Revered singer-songwriter John Darnielle has been leading the Mountain Goats since the mid-1990s, putting out brilliant albums like 2002’s ‘Tallahassee’ and 2019’s ‘In League With Dragons.’ He’s also published three novels, ‘Wolf in White Van’ (2014), ‘Universal Harvester’ (2017), and ‘Devil House’ (2022). His new book, ‘This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days,’ collects 365 of his song lyrics with commentaries on what inspired them. This excerpt includes the book’s preface and the lyrics and commentaries for six songs.
A book can take a while to find a form. This volume began as Compleat Lyricks, the antiquated spelling there to mark the effort as out of step with the times: an enormous tome collecting everything, with the ones that still seemed good to me there in detail alongside their brethren, boisterous and vocal but occasionally unkempt.
I picked and pecked at Compleat Lyricks for several years. I wrote long pieces about the room in which I started doing this, an employee- housing apartment in Norwalk, California, to which we’ll be returning frequently in the pages that follow. I dug up old songs on master tapes, ones that nobody besides me had ever heard but that felt, to me, like part of the picture. “Part of the picture” — what picture? That was the question, for me, that pushed the book past one deadline and then another: What are we trying to do here? “Trace a path across thirty-odd years of writing songs” was, I decided, the answer.
You trace a path through time methodically or it’s no path at all: You use a piece of chalk and eventually it becomes a stub, or you write in a diary until it’s full, or you mark a calendar from January through December. I remembered a late Psychedelic Furs album called Book of Days (look it up; it’s underrated), and I had my form.
There’s one song for each day of the year here. Some are accompanied by detailed explications, and some by autobiographical reflections; some get elliptical glosses and some get extended question marks. Most were first released on records, or tapes, or compact discs, but some of what you’ll find here has only ever been played live; a few songs in what follows have never been seen or heard by anyone but me until now. Some differ in small ways from their recorded versions: a phrase here, a line there; sometimes because that’s how I found them in the notebooks where they originally resided, sometimes because that’s how I sing them now. The shape they trace, together, resembles me; the songs beside which they first appeared would form a different view of the same person, but this one seems truer. That’s a notion I’d have resisted fiercely back at the beginning of all this. I don’t, now.
For me, the form of this book evokes that Norwalk apartment — a place where, in 1991, I hung a Warhol calendar on the wall above the radiator: This calendar became immensely useful to me as my once- chaotic life took on, or at least began to hint at, form and direction. I was only then coming around to the idea that I might live a long life, full of years. It was novel territory. Some of the ideas that emerged in that time have faded into dim memory (a one-hundred poem cycle about a man who thinks he is a pig, entitled Theodicy), and some have endured: specifically, the project that eventually results in this volume.
You can read This Year however you like; if you want to assail it in a single sitting, you can do that, but you can also take it in twenty-four-hour doses, going deep into the weeds on some days and skating across a frozen pond on others. My misconception, for the first several years of the effort, had been that I was writing a book, but in truth I was making a book: These are two different things. To make a book rather than write one is to assemble something whose external form masks its more flexible potential.
I did not expect, when I began writing “the Mountain Goats” on the J-cards of blank cassette tapes, that the project would encompass so many forms over time. In truth, I did not anticipate any audience at all. The existence of an audience — one that genuinely spans the globe — the privilege and honor of it, still seems, to me, like a dream, or a miracle. The distance from my station as a state hospital psych nurse grafting poems onto crude chord progressions to — well, to whatever I am now: It’s a road marked by the songs that, over the years, paved it. Back in the beginning, I didn’t expect that anything I was then writing would see print; indeed, I had whole theories about how lyrics weren’t meant for the page. I’ll still rehearse these theories aloud, if you let me get started: Songs exist in the air! Poetry is its own discipline, which informs all the others but reserves its essence for itself! And so on. I resisted for years; but that resistance was, really, only the search for a form, for this form. What more fortunate situation could there be, for a person, than to be glad of having been wrong? And really, come to think of it,
January 1
“Alphabetizing”
The summer crawled by indetectably
and then I saw you, looking down to me
and your earrings sparkled in the noonday sun and
though it’s very true that I love everyone
with every ounce of energy left in me,
I love you especially
because I saw you
coming through
the screen door
up on the second floor
up on the balcony
it was hard to even see you at all
because the air was thick with alcohol
so I kept on rubbing my eyes
for all the good it did me, for all the measurable good it did me
let the years come and take away my memory
I will not forget the shock that rang through me
when I saw you
coming through
the screen door
up on the second floor
up on the balcony
Let’s start here. It’s the last song on Chile de Árbol, the second 7″ by the Mountain Goats and the first of several works I’d release in partnership with Chicago’s Ajax Records. Ajax ran a distro whose catalog made for some of the best coffee table reading around; almost every item listed got a capsule review explaining what you could expect from the record, tape, or CD under review.
