The Mountain Goats “The ‘49 Packard will slay all.”

For years, The Mountain Goats — who are really John Darnielle, more or less, and whomever else may be in the room with him — have tackled the most finicky of subjects through music: troubled marriages, child abuse, love, death, the first 17-year-old to do federal time for possession of LSD, and nearly everything in between. With The Life of the World to Come, Darnielle's moved on to perhaps the grandest, most difficult topic of all — religion. It was quite surprising to discover the album's tracklist this past summer: 12 songs, all named after bible verses. How does an intensely personal, militantly literary lyricist deal with a deity in his music? Well, rather than retreat from form, Darnielle keeps things in a rabidly subjective realm, writing a series of songs that feel more like short stories. “Twelve hard lessons the bible taught me,” Darnielle said on The Mountain Goats' website back in July.

But don't expect Darnielle to start sermonizing in front of audiences when he goes on tour this fall. Darnielle sounds comfortable dealing with a topic that carries the weight of history on its back — he's not preaching or judging, just doing what he does best: offering a glimpse inside the minds of his characters — even if he's one of them. Tiny Mix Tapes talked recently with Darnielle through e-mail about the reformatting of music, autobiographical songwriting, the proper way to listen to New York doom-metal band Bloody Panda, and, of course, religion.

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I'll admit I don't like conducting interviews through e-mail, but I'm interested in this re-formatting of the whole music business, how everything has been sequestered to the internet. In one way, I think it's interesting to conduct an interview via e-mail as it allows you to really plan out your answers — but it's also limiting for both of us. What do you think about that?

Well, I don't really plan out my answers -- I used to prefer mail interviews to phone interviews, way back in the days when everybody had a zine, and I did them the same way I'm doing this: I answered the first question without reading the rest, and I'd take them as they came, correcting only for spelling. If I run across a question that's really good & hefty, I'll sometimes go over it a few times, but for the most part, I adhere to the classical limitations of the interview form: I answer questions as they're put to me. I actually feel that e-mail interviews, and mail interviews before them, are much less limiting than phone interviews, which follow very predictable patterns.

Would you say you've started to prefer to deal with your musical career through the internet anyway?

I actually feel like that was true for awhile and is now maybe less true. The last year or so I'm more focused on just making music and thinking about music, and in trying to challenge myself to hear things in new ways. The internet's a tool for dissemination of news and information and music itself, sure. To tell you the truth, I'm kind of surprised, in 2009, that "the internet" is still something we talk about; to me it feels like being asked, circa 1948, whether I think the automobile is here to stay. Yes! The internet is an indispensable part of having a career in the music business now. The '49 Packard will slay all.

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"Seriously, I do not know one artist or person who works at any label who minds when a record leaks."
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Let's turn to the album. Religion always seemed hinted at in your music, but it's never been so blatant as it is on The Life of the World to Come, even without the song titles. Is there any reason for this explicitness? Religion is treated here in a similar way as subjects like love or family on past albums.

For sure: religion's explicitly personal for me, for a bunch of reasons. My early school experiences were in Catholic school, and some of the early Sisters who taught me were real heroes to me: they nurtured me, treated me with love and respect; they meant so much to me. Experiences like those, at a parochial school, can really cement one's ideas about God and bind them with one's ideas about self-worth and feeling welcomed and at-home.

And then my parents divorced, and church became something we only did when we (my sister and I) would go to stay with my dad, and he wasn't Catholic any more at that point, so I'd get exposed to the weird world of protestant services, which had their own warmth for me. And then I renounced God and raged against religion for years, as I still will, often, given all the damage that Christians (not fake Christians, that's a cop out: real ones do all kinds of harm) will do. But down in my gut, I want to believe so badly. I can't stand the idea that Christian virtues are mainly humans celebrating their indwelling natural goodness; it's probably true, but I want transcendence. That's personal. And some of my friends are dead, but I feel that what they left in this world persists: and that's spiritual. So, yes. Spiritual stuff, way personal for me.

The sound here is more brooding, much heavier than your last two albums. Even at its quietest, The Life of the World to Come is pretty menacing. Did you intend that?

