The Mountain Goats’ latest album Goths is due out on May 19. On the album, John Darnielle dissects the black-clad and death-obsessed in the same way he did Florida and semi-pro wrestlers. Well, not exactly the same way. Darnielle announced that the new album would break with tradition and feature no guitar parts. Ahead of that album’s release, Darnielle shared “Rain In Soho” and spoke with NPR about how the album came together, avoiding the trap of nostalgia and whether or not he was a young goth himself.
First off, Darnielle explained how he landed upon making an entire album of piano songs. Basically, it started as a bit of a parenting lifehack. When his then two-year-old child kept wanting to be a part of the songwriting action, Darnielle made the switch to piano for practical reasons.
“If you’re playing piano and I’m here in the middle 44 keys, your child can bang on the upper and lower ones without distracting, whereas with a guitar if the kid decides he doesn’t feel like you playing guitar right now then you’re done,” he said. “So it began sort of as a necessity of where I’m going to be writing. Then, once you have two songs in the same vein, if you’re me, you go, ‘What if I get 12 of those? That might be fun to have.'”
Obviously, you don’t write an entire album about goths without being a little bit obsessed with the idea. And Darnielle talking about the origins of goth style is entertaining in the same way that anyone discussing their passions can be.
“I mean, young men and women have been obsessed with death forever and forever — you know like Baudelaire, the Decadents in Paris,” he said. “There’s plenty of Roman poets who like to think a lot about death. But the expression of it then was to dye your hair black and sort of look dead, which was kind of a new-ish thing. Put on white base coat and blacken the bottoms of your eyes to make you look sunken — which actually Bob Dylan did on the ’74 tour, I think, and he looks like a proto-goth in that.”
And, of course, that lead to Darnielle talking about his own flirtations with the theatrical subculture.
“When I was 16 I dyed my hair black and I started wearing white Oxfords,” he said. “It was all pretty proto-goth, because what happens to goth in the wake of [famed London nightclub] the Batcave is the style becomes a lot more ornate. It becomes a lot more lace and a lot more expressive. What I was favoring was a sort of an undertaker look — a bad undertaker, I guess, because a good undertaker doesn’t remind you of death.”
When you’re writing on something from your own past, it’s easy to get overly nostalgic. Darnielle says he did his best to avoid rose-tinted glasses — decidedly un-goth as they are — while writing this album.
“I think being able to look at the past without getting nostalgic is a challenge for those of us who’ve been writing for a while because I think the trap of nostalgia is always going to be there, especially in the age of Facebook,” he said. “All your friends posting and saying things like, ‘Well, here’s when music is really good.’ I think it’s so toxic…Most of the writers I read are pretty obsessed with the past: the past is where most of the stuff is. There’s a lot more stuff in the past than there is in the present.”
With “Rain In Soho” and “Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back To Leeds,” we’d say that Darnielle has done a pretty excellent job of avoiding the nostalgia trap. Check out the new single up top and pre-order Goths here.