Tim Adams was the guy who ran Ajax, and he’d contacted me through Shrimper’s Dennis Callaci to ask if I wanted to do a single; I did, and I had a whole lot of songs to choose from, because I almost always spent a little time every day working on songs. Some of the songs I wrote had their roots in a sequence of poems called Songs from Alpha Privative that I’d been working on before I got the bright idea to set some of them to music — poetry is its own discipline, one into which I’d poured countless days and nights, and the characters in the poems were like real people to me. Sometimes I’d use the word “alpha” in the titles of songs that sprung from this series: a note to myself about the song’s origin, a breadcrumb for imagined listeners who might come along later to try to piece things together.
My time as an aspiring poet seems as distant to me now as our collective cellular origins beneath the ocean bed, but in this song I can still find what seemed important to me then: a central image (Richard Hugo’s thoughts on anchor figures in writing and the imagination inspired me here), characters who reveal details of their past in the way they react to the present, a working cocktail of image and humor and wistfulness. A tendency to make that wistfulness the foundation upon which the other stuff is built.
Because writers are also always telling their own stories even when they’re trying not to, there are also real people in this song, who I can still see, if I squint.
January 18
“Going to Japan”
There’s a north wind coming in
and there’s a west wind coming in
and there’s an east wind coming in
and there’s a strong wind blowing in from the south
and there’s a sweet metallic taste in my mouth
there’s a dead feeling lingering over the land
and there’s a one-way ticket in my hot little hand
and I’m kissing your eyelids and I’m going to Japan
There’s life and liberty on my tongue
and there’s a dead silence where the wind chimes hung
and on some mountain somewhere in the world it’s snowing
but here in the fields there’s not a thing growing
maybe next year, you know, but there is no way of knowing
there’s wind coming in from all direction
there’s a coat on my shoulders, midnight connections
and I’m kissing you and leaving you behind in the sand
I’m holding you awhile then I’m going to Japan
There are songs that appear to me as flashpoints, growth spurts, songs within which I’m audibly getting better at the thing I’m trying to do: songs where I’m both gathering up the skills I’ve learned so far and locating, within them, my own voice — as a writer, as a songwriter. This is one of those for me. It’s kind of a song about form: image, image, image, image, image, mood, image, physical fact in time and space, physical fact in time and space. That’s the structure of the first verse. The second verse retains the formal characteristics of the first for two lines, and then begins to wander — a “but” instead of an “and,” a “maybe” after that; there’s an instability taking hold that echoes both the chord progression’s wild neck wanderings and the melodic modulation that happens in the second half of the verse, deeply uncharacteristic of the Mountain Goats in that time and for the next twenty years or so until Goths breaks the seal. The structure of the lyric is rigid for half the song, and fragments across the space of the second half. Finally, you can’t miss that there’s a story inside it — a person, he’s leaving, something seismic has happened, the world is too much with him, he appears to be in the desert but it’s time to go, somebody else has to stay behind, it’s a time of excitement and sorrow and fear and uncertainty, something has happened and can’t un-happen and we’re not sure what.
That’s the soil I sought out in those days, and occasionally, with some luck, I found it.
April 13
“The Fall of the High School Running Back”
Sophomore year —
You rushed for an average of eight-and-a-third yards per carry.
All eyes were on you!
Junior year —
you blew your knee out at an out-of-town game.
Nowhere to go to but down, down, down.
Nothing but the ground left for you to fall to.
By July,
you’d made a whole bunch of brand-new friends —
people you used to look down on,
and you’d figured out
a way to make real money —
“Givin’ ends to your friends, and it felt stupendous.”
Chrome spokes on your Japanese bike;
but selling acid was a bad idea,
and selling it to a cop was a worse one.
And the new laws said that seventeen-year-olds
could do federal time. You were the first one,
so I sing this song for you,
William Staniforth Donahue.
Your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland,
but you made a bad decision or two. Yeah.
“And early though the laurel grows/It withers quicker than the rose,” right? But William doesn’t die, he goes to prison, because the laws passed in the nineties let prosecutors charge LSD possession by weight — including the weight of the paper the drug saturated. Those laws fed the increasingly hungry prison-industrial complex; they are a stain. This is an explicitly political song. All Hail West Texas is probably my most political album; its politics favor the people who don’t have the means to escape the grinding gears of the system. Those are still my politics, which I was learning to articulate as things got, I think it’s fair to say, worse.
