Interview: John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats

It’s hard to know where to start when introducing John Darnielle, the songwriter, guitarist, and singer for the (these days) duo who record under the name The Mountain Goats. If you’ve not heard them, you really ought to. The Mountain Goats’ songs, spread across their 10-plus CDs, are among the most literate, subtle, powerful, joyous, sad, and deeply felt music being recorded today. From their earliest days recording on staticky equipment to the high-quality production of recent albums like 2006’s Get Lonely and 2005’s breakthrough The Sunset Tree, their music has been uncommonly smart and sophisticated.

Throughout those CDs and songs, John Darnielle’s lyrics are shot through with references to horror, horror movies, and the ways in which we can understand the joys and traumas of our lives through the lens of horror.

Darnielle was nice enough to recently take some time out of his busy schedule to answer a few questions about his relationship to horror and how it had influenced his songwriting.

DBS: What’s your earliest horror memory? What got you interested in horror?

JD: Well, there are two that I can think of, and the first one would have to have been in response to something too early to remember: it’s my glow-in-the-dark Creature from the Black Lagoon snap-together kit, which I got when all the dudes I knew were getting into model cars. I didn’t really care at all about cars, and I especially didn’t see the point in spending a lot of time studying a schematic and gluing things together when the result was something that didn’t even do anything, you know? Whereas the Creature kit, that thing took like fifteen minutes, and at the end of it you had a totally wicked glow-in-the-dark monster for your shelf.

The other thing is from the early seventies when my family lived in Milpitas, shortly after the divorce. Things were fragmenting in my house – the new house had really loose rules, and I stayed up pretty late for a seven-year-old. Back in those days, local stations showed horror movies late at night on weekends, sometimes hosted by some local dude dressed up, sometimes just with the station announcer assuming a scary voice. Anyhow, I liked watching the weird no-budget stuff they aired and the one that really burrowed under my skin was called “The Crawling Eye.” I could never connect its opening five minutes to the rest of the movie, but that’s probably becaue the opening five minutes put the fear of God on me – it was some dudes rock climbing somewhere in Europe or Japan or Nepal or something, and one guy needs to be raised up to a level where the other guys are at, and one of them gets the brilliant idea to have him wrap his climbing rope around his head. That was the way I understood it, anyway – I was only seven. Anyhow, when they haul him up, he’s headless, and you don’t see it – you just hear the one guy screaming about how the body has no head. Scared me so bad I couldn’t sleep, had to talk to my mom about the whole thing just to calm down, etc. I kinda secretly-even-to-myself liked the sort of visceral horror I had of the body arriving headless on the scene – of how much that would ruin an expedition, and of the senselessness of the whole sequence, since it didn’t seem related to anything.

DBS: What draws you to horror? What’s interesting to you about the genre?

JD: I think it’s the whole ancient notion of other orders which seem incomprehensible to our own way of thinking, and how there’s something really basic and primal in that. Lots of the horror I like sets Reality As We Know It against Another Version Of Reality and lets them have at it, and there’s something more satisfying in the escape I get from that than in, say, your possible-futures thing that science fiction’s into. Over time all old horror changes its flavor too – stuff that scared everybody becomes campy and then just moves into some nether-realm, sort of becoming its own subject in a way, and I’m really into that: how you can watch what’s left of the Edison kinetoscope of Frankenstein and just feel like everybody involved must have been insane, or from space. I like the lost quality of the whole genre, how everybody who writes & reads & engages it is in someway absenting himself from here & now – it’s kind of radical, I think.

DBS: What is the last horror movie you’ve seen?

JS: Well - I saw Zombie Honeymoon not too too long ago, and I went on a big kick of renting Takashi Miike movies. There’s an annual horror festival here in Durham, the Nevermore fest, and I went to a whole bunch (though I guess that was a year ago now) – Three Extremes, which was great, and Death Trance, which was also awesome. Recently I bought The Call of Cthulhu which is pretty great.

DBS: The moments of horror in your songs seem to grow organically out of what’s happening to the characters. That is, the horror isn’t external to the characters lives, its not high-concept horror in the way in might be in a movie, but instead comes from the characters and their lives. Do you see horror as happening that way - as being prosaic, quotidian, always ready to spring forth? Does it pervade our lives?

