John Darnielle, day by day

Feasting and dancing and annotating the Mountain Goats songwriter's book of annotated lyrics, with 33 footnotes

Note: For ease of use this one works better on the Substack website, where you can just hover your cursor over the footnotes to read them.

I thought when it came out in December that there would be more fuss made over John Darnielle’s new book of selected and annotated lyrics, This Year. ¹ Maybe it was too soon after the press cycle for the latest Mountain Goats’ record (Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan ²), or too close to year-end-list season. Or maybe most critics just couldn’t find the bandwidth for a 540-page book of highly compressed verse accompanied by exegetical notes. It took me awhile too—I started writing this post in February and it’s now April.

That’s fitting, as the way JD ³ chooses to make the book more accessible is by formatting it as a “book of days,” ⁴ i.e. an almanac, one song per day of the year. ⁵ This encourages the reader to follow along with the song and commentary of the day, as I notice that a “book club” of reader-listeners is currently doing along with a YouTube playlist of all the available songs. ⁶ You could also see it as mirroring the practice of a daily devotional reading, given that JD is a believer. Or readers can cherrypick through the book, for instance looking up what songs fall on significant dates in their lives. More deviantly you could use it for the form of divination known as bibliomancy, ⁷ opening to today’s date or else a random page and using it as a kind of horoscope. This is the kind of thing a character in one of JD’s songs or books would pursue. Before you try it here, remember that ninety percent of the time, his characters are heading for disaster.⁸ Do not use them as your guiding stars! ⁹ Maybe as cautionary tales.

Conveniently, the format also allows JD to name the book after one of his most famous songs. The climactic line of that song is, “There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year,” so it feels apt to be writing this on Passover weekend. ¹⁰ But in the book, the song for the day that I’m writing, April 3, is “Island Garden Song,” from The Coroner’s Gambit. ¹¹ It is about someone planning to shipwreck himself deliberately on an island: “And I will till the soil with my hands/ And I will make my home there/ My garden will grow so high that I will be completely hidden.”

JD remarks that this song is best understood via the axiom “all writing is about writing,” which did help open the song up for me, thinking of it as a kind of mission statement. It made me think of the scope of JD’s still-unrealized ambitions back then, in 2000. And of how ambition can serve to hide the greater drives behind it. Revenge. Escape. Redemption.

What are the ambitions of this book, then, and what do they in turn conceal?

One could question the point of publishing a lyric book at all in the age of Genius dot com and other internet repositories, and for Mountain Goats lyrics in particular, which obsessives started compiling online way back in the 1990s and continue to do. But lyric books still can be many things. They might be monuments to long careers, texts for scholarly use, scriptures for the faithful, or more modestly, class yearbooks for fans. They can serve as a strategic respectability grab, via the (wrongheaded) claim that lyrics are or should be equivalent to poetry. ¹² More competitively, they can assert that this body of lyrics has what it takes to stand on the page, unlike everyone else’s doggerel. ¹³ Alternatively, they can be an opportunity via the songwriter’s notes to explain oblique references, influences, and matters of craft. ¹⁴ In the process they can even deliver a stealth autobiography, a kind of “My Life in Lyrics.” ¹⁵

At minimum, they can just be fancy merch.

JD clearly feels most comfortable with the “notes on craft” aspect. He returns frequently to the contradictions of the Mountain Goats’ starting point as poetry set to or transformed by music, and the ways the project gradually assimilated more of the conventions of popular song. Also to his ideas about narrative compression, in which songs might reveal their subject and portray their characters only indirectly, via discrete details that imply the whole. ¹⁶ Thus the aura of mystery in Mountain Goats songs, of emotions intensified by not quite being disclosed. The absent referent might be a private matter—which he sometimes clarifies here and sometimes not—and other times a more subconscious thing, not knowing himself why he wanted to write a song about a certain person doing a certain thing, at least until much later.

Also on craft, JD talks about his aim to broach the abstract heights of metaphor while maintaining a spontaneous, conversational tone, in the March 23 entry for “Cobscook Bay,” released in 2000. ¹⁷ I’m sometimes mystified in this book by which songs Darnielle names as his favourites, while some of my own don’t appear at all, such as “Ontario” and “Palmcorder Yajna.” But we can agree that “Cobscook Bay” is a nearly ideal instance of that elusive balance.

In short, JD had a lot of theories starting out, and the story of the Mountain Goats is in part the story of him gradually breaking all his own rules. He’s interested in charting those shifts in his convictions over time, as well as the ones that held firm. The book itself is a case in point. JD used to refuse even to include a lyric sheet with albums, on the grounds that songs are meant to be experienced as a singular happening, pure vibration in the air. ¹⁸ Even recordings were a kind of compromise, and especially studio recordings with, god forbid, overdubs—and now he’s gone completely the other, musicianship-positive direction.

