john darnielle

A Week With The Mountain Goats' "Get Lonely": Day 1

26 August 2006
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller//Illustration by Shannon Palmer
Oh, hold on now, where are we? Where did the lights go? Why has the air suddenly lost some degrees as if it went on a diet? What are those noises and are those real lumps in my throat? Nobody said anything about this shit getting all darkly serious and uncomfortable. At least when WE were introduced to John Darnielle’s step-father in last year’s “The Sunset Tree” we at least got some dance music with the bitter pill, we at least got a tuneful piss-off anthem of Scotch-drunk video game playing to suck on—“This Year” is one of the most splendid songs ever written I think it’s safe to say. But the first thing you’ll know when you listen to “Get Lonely” is that maybe this record is how Darnielle was introduced to his step-father, who sounds like a miserable person with hot tempered hate raging through his body at all times. Whatever it was in that man, it was something to be afraid of, like a fault line, like a pulled pin. This album is the scariest reminder that there are people going through horrors every day without an escape. This album is just plain scary. A playing of these songs for anyone close to Darnielle must see that even the parts that are fictionalized are coming from a tortured memory that is dead-on real. Darnielle’s been known to make it difficult to decipher fact from phony in his songs, but these couldn’t have come from anywhere but his life as they smack of the kind of unbearable closeness that he couldn’t have helped but to have slept in. He’s exhumed his pain and made it public, putting it on display. This is Darnielle like you’ve never heard him.

The Mountain Goats

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Wow, checked out the website and his discography is huge. Where does one start?

Walter | 26 August 2006
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ghana or tallahassee

spokes | 28 August 2006

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