JD: Yeah, I mean – I think like a lot of guys who loved monsters when they were kids, I was sort of disappointed to have to admit that no monster’s ever going to just come out the woods or the chimney or the cellar and fuck everything up. Part of that, I think, is identifying with the primal part of monsters like the Blob, which just kill indiscriminately, unintentionally even – the Thing is like this too. That urge, that identification, is given voice I think when slasher movies get big – then you have people acting like monsters. I think really though that horror is ultimately a way of describing reality that’s more satisfying than the documentary approach, and that some of the best horror movies are really clever about seeming as though they’re not actually describing reality in any unreal way.

DBS: Tallahassee strikes me as the most directly “horror” of all your albums - you’ve got song titles that allude to horror films, reference horror plot points (the way “bad luck comes in from tampa” and “we have bad dreams the night he rolls in,” being the way the people of England are effected when Dracula comes to London), horror images (”the cellar door is an open throat”) - I’d assume you did that intentionally to create a greater sense of the trauma of the relationship described. Can you talk about that a bit?

JD: Yeah, for sure – there’s a song called “The House That Dripped Blood” on the record, right, that’s a pretty naked nod to the kind of washed-out Dario Argento scene I was trying to sketch. Only I wanted to sort of mix Argento with, say, Raymond Carver – to play up the gore & the technicolor, right, since I think that’s how we experience traumatic events personally. This is where I’d start to contend that horror kinda is realism if I were feeling argumentative, but yeah – I think a realistic portrayal of an exploding relationship is more likely to resemble a Hammer Horror film, or a Takashi Miiki dream sequence, than a Robert Altman one.

DBS: A lot of your songs are about, or at least mention, memories coming back to the narrator or protagonist. This puts me in the mind of that Faulkner quote, “the past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” That strikes me as one of operational bases of the recent crop of Asian horror movies, like The Ring or The Grudge - this idea that the past is always hanging around with us, sometimes even inflicting itself on us, and we can’t escape it. Does that sense of horror and memory resonate with you?

JD: That Faulkner line is something I ran across when I was sixteen, before I could really understand it at all, and I think it had a pretty major effect on the way I think about stuff. For sure, I think one reason I enjoy all the Asian stuff these days (don’t forget Thailand, where the ghost story still reigns supreme) is that there’s this trope of unresolved trauma or injustice festering until it physically becomes how it emotionally seemed to its victims – memory’s such a confusing and strange phenomenon anyway that I think it seems like one of the few doors that, flung open, might actually unleash things that don’t have to obey physical laws.

DBS: You also mention ghosts a lot in songs. Presumably you’re not envisioning these ghosts as literal ghosts or at least not the caricature versions - white sheets with two eyeholes. The way you talk about ghosts seems connected to memory, too. How do you conceive of ghosts?

JD: You know, I am pretty partial to the hulking-sheet-with-eyeholes model, since it’s kinda scarier to me – that kind doesn’t speak or spell out its reasons for haunting people, which is what makes modern ghosts boring. A ghost whose backstory is too easy to understand is a ghost who can’t really scare anybody. I think when I picture a ghost, though, I think of sorta Greco-Roman or Shakespearian ideas – semi-visible, non-tangible forms or maybe invisible ones. Spirits, right, only “spirit” is just never gonna be as awesome a word as “ghost.”

There’s a memory connection for sure but I like best the ghosts that’re connected to memories about which the haunted people know nothing. Again, I like it when the point of horror is that things are more senseless than they seem. A lot of old Universal horror movies try really hard to wrap everything up sensible, and that’s their weakness – the power of those films is all in the moment when you see the monster first, and it seems to spring from somebody else’s memory of something you didn’t see. That sort of unknown-unconscious vibe.

DBS: You’ve said that Get Lonely started as an album of songs about monsters. How so? What was the idea there? What was the impetus?

JD: I don’t know what the impetus was other than that I have this real love of monsters. A few of the songs from that beginning survive - “If You See Light,” which is a riff on the Frankenstein monster hiding in a house while the villagers bombard the doors, and “New Monster Avenue,” which is sort of the tranquil suburban version of the same thing, only all the action’s internalized. I am actually still working out some of those themes. I would have done the whole album-about-monsters thing, but really, can you imagine trying to talk about this stuff with interviewers who don’t care about horror stuff? It would have made for a painful interview season, I tell you.

Having said that, yeah, I started writing songs for a new album last month, and what should pop up immediately but more monsters in various aspects. I think writing songs is kind of a monstrous activity, really – that when the Frankenstein monster yells at the flames and waves his hands to get them away, he’s actually singing a song about the fire. That is how I think of the whole process of writing, kinda.