But while he’s most comfortable on that kind of technical ground, another part of him wants to tell stories: “My professional self and my personal self are barely even on speaking terms, and who can blame them?” he says at one point. As a person he wants to overshare, but intellectually he wants to preserve mystique and withhold explanation. So this book also has that autobiographical element, but only in fits and starts. As he says early on (Feb. 15) and repeats at least once (April 1), “[This] isn’t a memoir, unless it is.”

One way that it is a memoir is that it proceeds mostly in chronological order, so that the year of songs generally traces the trajectory of his 35-plus years of writing them. ¹⁹ It begins with him in staff housing in Norwalk, California, as a young registered nurse and later in other rooms as an English/Classics student, on the mend from several years of heavy drug use, staying up all night reading and rabidly writing poetry with a guitar to hand and the TV on, and soon songs, dozens or hundreds written and either discarded or recorded in one take on his Panasonic boombox in those little rooms, sometimes multiples a day. It’s the kind of hothouse development we mythologize via the Beatles’ nightly marathons playing the clubs of Hamburg, or Sonny Rollins spending day after day blowing his sax underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s there that JD developed the signature tMGs elements that would remain pretty constant however much the writing changed: “Characters who reveal details of their past in the way they react to the present, a working cocktail of image and humor and wistfulness. A tendency to make that wistfulness the foundation upon which the other stuff is built” (January 1).

The biographical details dwindle as it goes. There is one entry, on April 1 for “Jaipur,” that goes on for several pages situating that song in his early married life, and the stage of his spiritual questing he was in at the time. ²⁰ It serves almost as a test laboratory for another version of this book that really would have been a memoir. But in that it stands mostly alone.

But that conflict is in a way the Mountain Goats story. The project begins as a one-man affair whose songs are mostly haiku-like verses about animals, mythological figures, and the quality of the light in various rooms, or else comic setpieces about brands of Asian peanuts (March 22) and the Chicago Cubs (March 1). ²¹ He gives himself a bandonym instead of using his own in support of an insistence that his songs are fully autonomous works of art that have nothing to do with self-expression. ²² (This move proves handy later when tMGs becomes a duo, twice, and then a band proper.) Ironically though, he then has the greatest success of his life, commercially but arguably also artistically, in releasing a very clearly autobiographical, even “confessional” record, 2005’s The Sunset Tree, about growing up with an abusive stepfather. (In this book, those songs occupy most of June.) Listeners suddenly take his music personally in a whole new way, which makes them much more invested over the long haul. Sometimes to excess.

From what I’ve observed this has been both a blessing (certainly career-wise, but also in the work his songs do in the world) and sometimes a personal burden. That ambivalence is evident in these pages. On subjects he’s already been open about, such as the abuse as well as the years of drug addiction that followed in his teens and early 20s, he opens up further here—sometimes in startling ways, by printing previously unheard songs from his notebooks that are much more direct and stark, ²³ which he has rarely or never performed. ²⁴ It becomes clear as you read his notes about later songs, even quite recent ones, that these matters of his youth remain his major subjects, with which in some sense he will never be finished.

He even expands that territory by pointing out that the songs about the often black-comically fractious “Alpha Couple” of his early work and his first 4AD album Tallahassee (2002) also spring from his childhood, i.e. from his own parents’ divorce, though of course only in imaginative caricature. ²⁵ This should have been obvious but had not previously occurred to me. Why “No Children”? Well, arguably they shouldn’t have had any, though then there’d be no one to argue the case either way. ²⁶

But on other, fresher subjects, JD is much more closemouthed. He refers to a crisis around the time of The Life of the World to Come (2009), including at one point ending up in an emergency room in Stockholm. It was a health issue but something beyond that too; we don’t hear what. ²⁷ He is under no obligation to explain, of course, but I admit I am curious if it had any relationship to the dramatic shifts in both his career fortunes and his public self-exposure in the previous handful of years. ²⁸ Maybe some fans would not like the answer if they heard it.

Certainly, many of them might have preferred a version of this book that was more fully “the stories behind the songs.” Never mind the more painful subjects, it might simply have been nice to hear more, for instance, about JD’s various and sometimes somewhat mysterious collaborators, like the early ones in the Bright Mountain Choir, and many others since. Perhaps JD would consider that indiscreet.

Still, then we might have gotten much less of the meta-craft discussion. Nor would I want to have missed all the jokes, which constitute perhaps a quick-dodging third of the song notes. My favourite running one is about all the alternate-universe versions of the Mountain Goats that particular songs suggest, and that JD muses he might prefer to have lived out: the one that would sing only about people compulsively plunging into financial ruin ²⁹; the one that would sing songs only about Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osborne ³⁰, which is the only incarnation that he imagines having become massively successful; at the opposite end the one in which he only wrote songs on a cheap and grating-sounding Casio keyboard and so had to remain a psychiatric nurse or else go to grad school in English; or the one that only did songs “that take place against a backdrop of hazily defined political tension and that appear to be careening toward an unhappy resolution for all involved.”

