of the stories, where you see a bunch of people saying, “He’s doing what I put him in office to do.” Yeah, there’s some bad people out there. We have failed to reach them. We have failed to persuade them of the gospel. You know, we have failed to present to them the Jesus that we believe will liberate them from anger and their fear. I can go on about this a lot, because I think it’s a moment in which God is challenging us to communicate our values in a meaningful way.
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