Being a fan of the Mountain Goats is a consistent exercise in surprise
Genre is a game for the Mountain Goats.
On the band’s latest record, “In League with Dragons,” lead singer and songwriter John Darnielle tells stories in several genres, including noir and semi-historical fiction, from the perspective of characters like an exhausted arms dealer and a beleaguered possum.
“The universes in which stories take place are just skin,” Darnielle said in an interview with The News & Observer. “The actual blood, bones and muscles of a story are different, are deeper. And that’s why it’s weird when people say they don’t like Westerns, or they don’t like science-fiction, or whatever it is. It’s not about the clothes that the stories wear.”
Darnielle started performing as the Mountain Goats decades ago, often as a solo act, and has gained a dedicated following. Today’s iteration of the band — mostly based in Durham — includes Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster and Matt Douglas, and Darnielle is enthusiastic about the lift their work gives his lyrics.
The sound on this album is just as genre-curious as Darnielle’s storytelling. Hughes, Wurster and Douglas flesh out Darnielle’s characters by building a unique musical atmosphere for each story, pulling honky-tonk, vintage rock and stripped-down choral arrangements into the music.
“In League with Dragons,” the 17th Mountain Goats record released April 26, was featured on NPR’s First Listen and has earned the band positive reviews from outlets like The Guardian and Rolling Stone. The band has embarked on a tour to promote the album with plans to circle back home July 24 for Merge Records’ 30th anniversary concert at Durham’s Carolina Theatre with Hiss Golden Messenger and H.C. McEntire.
Darnielle originally set out to write a rock opera about an aging wizard king set in a fantasy world, but his choice to cycle through different genres instead highlights the commonality of the experience of getting older.
“The feeling of getting older starts to sit on you shortly after you turn 16, I think,” Darnielle said. “The thing is that everyone has the experience of feeling like their younger self is something that happened and is present in some spectral way now. That’s a universal feeling.”
Some of the narrators are accomplished heroes, artists, athletes and detectives who have been under a lot of pressure for a long time. Some of the songs don’t have a single narrator, but instead are about whole communities singing, Greek-chorus style, about a changing world, one that is more complicated and less comfortable than it was when they were younger.
The album is also influenced by Darnielle’s time playing role-playing games.
“It is an album that is about aging, but it looks at that in terms of character building,” Darnielle said.
While he was writing, Darnielle spent time thinking about the themes of character, alignment and the choice between when to defend and when to attack.
But most role-playing games aren’t about one character having some great adventure. A game usually depends on the contributions of a whole team of players, and Darnielle agreed that there is a similar dynamic to this record.
“I write the songs by myself. That’s a solitary activity. But the playing, the choices that you make about instrumentation and the way that you present it collaboratively is what gives the heft to it,” Darnielle said, contrasting that process with his earlier work.
“The lyrics, I worked just as hard on them, but I trust them to stand on their own and to be sufficient to themselves,” Darnielle said. “The difference between ‘All Hail West Texas’ and a record like this is that the music is better now. I write better music, and I have this amazing band.”
“In League with Dragons” was also produced by Owen Pallet, a musician and producer who has performed under the name Final Fantasy.
“On this record more than any other record, what you have is a group exercise that gives the songs a weight and depth they could not have attained by themselves,” Darnielle said.
Companion podcast
Darnielle projects a gentle but secure kind of cool. He’s quick to laugh at his own limitations but isn’t afraid to acknowledge his success. It has added to some insightful discussions on art and creativity, interesting enough to drive “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats,” a podcast that is mostly about Mountain Goats music.
The first season of the podcast, hosted by Darnielle and “Welcome to Night Vale” creator Joseph Fink, focused on “All Hail West Texas,” an earlier Mountain Goats album. The second season, which began in early April, breaks down the process of creating “In League with Dragons” song by song.
“We were so proud and wanted to tell the story of it,” Darnielle said. “And I wanted to tell the story while it was new.”
But asking Darnielle about his own work inevitably leads to conversations about creativity, art or politics, and those tangents are the real charm of the podcast. This interview ended up going down a similar rabbit trail, from Darnielle’s own work, to genre, to the balance between literature and entertainment.
“Ancient authors didn’t distinguish between whether a story had a god descending from the architecture or was just people talking to each other,” Darnielle said. “You could tell a story about anything.”
Being a fan of the Mountain Goats is a consistent exercise in surprise. And the evolving sound of the band over the last few albums has taught many devotees not to pigeonhole the musical genre. But you can trust there will be compelling, carefully told stories, whatever genre the songs happen to be wearing.
“We feel like this record sounds totally like a Mountain Goats record, but it doesn’t sound like any other Mountain Goats record,” Darnielle said.
Details
What: MRG30 featuring The Mountain Goats with Hiss Golden Messenger and H.C. McEntire
When: July 24, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Carolina Theatre, 309 W. Morgan St., Durham
Cost: $35
Info: carolinatheatre.org