JD figures nobody else loves that subgenre of Mountain Goats songs as much as he does. I am here to say that I very, very much do.

If This Year leaves you as a reader feeling unsatisfactorily teased on the level of memoir, however, take comfort: First, through the ways that JD’s glosses on his songs show us how to interpret them, it becomes easier to understand the larger sense in which his songs (and the novels too) are all one long interwoven story. But also, this project demonstrates, as the general tMGs arc does, that as much as JD says, “I resist the terrain of memoir where I can,” he is simultaneously drawn towards it. This volume could prefigure another book he may be ready to write someday. Perhaps when he eventually retires (at least partially) from the stage. ³¹ If so, this one will have prepared the way like a herald of things to come.

Until then let us be not greedy. We have this Book of Days, and that’s kind of a book of everything, for what is there to a life but days, one after another until there are no more, until you bleed out? ³² Well, there is always at least one thing more: There are songs. As JD writes for July 7, “I love this about songs so, so much—they alone can mark the reaches of the printed page, they alone can take it a step further.” ³³

1. This post assumes you’re generally aware of the American songwriter and novelist John Darnielle and his approx. 35-year-running project, the Mountain Goats. If not, perhaps read this excellent recent profile by Grayson Currin first, and listen to some songs.

2. One of my top three tMGs albums of the past decade, along with Goths and Songs for Pierre Chuvin.

3. I’ve been friendly acquaintances with him for some years now, mostly online, as many critics are, given that he used to moonlight as one himself. As a result “Darnielle” feels too formal, while “John” still seems too casual, so I’m going with JD.

4. The “Book of Days” designation was inspired, JD claims, by the Psychedelic Furs album title. But I can’t believe this erstwhile Classics major did not also have in mind Ovid’s epic Fasti, usually called Book of Days in English. This is, after all, a guy who’s written a song called “Song for the Julian Calendar” (March 19), the invention of which Ovid’s cycle also celebrates. Patti Smith also called one of her own recent publications A Book of Days.

5. However, that year is a leap year, as its calendar includes Feb. 29, so the subtitle’s claim of “365 Songs Annotated” is a white lie. Unless JD sneakily skips some other day and doesn’t mention it. Which now that I think of it seems highly likely. Either way, by my estimate this is only about half the Mountain Goats songs performed since 1991, not to mention the unheard hoard found only in JD’s notebooks, of which a surprising number are peppered through this volume. So it is very much a “selected” lyrics, not a “collected.”

6. Well, almost: Playlist creator “madsmikkeldaughter,” I notice you have left off the songs from 2009’s The Life of the World to Come. I assume this is an oversight and not a protest against those songs all being titled for Bible verses. Fix it before August, mmd, or you will miss out on a lot of interesting stuff.

7. Which people do with the Bible, of course, or a classicist like JD might do with Virgil, in the practice known as Sortes Vergilianae, which is also the title of a great John Ashbery poem. But any book would do. Especially any big book.

8. As JD describes in the Feb. 5 entry for “The Recognition Scene,” one of my best-loved early tMGs songs: “The scene in your life where you remember that there are only two types of stories ever, comedies and tragedies, and the one you’ve found yourself in probably isn’t a comedy? That’s this song.”

9. Similarly, as JD emphasizes at one point, do not ask him to play “Riches and Wonders” at your wedding—and even less, “No Children”!

10. Chag Pesach Sameach!

11. The song for the day this post publishes, April 6, is “Family Happiness,” which includes two lines that foreshadow “No Children” (“I hope the stars don’t even come out tonight / I hope we both freeze to death”) as well as a line that mentions “Long winding Canadian highways / Innumerable evergreens.”

12. See anthologies such as 1969’s The Poetry of Rock, which meant a lot to me when I found an old paperback copy for a quarter as a teen, I guess because it helped justify the lyric fixation I already had. Also 1992’s Rap: The Lyrics and Yale University Press’s more scholarly doorstop, 2010’s The Anthology of Rap.

13. In other words, a Nobel Prize application.

14. As in the pages of Jay-Z’s Decoded, Stephen Sondheim’s two-volume Finishing the Hat/Look, I Made a Hat, and Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys’ 100 Lyrics and a Poem.

15. As Loretta Lynn subtitled hers, and which also applies to the Jay-Z and Sondheim books and, reportedly, Jarvis Cocker’s.

16. He was influenced here by various writers such as Richard Hugo or the Polish poet Miron Bailoszewski, as well as how Auden’s “Musée de Beaux Arts,” via his English professor father (not stepfather), describes Brueghel’s painting of the fall of Icarus portraying all the other figures in the vicinity going about their business and never noticing the tragedy itself, thereby heightening it. Similarly in a song like “The Last Day of Jimi Hendrix’s Life,” JD would anchor a song to a central image or event, but also often elide that event and hint at its existence only by describing an adjacent scene or series of smaller, seemingly unrelated actions.

