John Darnielle, singer-songwriter behind the Mountain Goats, took time out of his schedule in March 2025 to do the Broad Sound interview—a set list of 12 questions generated by Broad Sound contributors and friends—with editor-in-chief Ethan Warren. (Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.)
EW: Would you tell me about a work of art that you fell in love with when you were very young?
JD: I mean, childhood is long, right? But The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis came along at a time in my life—my father and I were reading the entire Chronicles of Narnia together, and I liked that one better than he did. He liked The Voyage of the Dawn Treader a lot, but I thought that was a little long, and The Magician’s Nephew was kind of mean. And if you’re a child reading Lewis, you begin to really sense the big places that art can go. The scene where they crucify Aslan, when the mice come to chew away at the ropes? Mind you, I haven’t read this book since I was seven years old, and I didn’t see any of the movies because there shouldn’t be movies of these books. That’s another shtick. But I have not revisited these stories once, and I still remember the mice.
Do you have a feeling about whether you read The Magician’s Nephew first, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
I don’t like any retconning stuff. They were issued in the order they were issued in. This is a Catholic stance. You gave me this, and so that’s what I’m reading. I’m not here to reorder it some other kind of way.
I completely agree.
I mean, the other thing is, for any scene in the entire story to be first besides the scene with Mr. Tumnus just feels really short-sighted. Entering snowy Narnia ought to be your first view of the whole thing, right? It’s not about plots or anything else. Who cares? Doesn’t really matter what order the stories are told in. What matters is your first view, your first look. And the first look you want is the wardrobe.
That is a fabulous answer.
Thank you. I take it you have strong opinions about this?
Oh, I absolutely do, but we simply don’t have time.
Very funny that I brought that one up.
Could you tell me about an early creative project of yours?
Project. [pause] I mean, I wrote short stories when I was six, but when I think of a project, I think of something that’s more than just an individual thing. I don’t know when I started doing larger projects.
Well, I’d love to hear about a six-year-old’s short story, if you recall one. That’s a project to me.
That’s easy. So I wanted—and I don’t know why—for my seventh birthday a typewriter. Well, electric typewriters were on their way in, right? And narratively, this is when I’m living in Milpitas [California]—I don’t like to dwell on this stuff too much, but here’s what happened: my parents divorced. We moved in with my stepfather across town in San Luis Obispo. He got a job in San Jose. We moved it to Milpitas. He became abusive. We fled and lived with my dad for part of a year. My sense of time there gets pretty weird, but we lived with Dad for a while, then we moved in with my grandmother. Then my stepfather came back and said things would be better, and we were reunited with him, right? This is the order of things.
So in Milpitas, which is going to be the place from which we flee within a year, I asked for a typewriter. And I got one, and it was an old Royal typewriter, because electric typewriters were on their way in, and manuals were all being phased out. So I got an old Royal that probably cost my mom five bucks or something like that. But it was majestic. It was a big, heavy machine, and I put a piece of paper—a piece of stationery—into it that had a Jaguar on it, and I typed the words ‘The Magic Bugle,’ and I typed the sentence, “Once, a bugle stood in the window of a store that sold brass goods.” That was the sentence: “Once, a bugle stood in the window of a store that sold brass goods.”
Solid.
I wrote a story that, like a lot of my stories when I was younger, once the plot gets underway, I didn’t know what to do. So very abruptly, with a magical shift—the way a lot of children’s stories do—the bugle runs away from the shop. It sounded like a Grimm fairy tale kind of thing, but my mom read it and sent it to my dad, and my dad, who taught English, made a great show of reading that line to his freshman comp students and telling them that if they wrote a sentence that good they would get a B in the course at minimum. And I was young, and really flattered by this. I mean, it probably took me less than an hour. Like I say, the word project is an interesting word to me, because I don’t think I actually get going on things that take longer than one sitting for a long time.
Sub-question: do you have a favorite first sentence in literature?
