January 2009 Archives
January 27, 2009 Up for Auction: Guest List for the Whole Dang Tour
Anna Ives is receiving treatment for a brain tumor and her family could really use some help! So, I am offering a guest list spot for every night of the Gone Primitive tour, plus one soundcheck, to the highest bidder.
The auction is here. Bid what you can and I'll see you on the road!
January 21, 2009 Harmonic Convergence of Awesome
Do I have news? Yes I have news!
the Mountain Goats and John Vanderslice: Gone Primitive
a night of amplified acoustic guitar & voice
We are going to light out for the Territories in a van with two acoustic guitars, some notebooks, our soundman Brandon and a pouch full of charms against ill omen. We are going to get elemental. We are going to stomp our feet and hammer at the strings until we get what we want from them. We, a couple of guys named John, are going to tour, is what we're going to do. We're going to stand alone onstage and play our guitars and sing old songs & new, and then we'll probably play together. We are going to sit side by side with our acoustic guitars like two out of the five guys on the Five Man Acoustical Jam album, only with fewer Tesla songs. Because the whole point of playing an acoustic guitar is not to unplug. It's to get raw and draw blood.
Here's where we'll be:
March
18 - Asheville, NC, the Grey Eagle
20 - Norfolk, VA, Attucks Theater
21 - Washington, DC, Sixth and I Synagogue
24 - Northampton, MA, Pearl Street
25 - Somerville, MA, the Sommerville Theatre
27 - New York, NY, the Society for Ethical Culture (part of the Wordless Music series)
29 - Gambier, OH, Kenyon College
30 - Oberlin, OH, Oberlin College
April
1 - Chicago, IL, Epiphany Episcopal (tickets here)
2 - Champaign, IL, Courtyard Café at University of Illinois
3 - Iowa City, IA, the Mill, Mission Creek Music Festival
4 - Richmond, IN, Earlham College
6 - Bloomington IN, Buskirk-Chumley Theater
Is that the end of the spring news? No my friends it is not. There will be one or two morsels of news after these. In the meantime, if you've never seen me do my thing solo acoustic blood-and-spit style, and if you wanna hear some new songs & some old ones, c'mon out during the early thaw, and JV & I will help you fling curses at what's left of the snow.
January 10, 2009 Show Added
The Mountain Goats will be playing at Swedish American Hall on February 25th. At present, the show's listed as "John Darnielle," from which mix-up you may correctly infer that this is a solo set. However, the entity known as "John Darnielle" does not play music. "John Darnielle"'s activities are generally limited to the watching of old boxing matches and the cooking of delicious one-pot meals accompanied by handmade breads. The Mountain Goats play rock music and harangue audiences worldwide for the greater glory of Our Lady of Medugorje.
Swedish American is a small room, and it's been a while since I played a solo set in San Francisco, so if you think you might want to see it, you might also want to act fast. Every penny I get paid for this show will benefit the Family Violence Prevention Fund, an organization whose cause is close my heart.
Is this the end of my first-quarter news? Hell, no! I got so much more news coming you're gonna need a separate feed for it!
January 8, 2009 tMG '09: Still Pouting That No-One's Translated Die Kinder der Toten Yet
And pout we must! Yet however dry our lower lips get from being stuck-out over the inherently slow nature of translation, our own work continues. The gratitude we feel toward all the people we got to play music for in 2008 outweighs our petulance over being denied an English rendition of the book that is reportedly Jelinek's masterpiece.
Our dance card is filling out nicely for the new year, and there's lots of exciting news. For now, we have two shows to tell you about:
February
1-6 - Ships and Dip V
It's a cruise that the Barenaked Ladies do once a year. The Weakerthans will be there. Christine Fellows will be there. Sarah McLachlan will be there. Maybe some of y'all are of the type to hate on Sarah McLachlan and crack wise about the Lilith Fair, but give me a plaintive piano ballad and a mid-tempo arrangement to get all weepy about and I'm a happy man, so if you want to be the person who uploads the file "John Darnielle crying over 'I Will Remember You' aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean" to YouTube, I encourage you to buy tickets now. This whole thing is going to be a blast. "Golden Boy" bonus possible if somebody gets Wurster to luau.*
24 - San Francisco, CA, Herbst Theater
This is part of City Arts and Lectures - Tobias Wolff, who is to the short story what pre-Miami Sonny Liston was to the jab, will be chewing the fat with me, and I'll also be playing some songs. Those of you who are familiar with my vocabulary probably know how I feel about this whole deal - the word rhymes with "stoked" and is also spelled exactly the same.
More news to come! Spring will rule for all of us this year, even those of us whom 2008 tried to break! So get excited, fellow doomsayers! Good times are coming for sure!
*"Golden Boy" bonus not redeemable aboard ship, on land, or at any time prior to the return of Quetzalcoatl to Earth