I had a lot of hard, dark stuff go down in my life over the past couple of years, along with some of the greatest, best times: huge highs and deep lows. I'm a goth, so it's the valleys that are going to get the most loving attention from me every time. I think, too, that we as a band sort of naturally lean toward some darkness: not that it's what we're about as individuals so much as it is something that, when we start heading in that direction, we all get a sort of "yeah!" feeling at once. You can hear that in, for example, "1 Samuel 15:23," which we put together on the spot super late at night in the studio -- I had lyrics and some chords but we just constructed the song from bare bones. And finally, of the three producers on the album, one's John Congleton, who I think is as into contemplating splattery dark things as I am, and he probably hears & responds to that in some of the stuff.

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"... this album is the closest since The Sunset Tree to outright autobiography, though I don't guess I'll ever do an "every song directly from my life" album again."
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The album leaked. How do you feel about that?

I was a little relieved when it leaked -- waiting for the leak is kind of stressful. I mean, I think people have all kinds of self-invented mythologies about how musicians and labels feel about leaks. Nobody really cares, as far as I know, in the business; everybody expects it to happen, it's just part of the release cycle. But online there's this sort of sense that artists and the people who work at labels get really worked up about leaks, that there's some kind of push-pull; that was true 5 years ago, but it isn't now. Seriously, I do not know one artist or person who works at any label who minds when a record leaks. It's part of the process. I think people take some pleasure in imagining that artists and/or labels get real mad or something when a record leaks, and I don't really understand why people enjoy imagining that, but I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about it.

A leak is something that happens when you make a record, and you actually look forward to it because it'll be your first chance to hear how people like what you've done, and you hope when people hear it that they enjoy the album and feel inspired to buy it so you can keep on making records.

Why stream the album through Colbert Nation then?

Why Colbert Nation? Well, I'll tell you, the ground floor is a beautiful thing, and that guy's gonna be president and/or chancellor someday. We have always been a band with a keen sense of which way the winds are blowing.

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"I can't stand the idea that Christian virtues are mainly humans celebrating their indwelling natural goodness; it's probably true, but I want transcendence."
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I want to ask you about your writing process. Some of these songs — such as "Isaiah 45:23" — are pretty faithful to the bible passages they're named after. Did you write with a bible in hand, or are these passages ones that you have internalized?

It varied from song to song. I was going through some pretty tough stuff when I wrote that and I wrote the song by itself, but I've read in Isaiah a lot, so I knew where I'd go looking for the verse to match it. "Romans 10:9," obviously that one's inspired by the verse in question. But, like, with “Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace,” I had a story I wanted to tell & an idea I wanted the title to convey and I said, "You know what this song needs to really wheatpaste it to the wall is some Old Testament prophecy." So I went and hung out with Ezekiel for a while.

How do you reckon with having such a personal style -- I suppose some have called it "autobiographical" -- when writing about something like religion?

It seems to me that whatever one's response to ideas of religion & spirituality are, they're necessarily personal. That's true for me, anyway: my natural bent is to personalize a story. So in the presence of stories that, for some people, are the secrets of the universe, it's even easier to experience the stories & ideas & words as very personal things. And, of course, as you've noted, there's some autobiography at work in the record: this album is the closest since The Sunset Tree to outright autobiography, though I don't guess I'll ever do an "every song directly from my life" album again. Although, who knows, it's like jinxing things to say "I won't ever do x or y or z again" -- you end up doing exactly that. Like, immediately.

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"I'm kind of surprised, in 2009, that ‘the internet' is still something we talk about; to me it feels like being asked, circa 1948, whether I think the automobile is here to stay. Yes! The internet is an indispensable part of having a career in the music business now."
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You're about to embark on a pretty extensive tour. “Psalm 40:2” seems to cast a pretty scathing portrait of traveling, among other things. Is touring something you look forward to?

Delicate question -- I mean, the thing is, I really look forward to playing shows. I love to sing and play, I love my band. I love that people enjoy our shows. I love the feeling of communion there. But to be honest I have a real dread of touring: it's disruptive in the extreme. I am a private person who likes to write songs and lead a fairly quiet life. I like to spend time with my wife. I like to cook in my kitchen. I like to play music alone in the house. I avoid hanging out with people.

Tour pretty much forces a total reconfiguring of all my stay-comfortable day-to-day stuff, and usually at the beginning of tour I'm pretty near to having a nervous breakdown. My fear of having to talk to people skyrockets. But since 2004 I have discovered the secret advantage to this: in that kind of state, I can write good songs. I just have to find the time & place to write them, and they'll come. So I deal with tour by writing, these days. It has made me kind of a stereotypical touring musician type. At any given hour of the touring day, I'm as likely to already be playing guitar as not.

[Photo: Chrissy Piper]

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