17. “One longstanding aesthetic goal of mine is to be writing in poetic language that comes out sounding like speech … for a lyric to allow the listener to indulge in the fantasy that the singer, or speaker, is making the whole thing up from scratch—pulling the words from the air—while retaining and exhibiting form so apparently that this could not be (and obviously is not) true.”

18. “the printed lyric is an echo and not a simulation, even the recording is only the physical evidence that something happened, something spectral and momentary, something maybe worth remembering but impossible to remember with total accuracy, and yet.”

19. Although he does not always put in signposts to the chronology and it can get a bit muddy and disorienting,

20. "I think ‘Jaipur’ is the moment when I begin to make peace with the idea that storytelling is self-expression, no matter what stories you tell.”

21. This is where I say that I caught an unfortunate typo in this entry, p. 84: It has one line as, “The stars are going to spell out all the answers to tomorrow’s corporation,” when of course that should be “crossword.” “Corporation” belongs (and is) in the next line, “And the Phillips Corporation will admit that they’ve made an awful mistake.” (That mistake btw presumably being the invention of the compact disc.) However, don’t we all also want to know the “answers” to “tomorrow’s corporation”? Hell, we need it by yesterday!

22. I am tempted to rewrite Carly Simon: You’re so vain, you won’t admit that this song is about you. But I’m kidding: Even if a work is a roman à clef, it is often better to pretend otherwise so as not to reduce it to that. Artistically. Commercially, unfortunately, it’s the reverse. (Cf. JT Leroy.)

23. For example, there are two that recount a day in his freshman year of high school when he planned to kill himself, both sharing versions of the line, “My whole family’s crazy / and I / am fourteen years old / ready to die.” Another from the lead-up period to The Sunset Tree, “Song for My Stepfather,” is about the fact that his stepfather’s physical abuse began when he was not yet six; it includes the devastating, repeated line, “You erase me.” In that June 5 entry here, JD writes: “Even my harder songs manage to locate a little joy somewhere in them, something we can celebrate together. This, pointedly, does not.”

24. In part, he acknowledges at one point, because it would be too discomfiting to hear audiences inevitably start singing along.

25. “I’d always thought of kids from California as being more divorced than kids from elsewhere, which I think was demographically true; my own parents’ divorce when I was five had given me a window into how long the legacy of a catastrophe is, how its oil kept leaching into the present no matter how far it recedes into the past.”

26. As he writes in the note on another of my favourites, “Soft Targets” (April 30): “These songs [in which the doomed couple also has children] draw some of my better vocal takes out of me, because—well, you know, ‘collateral damage.’ It’s a phrase you’ve maybe had occasion to contemplate in quiet hours. Or maybe you haven’t, depending on your luck.”

27. Instead, he says only, “the most personal songs aren’t the ones that recount actual moments from an extant past… [but] the ones whose hurt is cloaked inside a story that hides it from the world.”

28. I wonder in turn if that has something to do with the long string of songs JD has written about child stars and other showbiz figures who came to harrowing ends: Judy Garland, Denise Matthews (aka Vanity), Frankie Lymon, Jimi Hendrix, Dennis Brown, Dana Plato and (in a separate song) her son Tyler Lambert, the list goes on. Although, as JD points out, he started writing such songs before he had tasted anything much of fame himself, perhaps proleptically or simply out of sympathy for shared ambition, it does feel like more began to accumulate once he had.

29. "as soon as I feel tempted to drain a character’s bank account, I do it, whether owing to bank error or poor money management on their part, it does me no force, I must have their money, the better to flush it down the toilet for them.”

30. A dream partially realized on the 2017 EP Marsh Witch Visions.

31. As JD writes in reflecting on the unwanted break from performing imposed by the 2020 lockdowns (Nov. 30), “Someday I will perform no more, and that’s all right, too. Everybody eventually needs rest.”

32. A song whose Dec. 17 entry here is a late-breaking contender for funniest in the whole book: “This is my ‘Hallelujah,’ insofar as the morning I wrote it I thought: I just want to do this, I want to spend years doing this, my whole life, I want ‘Bleed Out’ to become my legacy, I want it to have a thousand verses but I only use six of them … ” It goes on from there. Almost as good as July 17, when JD says, “as titles go, ‘Wizard Buys a Hat,’ for me, is it, the grail toward which my titling days aspired and every song after it ought to have gone nameless, or better, to have been titled using a numbering system: 1+WBaH, 2+WBaH, et cetera.”

33. The song he’s talking about there is “Woke Up New,” which makes a good case for that claim, and yet wears it lightly. Because it wears it lightly.