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Are Mountain Goats Really Vegan? A Chat With John Darnielle

by Jessie Nelson
08/03/2006

The Mountain Goats' music deals with thematic material drawn from mythology to the mundane flow of everyday life. He begins his latest tour at the Athens Popfest on Thursday, August 9. This tour is in support of the new album Get Lonely, which was produced by Scott Solter and is being released by 4AD Records. I had the opportunity to ask John Darnielle some questions about his new album, what he thinks of his music, his upcoming tour, and his return to Athens.

AE: What's your favorite sound in nature?

JD: A herd of cows walking slowly across a field... it's a subtle sound, you hear their breath and the jostling of their bodies, and the effort of their movement.

AE: What writer/novelist would you say your sound most closely resembles?

JD: These days? Maybe Horace in his more contemplative moments. Back in the day a bit for me it was more Juvenal though. All that salt and vinegar, like an eastern Carolina barbeque. I do still love the eastern bbq though. Drink it straight from the bottle.

AE: Where is the perfect setting to listen to your music?

JD: People tell me they drive across country listening to my stuff a lot! I think other people's opinions are better than mine on this question. I would assume a fair number of people enjoy it alone late at night and that pleases me a lot.

AE: What political cause/organization would you most closely associate yourself with?

JD: Farm Sanctuary is my favorite but I've got a bunch more - Rock for Kids, Nature Conservancy, Vegan Outreach. I'm passionate about women's rights too but the whole movement is so fragmented and marginalized now that there's no one organization moving the cause forward, which I consider a shame - people seem to have really taken a learned-from-sitcoms-and-talk-radio approach ("get over it! free speech! hey, it's human nature!" etc etc etc) to thinking about the important questions that the struggle for equality raised. Unfortunately it's hard to talk about this stuff and not sound boring, but I think the general misogyny of the culture is really ridiculous.

AE: What is your most distinct memory of Athens?

JD: I wrote "No Children," or the first verse & chorus at least, while en route to Athens & in an Athens Days Inn... first time I'd written anything worth keeping in a hotel!

AE: What is the most maddening aspect of being on tour?

JD: Ha, every answer I might give would sound like the privileged bitching of a guy with a sweet job. So, there is no maddening aspect! It's all awesome! It's not even a job, it's a nonstop party! These are all lies but it's not cool to complain about getting to play music for a living, really - people will rightly say "hey, feel free to work my job if you don't like touring." I do really dislike having to be away from my wife for long periods of time; I'm the cook in our house, and cooking is a really important part of my spiritual life, to put it all hippie: I feel like I'm really being myself when I'm fixing us dinner.

AE: What do you like to eat while touring?

JD: Red licorice. Black licorice too but thick red licorice ropes (which I cannot find in the south, they seem to be mainly a west coast thing) are my jam right now, I can & will eat 'em all day.

AE: What does Pop music mean to you? (Popular, poppy, shit?)

JD: I just understand "pop" to mean "popular" - I've always felt a little aloof about calling generally-major-key indie music "pop." I understand the impulse, which springs I think from how indie used to be kind of a macho dudes-with-guitars thing and then there was a poppy sort of impulse coming from K Records and E6, but I think that pop impulse is also somewhat retro - real pop has to always exist in the now (Britney, Shakira, also lots of that corporate emo stuff) I think.

AE: Where does your primary inspiration from songwriting come from?

JD: Probably just from enjoying the songs I listen to so much, wanting to be part of that dialogue - responding to stuff I've loved by adding my hopefully-pleasant few words. Partly writing songs for me is figuring out what actually moves me: if I write a song and it gets to me, then I learn more about what I like.

AE: What do you think of the current state of the world.

JD: Oh, it's sorry, but it's always been sorry: everybody always thinks "this age is the worst age ever," most religions sorta bank on that whole "this must be the end!" feeling but where you've got people you're gonna have awful quarreling. That's just the way the world is, all you can do is try to keep your little corner of it friendly, maybe encourage a few other people to think what they can't do to do the same thing.

AE: How would you compare your new album to the rest of your collection?

JD: Well, it's quieter and darker, I think: I consider a lot of my old stuff kind in-your-face, you know, a guy hollerin' lyrics real fast. The new one has to me a much darker groove, for lack of a better word: all the songs are sort of in a cave down in the earth waiting for light to break through, but all that really comes is some rain. It's kind of the album I've always wanted to make in that sense, my favorite records are always really sad, down records.

AE: How has your sound evolved over the years?

JD: Well, I've gotten a little better on the guitar, and obviously I play with good musicians & producers now where I used to just play guitar and sing alone. I take a lot more pleasure in the just-music end of things now; there's a song on the new album called "moon over goldsboro" where to me the most fun part of the recording is hearing me & the drummer sort of reacting to each other, trying to really corral the exact feeling we were shooting for (vocals drums & guitar on that one were tracked live). Getting to that point, where the music is partly about people listening to each other and responding, that's the most pleasant evolution for me.