Lalitree Darnielle
July 17
“Wizard Buy a Hat”
Shuffled up Sixth Street in the rain
kept my head down as I looked past the people
and in the department store
I found what I was looking for
This is the church, this is the crucible
They come out to Broadway
and they look for me
I’m on the red steps smoking a cigarette
easy to recognize
black bandages on my eyes
This is the church, these are the congregants
Sun sets on the broad square and lights come up
feel like this town’s gonna put a quick end to me
but if I came here to drown,
I’m going to take a few people down
This is the church, occupied by the enemy
Should I live to be one thousand years old, and write every day, and pursue my craft like an assassin on the trail of his quarry, tireless, my vision narrowed to take in only the object before it, viz., to write a better title than “Wizard Buys a Hat,” yet do I know that it will never, ever happen; I will never peak, but, as titles go, “Wizard Buys a Hat,” for me, is it, the grail toward which my titling days aspired, and every song after it ought to have gone nameless, or, better, to have been titled using a numbering system: 1+WBaH, 2+WBaH, et cetera. Just trying here to be honest with you about how I feel about the title of this song, which, in case you missed it, is “Wizard Buys a Hat.”
December 4
“The Mummy’s Hand”
If you prick us, don’t it sting?
if you kick us, won’t it hurt?
I am wrapped in scraps of linen
and pieces of people’s old shirts
but way, way underneat
all these sticky bands
I hold all my dreams
right here in my hand
I will rise
from the tomb
like an infant
emerging from the womb
I spent several thousand years
down here all alone
no way to stem
the lonely old ache in my bones
say the spell three times
crank up the special effects
I’m gonna cast off all my bandages
and see what happens next
I will rise
fully formed
like an infant
freshly born
I’ve been trapped too long
underneath the ground
in the hollow darkness
but ain’t no grave gonna hold my body down
I will push
my hand up through the earth
and I will rise like the cry
of an infant at its birth
Reasons why as a child I was more drawn to the Mummy than to Dracula, the Wolfman, or Frankenstein (partial list):
1. Obscurity of the Mummy’s motives for mischief as vs. Frankenstein’s (revenge), Dracula’s (sustenance), or the Wolfman’s (primal rage)
2. Obscurity of the Mummy’s generally unspecified powers as vs. Frankenstein’s (strength of large body, motivated anger), Dracula’s (hypnotic sway plus fangs, shape-shifting), and the Wolfman’s (feral strength)
3. The Mummy is free from the burden of speech in a way none of the other big three can accurately claim.
4. Frankenstein movies are about Frankenstein. Dracula movies are about Dracula. Wolfman movies are about the Wolfman. Only the first Mummy movie is about the Mummy; he is otherwise seldom the center of the story that bears his name. Someone must speak up for the Mummy and give him a story of his own. It took me a while, and he still didn’t get to be on an official release, but this one is for the Mummy.
December 17
“Bleed Out”
Every time they knock me down
I rise to my feet
every time I take a bullet, they send a medic
to patch me up real neat
you only have to run the numbers to know
sooner or later everybody’s got to go
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
there won’t be anybody waiting to rush me to safety
I’m gonna let the long night take me
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
Every bender needs a blackout
every gauge deserves a top line
every story needs a child who believes
the brave hero’s gonna be just fine
you only have to check the papers to see
some of these children end up just like me
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna make a gigantic mess
but it meant something important, I guess
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
Somewhere beyond imagination
somewhere beneath the final delta
washed up on the banks of a river at the height of the storm
everybody seeking shelter
I’m gonna dive right in
I can’t swim
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
there’s gonna be a big spot where I once lay
and there won’t even be a spot one day
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
There was a chance we’d make it through this
it’s safe to say now that we missed it
and I will never lose hope, and I haven’t lost hope
I’m just realistic
I will go down punching, but I will go down
and my cornerman won’t bring me back around
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
The blood is pooling underneath me
flowing freely from my mouth
you want to call a medevac now,
knock yourself out
you can tell them when they get here
you trie
but the smallest hole was several inches wide
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna head into the darkness
I’m gonna head into the light
I will surrender to the slow, lurching tide
and drift off into the night
there won’t be any words of wisdom from me
just a lake of blood for all the world to see
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna tell my friends to all go to Hell
and wish my enemies well
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
if it’s blood you want, I’ve got plenty of it—
you’re gonna love it!
bleed out
I’m gonna bleed out
This is my “Hallelujah” insofar as the morning I wrote it I thought: I just want to do this, I want to spend years doing this, my whole life, I want “Bleed Out” to become my legacy, I want it to have a thousand verses but I only use six of them; I want to grow to resent “Bleed Out” and hear it sung by people who would no sooner bleed out on the concrete than swallow thumbtacks for their breakfast, I want to wash up on the shores of “Bleed Out” where my bleached body will serve as a warning to others, viz., that to linger is to languish, indulgence is its own reward and also its only reward, I’m going to call the band right now, I thought, Hey fellas, throw all those other songs away, this is it, no further songs are needed, I found the One. And I think this happens to everybody in their normal lives, like when you make toast and it’s perfect and you think: Just this toast forever, let this moment freeze in time and I’ll be fine — that was me writing this, bleeding out in my own imagination, having lived an entirely different life from the one I have actually led, palpably lying on the concrete in an alley: toast.
