Last Plane to Jakarta

John Darnielle gives up the goat to TDoL

Monday, November 9th, 2009 | interviewZ, musiX, pdX | 1 Comment

John Darnielle is just all right with me. He’s an intelligent guy, not to mention one of this generation’s great storytellers (musically speaking, of course), but still has this sort of—for lack of a better word—dude-ish humility about him … and he listens to metal.

Darnielle has been leading his Mountain Goats in one form or another since 1991—way back at a time when I was listening to this album religiously. Of course, those early lo-fi boombox recordings are a far cry from the lush sounds found on albums like We Shall All Be Healed and the latest The Life of the World to Come. The new record finds Darnielle naming each song after a verse in the Bible to let listeners know that “bigger things, darker things, heavier things” lie within. Plus, he says, it looks kinda bitchin’.

Musically, The Life is spare—guitar, bass, drums, occasionally only piano—which effectively directs more attention to the lyrics, though it doesn’t necessarily make for an exciting listen (honestly, I like Darnielle’s approach to music sometimes more than the music itself). I find the stripped-down The Life of the World In Flux (acoustic demo versions of the record, plus a couple of bonus tracks/verses) to be much more gritty and urgent.

What connects Darnielle to listeners (and separates him from many other songwriters) are his surprisingly candid takes on music, religion and even songwriting—all which can be found in his songs, on his music blog Last Plane to Jakarta, and in interviews. Over the years The Mountain Goats have built a cult-like following (sorta like those Finnish death metal bands Darnielle seems to love). The band will perform Wednesday, Nov. 11 at Portland’s Wonder Ballroom, which I’m guessing will be a religious experience for many.

Darnielle recently talked to TDoL about the Good Book as an actual good book, being an atheist who dislikes the company of atheists, and writing songs by the light of a television.

TDoL: On this album you delved deeper into the Bible than you ever have. What made you decide to go as far as to name every song after a Bible verse?
John Darnielle: Well, I’ve been doing that for a long time, just not as concentrated. I think the first one of those was a long time ago, a song on Nothing For Juice called “I Corinthians 13: 8-10,” which was a story about a couple of people during the Warsaw uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. It was a very in-the-moment story, and I wanted to have a song title that kind of, was like a big finger going there’s something bigger at issue here. I’ve occasionally written songs like that over the years. And I wrote one about a year ago, and I was like “Hey I kinda like that song.” And the next time I wrote a song I did the same thing, and once I had two then I started picturing a whole list of them and how bitchin’ that would look [laughs]. Everything tends to start with really simple aesthetics of what would look cool. I never trust people who say, “Yes I had this vision of making an album that would somehow be a big gesture.”

That might be the best thing I’ve ever heard a songwriter say …
So then somebody might say, “Oh so it didn’t have any deeper meaning.” No, it comes after. It’s like with any major life decision you make. It’s like, why did you take this job? It’s not like you sat down with a big chart and said, “What am I going to do in life, and how will this job help me?” It’s like no, you need a job so you go apply for your job and then later you can see the bigger things. And creating things is the same thing. I’m always telling people—and they don’t believe me—but when I try to write songs, the first couple lines are spat out while I’m watching television or something. I’ll pick up the guitar while I’m watching Law & Order and I’ll bark out some lines and then it goes somewhere. I assume that songwriters who sit down with a big vision first are the ones writing very boring songs. It sort of has to come from the playful part of your brain. It has to come from the little kid with finger-paints to be interesting to me.

You’re an atheist, right?
I am, but I’m an atheist who can’t really stand the company of other atheists [laughs]. You know what I mean? There’s nothing more tiresome than a person who never grew out of saying how awesome it is to have discovered that there’s no god. You know the kid who shows up in kindergarten and goes, “You know Santa is your mom and dad.”? The bully who hits that kid in the face is like my hero. I mean, I doubt strongly. I’m always open to a religious conversion, I would love to have a massive religious conversion, but I don’t see it happening.

Has anything come close?
You know, the experience of music—to be really corny about it—when you’re 17 and you find a song that you’re quite certain there was a definitive way for you to discover it so you could have this communion with the spirits inherent in this piece of music. The notion that that’s all just a biochemical or psychological process is kind of attractive to me. The notion that it’s more than a construct of the human psyche is not just really attractive to me, but seems to have some truth in it somewhere. But, I mean, once you start looking at any religious ideology it’s going to be drawn with so many problems by the time you get in even for a few minutes.

Some people “find God” after dealing with difficult times in their lives. Drug use and depression are both things you’ve faced in your life. How did you deal with it?
It’s the many thousands of things that I did after various times. I can’t really say, “Well, I had a wound and I treated it with peroxide.” It’s more like, “Well I had a lot of friends, and I had a lot of ideas, and I had a lot of other things to do, I had a job, and I had a guitar, and I had records, I had books, and I had a garden to work in.” I don’t think that climbing out of that situation is the same as dressing a wound. Drug abuse and depression are these stops, not even stops—they’re sort of lines on a long path.

Do you have a fascination with the Bible? Is “fascination” the right word?
[Laughing] I like the Bible. I enjoy reading it. I think it’s awesome. For one thing it’s pretty impossible to imagine an American writer that doesn’t have a very strong relationship to the Bible as a text. If you’re not interested as a writer I think you’re kind of in the bush league. It’s where the real writers go to start looking at how to grapple with questions, and what to do with them, and how to tell stories that raise interesting questions. And, honestly, to not answer them—because the Bible is a less didactic book than some of its followers seem to think. It’s more of a really sort of gory, really productive poem in my opinion.

Who are some of the storytellers that have spoken to you?
Joan Didion is a person I always name first and foremost. I think she’s the greatest living American writer. One thing is she doesn’t trust stories, and neither do I. The difference is she’s not a romantic and I am. When she tells a story, she enters immediately assuming that the story is not true and that it’s there for some purpose other than the purpose it would have you believe. Where I’m the kid who wants to believe in Santa and I want to take everything at face value first, for as long as I can. But the common obsession is the idea of the story as having some sort of totemic functionality. In recent years William Gass—talk about people who don’t trust stories. He refuses to tell a story outright. At all. It’s very hard to figure out what’s going on in his books, but I think underneath there’s this idea, there’s this sort of a trusting symbolism.

Are all of the stories in your songs true?
No, no … I mean, define true. It varies. Generally speaking, I’m a storyteller, but over the past four, five years I’ve been sort of experimenting with telling stories that are also true.

It seems like the songs have become more simple in recent years …
Again, it has to do with aesthetics. I think most of the poetry I admire tends to arrive at simplicity. A good writer learns to pare things down and do more with less. Not to make it weightier, but to use [words] better. When you first learn to cook you thrown in all the spices you can, and later you learn that if you just use these two and put them in the right way, that’s all you need. I think I’m more compact than I used to be. The songs aren’t likely to have as many words in them. [Laughing] I mean when you talk too much no one hears a word you say, right?

“Psalms 40:2″ - The Mountain Goats (The Life of the World to Come)

“Proverbs 6:27″ - The Mountain Goats (The Life of the World In Flux)

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