Do you still get pegged as “lo-fi” even though it’s been
years and albums since the Mountain Goats recorded to cassette? If so,
does that bother you?
Let me answer this question with a question: Have you ever dreamt of
getting your dishes done and lawn mowed by a singer-songwriter dude?
Because I will do it. Because I love this question just that
much. Because yes, people persist in calling our records “lo-fi.”
I spent all my home-recording years pointing out that “lo-fi” was a
really stupid term, and then we went into a studio and recorded
Tallahassee with Tony Doogan (Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai),
and we thought, “Wow, this sounds quite different.” But still, I could
show you reviews that called that album “lower than lo-fi.” I can
guarantee you that people will ask me questions about the lo-fi sound
of Heretic Pride before the day is over. It happens every
album, and it’s been eight years since I released anything
recorded into a boom box.
You write music, and you write about music. Does being
engaged with music criticism inform your music making (beyond the odd
Marduk reference)?
I can’t really imagine how writing music criticism would inform one’s writing of music. I guess if you were the sort of person
who spent a lot of time analyzing
Lennon/McCartney stuff, you
might end up saying, “There’s a right way, and there’s a wrong way,”
and trying to follow that template. I’ve always avoided listening to
canonical stuff when I’m writing for that very reason. I hate it when
you can tell what a songwriter was listening to while he was
writing.
Satanist black-metal bands, occasional Old Testament
references, the title Heretic Pride—there’s a lot of religion
around the edges of your work. Is that something that plays a role in
your life or is it just fertile lyrical material?
I consider myself religious—I’m Catholic, both by blood and by
tendency, and I mean “religious” in the sense of the word that
occasionally makes Protestants uncomfortable: I like ritual and
repetitive prayers, and I think a communal relationship with God is
many orders of magnitude more important than “a personal relationship
with Jesus Christ.” I prefer being told what to do and how to pray. I
don’t think I’m smart enough or eloquent enough to write prayers that
are worth God’s time.
At the same time, though, I’m in the same boat that everybody else
is in: In my heart, I doubt there’s a God at all. Most of what most
religions teach is utterly ridiculous, and besides, I’m a pro-choice
feminist, so the Church that I love and which I’ll never fully be able
to leave is also my enemy.
I stopped going to church years ago and hardly ever go these days,
and I won’t take Communion when I do, because those are the rules. I’m
as likely to pray the Hare Krishna mahamantra as I am the rosary. But I
do pray, as devoutly as I can, even though I suspect we’re just animals
crawling on the surface of a godless earth. I do it because it gives me
comfort and peace, even if that’s illusory, and because I think that a
prayerful mood is a powerful thing in the world and can be a real force
for good.
A lot of your songs, “Sax Rohmer #1” as a recent example,
seem to explore themes of collapse—of relationships, of systems,
of individuals. What makes entropy so appealing to you as a
lyricist?
I think the answer to this question is an old comic book called
Man-Thing, which was where I first learned the word “entropy.”
One summer, when I was 11 or 12 years old, it seemed like the whole
Marvel universe was on a big entropy jag—Man-Thing,
Warlock, the Hulk, too, for a few issues—and my inner
metal dude was like, “Okay, entropy totally shreds.” I guess the other
thing is that a big part of the whole Catholic deal is this embracing
of divine order, of design and pattern and repetition and structure and
the sort of inherent poetry in structures and orders and in obedience.
So like most Catholic writers, I take an interest in sowing discord
under that whole idea, in being the quietly rotten kid in class.
Do you ever get tired of discussing certain songs or
lyrics?
A few years back I got annoyed when people would ask, “What will you
do if Tampa Bay wins the Super Bowl?” But, really, I bring that shit on
myself by writing songs, so I got no complaints. There are worse
problems to have than having total strangers ask me questions about my
lyrics. I could be digging ditches for a living, you know.
What music are you digging right now?
I’ve been listening to heavy metal all day, a Colombian
black-
metal band called Utuk Xul. Then I listened to the new one
by Epoch of Unlight, which I have mixed feelings about, because the
whole thrash revival is kind of weird, but every album you hear from it
has at least one or two really solid jams. I don’t know, though, I
think retro is always a bad move for any genre. I saw High on Fire the
other night—totally great, as usual. The only two albums on my
best of 2008 so far are the new American Music Club and the new Kaki
King, though. I’ll probably end up listening to Peste Noire’s
Lorraine Rehearsal again today. That thing is tremendous.
The Mountain Goats play Sat Feb 23 at Neumo’s, 8 pm, $16 adv,
21+. Their new album, Heretic Pride, is out now on 4AD. John
Darnielle blogs at lastplanetojakarta.com.