If you are on TikTok, you’ve likely heard the Mountain Goats’ 2002 song “No Children.” The doomed-relationship anthem went viral on the app in 2021, but the band has been a folk rock fixture since the early 1990s.
Throughout those 30 years and 21 albums, John Darnielle has anchored the group as its frontman, founding member and at times, its only member.
Constant, too, are Darnielle’s evocative, irreverent lyricism and uncanny ability to access the crux of his subject matter. He uses offbeat fodder for his songwriting, having devoted albums to professional wrestling, tabletop gaming and most recently classic action movies.
His life is as varied as his songwriting: Darnielle is a novelist and father of two, and he worked as a psychiatric nurse before his Mountain Goats days. Before embarking on the band’s 2023 tour, Darnielle spoke with The Daily Mississippian from his home in North Carolina about the South, eating plant-based on tour and art as labor.
THE DM: The past 30 years have been a gradual eastward migration for you. You’ve gone from California, spent some time in Iowa, and now you’re in North Carolina.
DARNIELLE: I’ll be in the ocean next.
You’re in Durham, sort of split between the coastal region and Appalachia. Do you consider yourself a Southerner at all?
I’m not. Not by birth, anyway. But I’ve lived here longer than I have lived any other place, so North Carolina is where I’m from now. I grew up in California. But my grandmother was from Arkansas, and my grandfather was from Alabama. So there’s a sense in which I’ve come back, but you never fully shake the Californian identity.
I have lived in North Carolina since 2003. I’d been bumping all around prior to that. When do you get to start saying ‘“I’m from here,” you know? But I do say I’m from Durham now, because if I moved back to California, I would barely recognize it at this point. It’s like, oh, well, I used to live here, but everything’s different now. Whereas everything’s different here now, too, but I was here to see all the change.
I guess at the end of the day it’s up to you to determine which region you identify with the most. Speaking of the South, tell me what it was like recording some of your recent albums here.
I record mostly in Southern cities now, just because there’s a bunch of good studios here. One thing about the South is people outside it have a caricatured idea of it. It’s the same as with the Midwest. When, really, we have all the same stuff everybody else has. People, the same stores, the same access to everything.
People who are from New York can go out to see different big-stage shows on any given night. In other places, you can’t do that. That said, there are amazing recording studios in the South, where you can record without having to be in a super city environment. I love to be in cities, but I also find them very high energy, even just going for a walk in the city. You get a lot of stimuli.
Yeah, the stimulation and the energy expenditure are totally different.
For me, the ideal recording environment is a place where I’m gonna see as few people as possible, where nobody’s going to recognize me. We’ve recorded here in Durham at Overdub Lane and Fidelitorium in Kernersville. We did some stuff in Texas once at Sonic Ranch, which is literally on the border, and Memphis and Muscle Shoals.
We do tend to stick to the Southeast. Bigger cities are great to record in, because I can have whatever I want for lunch. Whereas if you record in Muscle Shoals and you’re vegetarian, your eating options are pretty limited.
I’d imagine so. You’re probably limited to baked beans at a local barbecue restaurant.
If you’re lucky. I’ve actually had a terrific four-sides plate at a place right next to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals. You’re gonna have to do a little work to figure out where to get your vegetarian food, but the trade off is you were in a cool place you might not get to go back to, you know what I mean?
Yes. Recording in a place like Muscle Shoals is almost like doing your due diligence as an artist because it’s so important in music history.
Absolutely. You can just stand exactly what Aretha Franklin sang “Natural Woman.”
I’m now wondering about your plant-based eating habits on tour. How do you manage?
Eating on tour is hard because for one thing, like a lot of other people, I’m kind of a comfort eater. You eat when you’re bored, you also eat when you’re agitated. As a singer, too, you have to watch out for your acid intake.
Right now we’re on a bus, and I often make overnight oatmeal. I have a special thing where I take a quarter cup of oatmeal, soak it in either milk or plant based milk — I’m not that particular — and then I add dates and cashews. That’s breakfast.
For lunch, I now have a tiny induction cooktop thing, and I will heat a Tasty Bite. These are Indian lunch things, like palak paneer. Or I make ramen with some vegetables. For dinner, my general rule is to be disciplined about breakfast and lunch, and I’ll have whatever I like for dinner.
That’s a good, non-restrictive rule.
Yeah. Constantly being hyper-vigilant on your stuff is just not sustainable. The touring lifestyle is draining as is.
Without a doubt. I imagine it’s hard, too, to be away from your family for long periods of time. How do tours change your relationship to fatherhood or make you value it differently?