Yes. It’s a very long sentence. [ed. note: the following is delivered with perfect Chaucerian pronunciation]
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
That’s just a sentence! It’s in verse. It’s in Middle English. I think I got it all—it’s been a minute. But that’s the beginning of the “General Prologue” by Geoffrey Chaucer, a beautiful man. And it’s an incredible sentence, as sentences go. It’s one I like to think of, because people imagine literature as being on this sort of modernization curve, but modern literature will never catch up with Geoffrey Chaucer. This is a guy for whom the language is new, and all he can ask is: how far can I push it?
I had a time in my life when I had that memorized, too, and I never thought about it as a sentence. That is fascinating.
But it is a sentence! It’s all these dependent clauses, and when you get to Thanne longen folk, it is the most amazing moment. He’s established all of these astrological and seasonal conditions on which something is going to happen, but then he brings it into the heart, right? He’s talking about the world—April rains, and the birds sleep, and all this stuff, all these things happen in the world, right? It’s the world. The world doesn’t have feelings. And then longen folk to goon on pilgrimages … The hooly blisful martir for to seke/That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke. That’s the most amazing thing for this guy, to establish all these physical conditions. And you’ll see that this connects to Mountain Goats stuff; I have so many nature references, people talk about it. And the trick—or not trick, but the technique—is to take it from something that we all can agree on to something that only a narrator can do. It really is this universalization of the pilgrim’s journey. It’s a favorite thing of mine.
I’m not going to ask more Chaucer questions. I’m going to go back to the questionnaire.
Oh, really?
I could go down so many branches here. But let’s stick to what I have.
I thought you meant, Oh, he won’t stop. And you’re right, I won’t stop!
This one’s a little heady: if you could imagine that your work—I don’t know if this is Mountain Goats, if it’s the novels, or if it’s all of a piece—but if your work finds the one person in the world it is most perfectly suited for, what effect would you hope it has on them?
I mean, I question the premise. I have a spiel that I’ve said so many times that I hate to bore people who’ve heard it before. But work is not suited for somebody. People do things with work they find, right? And we know this. Everybody knows this instinctively. You know that a song you didn’t expect—that’s not in a style you’re used to, that isn’t your thing—catches you on the right day, or at the right point of your life, but it doesn’t catch you. You caught it, right? You happen to cross it. And then the conditions of your mind and spirit were such that you were able to utilize that. The text—the song, the story—doesn’t do anything to you at all. You do stuff with it. It’s there. And not every text is going to be something that you’re able to do stuff with. Not everything is apt for everybody, and that’s fine, but the agency lies in the listener, and in the reader, not in the artist, who literally just made something. I’m not making something for a listener, I’m just making something. So if I’m making it for any listener, it’s for the people who like what I do. Except that’s not even true either, because as soon as I do something that sounds like I already knew I could do that—well, I don’t want to do that anymore. I want to be growing. So I don’t have an ideal listener. An ideal listener is a person who wants to work with the—I use the word text. I’m a po-mo [post-modern] guy. But as a person who wants to do something with a text in front of me, whether that’s for emotional purposes or intellectual purposes or the purposes of play—I think it’s all play, in the end.
I don’t think in terms of an ideal listener because music is so personal, and what we do with it is so variable, both from person to person and throughout your life—your needs from music change, right? This is why (I’ll go on about this stuff all day) as you age, if you’re on Facebook, you find that your friends from high school start talking about how music stopped being good, right? And it’s not that it stopped being good, it’s that they didn’t adjust their expectations for what music was going to do for them. Because when you are younger, and music hits you so hard, emotionally, a lot of that is neurological. Because there’s a lot going on in your brain, in your life, right? That music meets that need. If you insist on saying that music has to mean to you what it meant to you when you were 17, you are doomed to be frustrated, because you’re only going to be 17 once. What music does for you, and what you do with it, grows over time. You can choose to view that as a decay, but it’s not.
So in that way, you can’t really have an ideal listener. The listener is going to be so variable in what their needs are that all you can do is focus on the work itself and stay out of the notion of an ideal listener.
To quote you back at you, I think you once described it as suggesting the builder of a house did not save your life.
