John Darnielle Interview
The Mountain Goats new album is about God, in a raw and unsettling way. The narratives are about the interaction of the divine with human hands, in a round about way, or about how culture interacts with the texts that found us. Each verse is based on a bible verse, but they are poetic responses and narrative constructions. This is not personal reflections or strict exegesis, but contain all of these things. It is always a bit dangerous to assume biography, but the album, and the songs seem profoundly personal, a struggle about how to reintegrate faith and culture in a polyvalent, secular world. How to make the words mean something again, when the words used to be about bad things. It is a free and liberating work, with a full recognition of the weight of melancholy, of oppression and even exhaustion that comes from the logophillia of Christianity.
In the following questions. John Darnielle pushes back against the assumptions of faith, about the narratives of conversion and, about how we interact with the gospels, and about how we rescue that which is valuable from the “childish things” from his (and for many of us, our) Christianities.
Why these bible verses?
It’s back and forth, case by case - there isn’t one “why these taken together”; each one has its own relation to the song it appears in. Rom 10:9 pretty obvious, Hebrews 11:40 too I’d think; some of the others (Deuteronomy 2:10, referring to a time when something great & now gone roamed the earth freely & abundantly) only take a little work, and some of the the others are “elliptical” as I like to say. The verses are kinds of keys into the songs - not the only keys, I’d think, but the ones I use.
Which ones do you think you are missing?
Oh, who knows - this isn’t, like, “JD’s compleat look at the Bible” - it’s songs and the verses that go with them. I didn’t get to Job or Jonah, and the song from Daniel got left out of the album, and those are three of my favorites, Jonah especially. But Jonah itself (to say nothing of Job) is so spectacular that it’s hard to imagine doing anything with it that couldn’t be better done by just pointing at the text, whereas these other verses, I’m trying to do something with them.
Why was Enoch the only Deutrocannoical text you used?
Because I am less generally interested in non-canonical books. I know that for a lot of people, there’s this instant interest in anything that didn’t make the canon - this urge to say “such-and-such a song, had it been on the album, would have been the best one on it,” or “the unedited version of the film is clearly superior to the edit.” I tend to go the other way. I can dig these mystical books like Enoch for sure, but, y’know…they’re no Genesis.
I am using the NRSV, do you have a preferred translation?
Used to be a big New Jerusalem Bible fan. These days I like Young’s Literal Translation and the Darby Translation for reading - I haven’t seen the NRSV but I grew up on the Revised Standard.
How does this view of Jesus relate to yr interest(is interest to small a word, faith, belief, practice of?) in Hinduism
You know, for all the Biblical focus of the album, I feel like Jesus is more present by His absence - there aren’t any actual-stories-about-Jesus; if He’s addressed, it’s only in the speaker-addressing-God-as-“Lord” sense, i.e., the speaker could be talking to God the Father or the Son or really anyone he’d call “Lord.” I am a little surprised by this, since I love the stories of Jesus so much, but here He sort of paces the empty halls between the song lines like a spirit in a drafty castle. Which, now that I think of it, is sort of how I think of God generally - any God: a presence that comes sometime to possess a person in moments of extreme heat or cold.
Can you talk about the intersection b/w fictional construction and autobiography in the creation of the characters here?
Well, I mean, the old line about all writing being autobiography is incredibly liberating, right - every story you tell, you’re the hero whether you admit it or not, and the villain too, and the scenery. You and all your friends and foes, they’re all there is in the stories you tell. So I don’t really worry about this sort of thing. It all blends together before I finish even the first line, with or without my consent.
There is an American tendency, and I think it is uniquely American, to assume that their pyscho-geography is Edenic, from Edward Hicks paintings, to the Oneida Community, to Joseph Smith sanctifying Jefferson county to the Joni Mitchell line about going back to the garden. There are some songs that you have written that suggest that the suburbs are not a place of control and ennui but of punishment for ambition. There is something Edenic no matter how dark, in songs like This Year or The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, that seems to extend or connect to this American sensibility. In this album you reference it explicitly. Can you talk a bit about that, about how you use the suburbs, about the spiritual contexts of them?
I disagree with your initial conception - I think Americans are particularly aggressive about asserting some personal Eden to their psycho-geography, but I think that’s universal - it’s just that Americans are a little less gung-ho (only a little, and it depends on the American in question) about equating Eden with childhood. So, when, say, you see a hockey montage of blurry home footage of kids playing hockey on a local lake & there’s some Edenic conception of “the game when it was pure for us” - that’s a type of Canadian Edenic self-conception, only it’s tethered to childhood or youth, which Americans tend to want to extend forever - so American Edenism sort of tethers itself to the especially rabid American worship of youth, thus amplifying the Edenic strain. I don’t know anything about suburbs. I guess technically where I grew up is a “suburb” but I don’t know - I think as far as discussion bigger cities vs. outlying areas goes, the water’s too polluted to swim in at this point. Too many calcified ideas about either the worthlessless/bankruptcy of such areas or, conversely, championing them as a sort of aesthetically daring stance. Anyplace where people live together is great!
Much of the metaphors, references, and language in this album are corporeal, and often dying or failing bodies. You grew up Catholic, whose bodily influence is unique in Christianity. Those two do not seem to unrelated, but I do not want to assume autobiography, how do you react to the mystical corpus?
Well, yeah, I mean, you kind of say it all when you ref the Church there, the Catholic Church - that’s the place where the rubber hits the road, as far as bodies & spirits go, blood & gore & powers & principalities, all that business. The Catholic tradition is the Augustinian heritage, for better and worse. When I conceive of the infinite I despite the foulness of the flesh and imagine its pleasures the way that we remember delight in things that we grow out of; I feel like, if spirit exists, then the body is a sad child’s toy that, once outgrown, will seem as insufficient as it is, its joys the joys of a person who loves hard tack best because he hasn’t yet tasted cake. But, you know, this is all supposition for me - I’m not sure I believe in a spirit outside of the body at all. Which complicates thing, given my Catholic inheritance. You know?
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