February 23rd, Herbst Theatre, San Francsico – Noise Pop Festival

It’s a rare treat to see an artist you admire step into a totally different context — in this case, Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco in a conversation led by  American author Tobias Wolfe.

It may seem a strange pairing at first. On comparison, however, the author, known for his writing coined by some as “dirty realism,” and the songwriter, known for his concise narrative human dramas, have a great similarity both in the process and the consideration for their characters.

Tobias opened the conversation with a little history on how he became a fan of The Mountain Goats.  A man in his mid-sixties, he is not what you would expect a typical fan of contemporary music to be.  Apparently his daughter happened to be playing them in the car, and when Tobias heard the lyrics from the song “Up The Wolves:”

“I’m going to bribe the officials.
I’m going to kill all the judges.
it’s going to take you people years to recover from all of the damage.

our mother has been absent ever since we founded rome.
but there’s going to be a party when the wolf comes home.”

…he knew “this was his man.”  He describes hearing John Darnielle’s work as “…having a depth of beauty and quality, of being works of poetic compression full of implication…”  He was overtaken in that car ride with the thrill of discovery, as we all have felt at one time or another when hearing something that really resonates within us.

After this introduction, Darnielle walked on stage to thunderous applause, the audience clearly full of die-hard fans.  Despite his initial shyness, he quickly opened up with stories and anecdotes for almost two solid hours.  He spoke about his humble beginnings — living in a small town in Idaho with his wife, renting a place for $275 a month while working on unloading grain freight from the railway in his backyard.

Apparently, on The Corners, you can hear the trains passing in the background while he recorded the album on a tape deck he bought for two hundred bucks.

They went on to speak about Darnielle’s earlier influences.  He spoke about listening to the record collection of his stepfather, a jazz-head, and about finding a few mysterious pop 7-inches.  Lionel Popkin’s “Shining Moon” made a particularly strong impression on him, he said, adding that listening to it was like “understanding things that I had read about…and finally knowing what it meant.  I was an eight-year-old listening to ‘Shining Moon,’ and I was pretty sure that he was singing about sex.”

Tobias Wolfe quoted from another interview with John, where he has said that “the condition of music is greatly abstract.”  Wolfe was interested in having Darnielle elaborate on this because he had always loved “the explicity” of his lyrics.  The songwriter explained that what he found abstract was that people can take a mathematical construct and invoke feelings in someone else.  He related it to the Internet, something I found funny — that it is a construction of binary numbers yet is a vessel for so much expression.

The Mountain Goats have been blessed with a loyal following, prompting Wolfe to ask about how John dealt with the “shadow side of this,” when fans get a certain sense of who you are through your music and don’t allow for deviations.  He asked, “How do you react to people’s interperetations of your songs?”  To which Darnielle answered: “I have always felt it is not a writer’s place to say that someone’s interpretations of a song is wrong…so I try not to nail it down too hard as far as what it means…”  He then went on to share a story of how, on The Mountain Goats forums, some female fans had interpreted one of his songs as coming from the perspective of a rapist.  He admitted having to insist publicly that he had no interest in writing from this point of view and never would.

The conversation turned to Darnielle’s experince working at a psych ward as a nurse. Although this experience affected him and inspired him, he has, until recently, never used it as a source of narrative.  He has a hard “respect for patient confidentiality” and felt that people who are hostpitalized are at their most vulnerable, and that he could never turn around and relate their experience of that.  It would be a betrayal. His family, however, “was fair game,” expanding on his rough childhood and having love for people who are hard to love, and for the damaged.

On that somber note, Wolfe changed the topic to how he would like to go to his grave having played music with The Mountain Goats. Darnielle stood up, fetched his guitar, and sang “Woke Up New,” with Wolfe singing backup.  It was both adorable and incredibly touching.

The event wrapped up with a Q&A session. One of the more interesting questions was how Darnielle’s plethora of songs about bad relationships affect his wife?  He laughed and explained that hours after intimacy, he can be wrting a song about “No Children,” that she knows it is not about her and not to take it personally.

Another audience member was curious as to the source of inspiration for a lot of his series songs. John laughed and launched into a story about how, growing up in Claremont, California, everyone was always talking about how if they were going get out and move somewhere else, that somewhere else was always going to be better.  This formed the basis of his “Going To” series.  Apparently he had always scoffed at this attitude, until he actually started feeling that way himself.  He said a combination of hostility and empathy continue to form his songs today.

Eventually, he decided to release a record online with only digital distribution. Someone asked how he felt that went.  In his words: “Music is free… Period,” and the sooner the record companies stop attaching moral or ethical values to that fact, the better.  He talked about how it is much more sensible to appeal to the people who listen to his music and like it, to ask for five bucks.  And if the songs happened to move someone to tears, to ask for 20.  He stated that if he ran the music business, it would completely be on donation: “People like when you acknowledge that they don’t have to pay you.”

The next question was “How does your family react when you put them in your songs?”  His answer: “You would have to ask them, because I refuse to.”

He wrapped up the talk part of the evening relating how overwhelming and amazing it is, when he realized that through his music, people had been able to access their own pain.  “Art is for getting down in there,” he said, and being able to help people relate to something and find healing in that was the greatest gift.

He played a few songs, clearly accustomed to being on a stage with his bandmate.  But for someone who has written over 400 songs, he remembered both old and new quite well, and it was great to listen to him play his music after the incredibly intimate recounting of his life experiences.