Yeah, of course. People don’t come up to the builder and say, Thank you for keeping me warm every day of the year, right? But he did that. He kind of did, but he didn’t mean to. He doesn’t know you. And people think of art as more personal—and it is—but what’s more personal than your safety? So it’s just different, and your safety is so primal to you that you don’t spend any time thinking about what it means to have a roof over your head, unless you have spent a night or two without one, right? So then you might say, Wow, I’m so grateful there’s no leak in this roof. But that, I think, is the analogy. It’s not like I’m never thinking how people might respond, but I’m certainly not doing it while I’m writing. I’m just trying to make the thing. And I have strong words for any artist who, if they’re in mid-composition, would go, Oh, they’re gonna love this—heal yourself, man.
Do you play favorites among your own body of work?
It varies from time to time. I don’t spend much time thinking about it. When I run across stuff for whatever reason, then sometimes I’ll go, Oh, it’s kind of good, actually. It turns out that I have darlings, if I look through the list of titles. Or if I’m getting a master set together for tour, then I’ll go, Oh, that one was nice. It might not even be something that we’re gonna wind up playing, but I’ll look and I’ll say, Oh, yeah, that was super good. The biggest songs in the catalog, like “This Year,” “No Children,” “Best Ever Death Metal Band [in Denton]”—I’m really proud of these songs, but what I’m mainly proud of about them is not from a craft standpoint, but that they mean a lot to people. That’s very meaningful to me, to have made things that are useful to people. That’s huge. But the ones that I tend to prize, just on an aesthetic level, are seldom the ones that people are yelling for. I like the ones that are a little harder to pin down, maybe have weird endings. Like the second song on Jenny from Thebes—I don’t think anybody’s ever mentioned it—“Ground Level,” it wound up being called. It’s kind of a formal exercise in some ways. I really like a successful formal exercise. There’s a line—I can’t ever remember who it is: The love that masquerades as pure technique. When I’ve been successful on a technical level, I think, Oh, yeah, you managed to tell a story just by outlining the diagram of a house. That’s what I like.
When it feels like something isn’t working, how do you know whether to keep at it and find a solution, or walk away from the idea?
There is no firm answer, because you could be wrong. I’m fairly quick to say, Okay, this isn’t going anywhere. But I don’t usually throw stuff away. I have all these notebooks, and I’ll keep the file so I can harvest lines or whatever. That’s how I think of it: you’ve made sort of a creature, and if the creature turns out not to be usable, you can still take its kidneys and put them into a new creature. But you develop a feel for it. You should have an intensely self-critical mindset from a standpoint of craft, but you should be depersonalizing it as much as you can, not thinking about whether it says anything about you. It’s just what you’re doing. The comparison I always use is: if you work Monday through Friday, some days you’re crushing your job, and other days you’re just not. Maybe you have the same amount of sleep—it’s not that you’re hungover, some days you just don’t seem to have as much reserve to draw on. And everybody who’s worked a job knows this, whether it’s coding, whether it’s washing dishes, whatever it is, you show up [saying], “I don’t know what’s going on with me. My heart’s not in it today.” Well, when you’re writing, it’s the same thing. You sit down and write, and you go, Well, that’s kind of good. Don’t know if it really gets where I’m trying to go, leave it alone, come back to it. You should keep most everything to a certain point, and you can always look at it again. You can always harvest from it.
I’ll still work on it and finish it. I’ll go, This is not going to be anything. This is nothing, but I’ll finish it anyway. I work fairly fast most of the time, so it depends on what you’re doing—that’s with a song. With a novel, you may have to throw away half a year—or a full year, or more—of work repeatedly, once you realize that’s not the form it’s trying to take. I think novels are like sculpture; I assume sculptors over and over again go, Well, this isn’t it. And they crush the clay back into slurry and do it again, right? And I do that. But novels, I’ve thrown away hundreds of thousands of words getting to where I want to go.
I always think of the novelist John Irving, who wrote one of his thousand-page books, then sat up with a start in the middle of the night and said, “It has to be in first person!”
Those middle of the night interventions from your brain, with novels especially, are a huge thing. Because making a novel, you do wind up saying, Well, maybe I should do this, because you learn so much about yourself, and you never get it perfect, so you always want to do it again. Like I say, I write songs pretty quickly. There was a song for In League with Dragons called “Witch Academy.” I kept flogging that song. I really wanted this to be a good song. It was not a good song. That’s all there was to it. The reason I wanted it is because “Witch Academy” is a great song title.