Fatherhood changes the relationship to the gig, really. It’s sort of yes and no. I was just talking with Matt Douglas, the saxophone, keys and guitar guy and close friend about this today. Because for us, the first week of a tour can be a real challenge. He has three children and I have two. We don’t have a nanny or anything. My wife is by herself doing this once I’m gone. So that’s just really hard. I’m out there gathering firewood. It’s not a hobby for me, it is my job. I’m getting the money to pay for clothes and food.
The first week can be really challenging because it can be hard to not carry that around. But eventually on tour, you break free from home base, and your feet go. It’s like a physical feeling where you feel like you can’t go back and then you’re sort of in the zone. And that’s where you want to be because you’re not going to just go home.
Right. You have no choice but to immerse yourself.
This is something I think about a lot. It depends on the tour, but during the first couple of days, even if the shows are great, I’m like what am I doing out here? I’m supposed to be back home. If we could afford an extra bus, I would bring my kids and have somebody take care of them.
You bring up an important point because even with reaching a certain level of comfortability and success in your career, at the end of the day, it’s still a job that you must work. And touring is your labor.
It’s very true. People don’t like to talk about that. But I do on my private Facebook, just talking to my friends. It’s interview season and I’ve been bitching. If one more person asked me the difference between writing a book and writing a song, I’m gonna jump out of this window. From the creative end, there’s nothing really to talk about. But that’s what people always ask me. It’s like asking how it’s different to build an apartment, or car or an idol.
Well, they’re completely different mediums for storytelling.
The differences are so pronounced in terms of what you’re trying to do and the way you would do it. If you were a poet being asked the difference between writing a poem and writing a song, I think that’s a more relevant question.
Do you consider your songs to be poems in any sense?
I have a schtick about that, actually. Because I think poems are songs, and that at some point, in the growth of literacy, this thing happens where they’re on the page, right? And literature is on the rise, and people now read them without singing them. Songs are necessarily poems because they’re the first poems. The stuff in the age of Chaucer was more like music than like written literature, insofar as people expected to be hearing it, not to be reading it.
All music dates back to oral storytelling traditions, the reciting and telling of tales to pass them down.
Yeah, they were songs. Maybe they were sung, maybe they were chanted, but the songs were rhythmic utterances in words.
Considering your own rhythmic utterances, how many songs have you written under the Mountain Goats moniker? It’s over 600, right?
At least three songs, I think.
That’s a sound guess. How do you approach building a setlist from such a vast discography?
The longer you stick around, the more challenging it is to figure out what to do. But it’s good to have a rationale. If you’re a legacy act, like The Who, the list of songs that people expect you to play is long. With the Mountain Goats, there’s only a few songs that we fully expect to play in the body of the set. Other than that, I have a lot of leeway to build a set. We’re blessed to have people who come and see us over and over again.
You want to dig deep into people who have liked you for a long time and haven’t had a chance to see you yet, and my assumption is that they’d rather hear a song they’ve only heard once or twice. So you play a couple of songs that people really expect and some deeper cuts. Every night, I write a master basic list. Usually, I take a solo set by myself in the middle where I may or may not even have a list of what I want to play going out, because I’d like for every show’s set to be its own in some way.
So you build it with your loyal fan base in mind. You want to cater to those who are the most dedicated to you, but without engineering it to anyone’s expectations.
I think a lot of it comes down to personal characteristics. Bob Dylan, you know, for years when he would go out, you don’t know what he’s gonna play. Your chances of hearing any of the songs you wanted to hear are dicey. But I have a strong desire to please people. It’s essential to who I am. I want people to be happy.
Not to the point, though, where I’m willing to go out and say, “Well, here’s all of the ones you wanted to hear.”
In a similar vein, what is your tour date scheduling ethos? A lot of artists tend to neglect the South in their tours. But this current tour has you playing several dates in Tennessee, some in Alabama and one here in Mississippi.
It’s like I was saying, people who don’t know anything about the South talk a lot of —- about the South. They just don’t know it. They haven’t been here. Especially if you’re going out in the spring, my god. It’s a beautiful place.
Will April 7 be your first time playing in Oxford?
We played there in 2019 in the summer. I actually gave a reading at Square Books for “Wolf in White Van.” And I saw the Faulkner house when I was in high school. Back then, there was a company called Historical Products that sold T-shirts of authors and composers. And they were very austere T-shirts. It was like a photograph in a frame with the name of the author underneath it. They had Sartre, they had Virginia Woolf. I had a William Faulkner T-shirt.
So coming to Oxford is a pilgrimage, in a sense.
It is, yeah.
The Mountain Goats will play at The Lyric Oxford on April 7.