It is!
But once I got going on the song, I kept insisting on keeping that idea. It was a good and tender story, but the song itself didn’t cohere. And we took that one through pre-production. I don’t know if you know what this term, pre-production, means—in pre-production, you record versions of the songs that are not for keeping so you can hear what they’re going to sound like in the studio. And we did pre-production takes of “Witch Academy,” and I probably still have them on a hard drive. It’s just not getting there, so we didn’t do it. But it varies. I think I knew most of the way with that song, it wasn’t getting there. But I wanted to try.
How do you know whether to abandon it? Well, are you getting anything out of it? If you’re getting something out of trying to make it, it doesn’t really matter if it’s going to succeed or not, because working is good and it pays dividends in your later craft.
Great perspective. How do you manage disagreement between collaborators?
There’s not a protocol for that. It varies from collaborator to collaborator and from time to time. One way you can manage that is to say, if somebody disagrees with me, “You’re right.” That’s what you say. “You know what, I’m going to give you that.” You do that strategically if you’re in a band environment. I’m not going to insist that I win all the battles. I’m going to give some ground here and there and prioritize what’s important to me, but then be willing to say, “I’m not the only perspective here.”
The short answer is: you should be humble, right? It’s humility of some kind. And it’s a lifelong discipline. You can ask anybody who worked with me 20 years ago, you couldn’t tell John Darnielle shit. Didn’t matter. Say, “Oh, John, synth would sound good”—I know we’re not having any synthesizers. A whole lot of arbitrary stuff like that. Over time, I’ve grown. I still have a few of those, but not many. In fact, I buck the other way. When somebody will say, “Oh, if we put a ukulele on this, it’ll sound like a Hawaiian song”—what else might we do with a ukulele? Can we use that instrument in a way that doesn’t sound coy, or branded as from any particular place? I get more interested in that. But yeah, in getting along with collaborators, you should prioritize your own humility, and seek harmony. I think seeking harmony is more important than being true to yourself, because yourself is going to change anyway.
I was very fearful, for many years, of, like, “My vision is going to get compromised.” And there are records—not full albums, but there’s tracks I could tell you where I didn’t shoot down the thing I didn’t like here, and then I didn’t get what I wanted, and I don’t like the song for that reason. I hear it, I go, “That’s not what I wanted from that song.” That’s one of the things that’s going to happen as you learn to give ground. But the other thing that happens is your collaborators and you grow together. And once you’re sharing a vision, once you really have joined in the vision, then it won’t matter. When it’s something that you didn’t expect, or think of yourself, you still like it, because you’re all in pursuit of a common vision. But it’s not always that way. This is a dynamic process.
This is a funny question to ask of a musician, so maybe I’m going to ask it of you as a novelist: do you listen to music as part of the creative process?
When I’m writing books, sometimes I’ll listen to music. It depends on the music; it depends on the book. But when it gets super intense in novel writing—writing a novel, there’s so much to it, you have this big story you have to keep track of, you have characters you have to keep track of, and then you have to be doing something new. Even if you’ve outlined it, you know where it’s going, you’re making the sentences that make that happen. And at some point in that process, most of the time, on a given day, I will just impulsively turn off. It’s like, No, I can’t have anything else in my head right now. But this is also a challenge that every writer has faced. I revised Wolf in White Van with a baby rolling on the pages that I was putting together on the floor. But I wasn’t listening to music, because the sentences have to have a music of their own. I will listen sometimes to jazz, or classical music. Very little with lyrics. Some jazz can be good. It can set a tone. But generally, when I’m listening to music, I’m trying to engage it, right? And when I’m writing, I am engaging the writing. So any music that’s on is literally background. It’s like distracting noise from my tinnitus, you know?
I love that idea, that the writing needs its own music.
Sentences are what I do, right? If you like my books, it’s because you like the sentences. So that’s what they’re made of. Not everybody is a “sentences” writer. Some people are storytellers. I’m actually better at telling stories in my songs. My books are about the individual sentences, and the music of them, and the music of the paragraphs. And I can’t do that when I have other rhythms functioning.
Is there a project that you didn’t make that you would like to come back to?
I don’t hold them in my heart. I’m looking in my files now as I talk to you. Nothing that I regret, you know? And in part, that’s because I view all of them as something I could come back to. I got the idea for—when was this file made? 2014, so 11 years ago, I had an idea for a tetralogy, a fantasy book. And it was a fairly elaborate idea. Without giving you the title of it, I’ll just read you a bit.
Once, not so very long ago, we lived in the warmth of the sun, and ate the fruit of the tree, and drank cool water that flowed down from the mountains. In those days—Then there’s a bracket that tells me I need to fill that in with stuff. “What was I like before I came here?” asked Thomas. His mother looked wonderingly into his eyes. He was such a smart kid. “You were born here,” she said. After she’d drawn the curtain on his chamber, she went to the well at the center of their dwelling, trying to find her way through the fog that always clouded her mind when she’d been remembering stories from the surface. She knelt at the well and drank, and the dust filled her mouth, slaking no thirst, the runoff clouding in the air and irritating her eyes until they filled with empty tears. When she rose to her feet, she felt the same. The well was only there for when you needed to prove something to yourself that you already knew. Still, you tried it several times a day, just in case.
So that was from a big thing. I know what the concept is for it, and it’s a good concept. I really doubt I’m ever going to get back to it. It’s a lot to commit yourself to. But I have other massive ideas that have come up since then.
What is the worst advice you’ve ever gotten?
I consider most relationship advice from anybody bad, because I think people don’t realize this—that anybody who’s giving you advice about your relationship is telling you what they would do if they were in your relationship. But they couldn’t be in your relationship because they’re not you, right? So they’re speaking from their own pain at all times. If you’re saying you need this help, what you need is empathy. But they’ll tell you how to act. They don’t know. They’re not in it. This is the case with a lot of things. It’s like when people give you career advice—unless they work in your field, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about. But I don’t retain any specific memories of bad advice.
What is the work of art that you have consumed the most times?
It’s probably either The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or The Wizard of Oz. Oh, you know, that’s not even true. And here’s why.
So I don’t watch things a bunch of times. When I hear that people are, like, re-watching The Wire or whatever, I’m like, “Have you watched everything else?” Because I love The Wire, but I’m not giving 13 hours—or more—of my life to something I’ve already seen. I might read War and Peace again, because it was so amazing. I’ll probably read [The Brothers] Karamazov again at some point, because I’m told that it bears lots of rereadings. But I almost never re-read because I have so many books that I haven’t gotten to, and I’m never going to get to. So I try to get through those. There’s records, but I grow so much, and I have this real aversion to nostalgia, that I feel sheepish about listening to stuff I liked 20 years ago. I wouldn’t want to get caught doing that when there’s new stuff to hear.
However, my son has an infinite tolerance for repetition. Infinite. So I have heard the Godspell revival CD—
[ecstatic gasp]
—with Hunter Parrish, Lindsay Mendez, and Nick Blaemire—I have heard that thing no fewer than 300 times. And I think it’s a masterpiece. That whole cast is so miraculous. Lindsay Mendez, I worship the ground she walks on, and Parrish is incredible. And Nick Blaemire, he’s great too. Everybody in there is good.
So I think it would be something that my son got into in the car, because I drive him to and from school. I’m pretty sure Godspell was the one we did the most, and the longest. But we’ve also done a lot of Wicked. But because Wicked is multiple CDs, I haven’t heard the whole thing all the way through so much as I’ve heard the first CD a lot. Done My Fair Lady quite a great deal. And all of the Basement Jaxx records. We got very into those for a while. But I’m pretty sure that Godspell takes the cake.
Godspell is quite a work of art.
It’s funny, because—it’s really true that you can’t argue with success. Who am I to critique Wicked?
Oh yeah, composed by the same guy [Stephen Schwartz], right?
But the thing is, Godspell’s so special, right? Whereas Wicked, there’s stuff in there—I mean, if I had written it—and I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and I’ll never—I won’t make in my life what Wicked makes in a week. So who am I? But at the same time, like that constant redeployment of the phrase making good, I find it cloying. But I love “Defying Gravity.” Utter masterpiece, right? But Godspell is seamless. Godspell is just a miracle.
Yeah, I remember sitting in my seat at Wicked and just having an okay time, and then “Defying Gravity” hits, and I just have an out of body experience.
This is a question that any Mountain Goats fan is going to know you’re not going to say “No” to, but: do you consider yourself a spiritual person?
Yes.
Great.
I mean, “spiritual person” is a strange question. What does that mean? I think it’s the halfhearted way of asking, Do you believe in the soul? That’s what that question is. Spiritual could mean anything. But I think it’s asking whether you believe in the existence of the metaphysical world, right? Yes, I do.
I think that question is sort of like—it doesn’t want to put somebody on the spot about big questions. Because any spirituality asserts a number of things that can’t be proven. And we live in an age when we really don’t believe in the things that can’t be proven. Collectively, we don’t, and individually, most of us don’t. We try, but we sort of leaned pretty hard into positivism, and that’s how you get to, Are you a spiritual person? Because it means, Do you believe there’s more to us than just us? I do. I believe in collective energy. I believe in all kinds of things. I also worship Jesus.
Finally, my six-year-old has a question for you. He’s at school. But I told him at dinner last night—
Do you have more children than the six-year-old, or just a six-year-old?
I’ve got an eight-, a six-, and a four-year-old.
Three!
Yep.
We only had two, and I’m very happy with them, but you know these people who have like six when they’re young? You go, Yeah, you didn’t get to have a twenties, but now you have six kids, you’re gonna have grandchildren running around, and it’s gonna be pretty sweet, right?
I had a twenties and three kids. I’m pretty happy with it.
Good, good.
But the six-year-old is desperate to know—and I’m sure you’ve answered this elsewhere, but he wanted me to ask you personally—why the name the Mountain Goats?
I mean, you have to have a band name. And I was listening to a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song called “Big Yellow Coat,” or maybe just “Yellow Coat.” And usually I only quote the one line, but let me look up the full verse while I’m here. I’ll do the whole thing for you.
A 40 gallon hat and some polka-dot shoes
Tomato pickle and onion juice to drive away my blues
A bright red leather suit, a trip in a motor boat
And the strike I caused on the waterfront when I fell out in my yellow coat
And then he just vamps:
Hey now, stick with it. Don’t quit it.
You’re bound to get it
Made out of goat skin, frog skin,
Laid out in milk and gin.
The people quit the scene like the devil was loose.
The crowds turned green and let down lemon juice.
What walks on two feet and looks like a goat?
That crazy Screamin’ Jay in his bright yellow coat
Stick with it. Don’t quit it.
Bound to get it
Made out of goat skin, frog skin
Laid out in milk and gin.
Here’s the verse, and you’ll hear the Mountain Goats being born in this verse:
I took a plane out Midwest to see my Uncle Joe
We ran into some real bad weather, ice, rain, and snow
50 million bulldogs, 20 mountain goats
All gathered round at sundown to see my yellow coat.
I used to have this magazine. It was a Surrealist publication. I’ll never know the name of it, but Surrealists got very interested in the blues as a form, and in how a lot of blues lyrics would really be doing surreal work, and tucking it into this good-time music so it just floats right past you. You sort of understand it intuitively instead of analyzing it, and that last verse—it’s one of the most absurd scenarios you can imagine. And you buy into it because it just flows along so naturally. So anyway, he says 50 million bulldogs, 20 mountain goats gathered around at sundown to see my yellow coat. The way he says mountain goats in the song really landed on me when I was making these early tapes.
And then I read about mountain goats and learned that many of them plummet to their death every year because they can climb nearly vertical surfaces. So they’ll see a mountain peak, a mountain wall across from what they’re on, and go, I can make that one, no problem. So you die. And this spoke to me at a very basic level.
This interview is included in Broad Sound Spotlights: The Sunset Tree at 20, available now in paperback at Amazon and as a downloadable PDF at BroadSoundStore.com
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