So, this is old now (April 6), but it probably hasn't been seen by many people because, as far as I can tell, it hasn't made it online. It's from an article entitled "Alpha Goat", in a free weekly gig guide booklet thing that you just pick up from store counters. I just thought that because the magazine is free anyway that it probably wouldn't matter too much if I reproduced a bit of it. Let me know if that's still not cool. I wouldn't normally bother typing it out, and I'm going to skip the usual "lo-fi/now 4AD/best non hip-hop" paragraph, but I think there's some very interesting material in there. It's kinda weird, almost like the interview was done seven years ago and just never published. Also some odd turns of phrase that are most definitely the poorly-edited magazine's, and not mine. Hmm. Anyway:
"Alastair Galbraith and Mr Peter Jefferies came to Clairmont, where I lived, and played a show. One or both of them were staying at Dennis Callaci's house, from Shrimper Records, a big early '90s lo-fi concern, and Alastair and I wound up passing the guitar back and forth. I had opened the show for them, and we ended up spening the evening trading songs, and in the end I asked him if he wanted to collaborate. I had some stuff on cassette transferred to reel-to-reel and posted it to him in Taieri Mouth, with some empty tracks on it. I'll never forget, a month later, being so excited hearing what he had done with it, and that was the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship where we ended up touring the US together twice." John Darnielle remembers. "I would do anything to play with him again. I would come down just to introduce a show by Alastair, he's one of my heroes and a beautiful human being."
The Mountain Goats catalogue is one that rewards close inspection, due in no small part to Darnielle's affection for the motif, whether it's jibing Don DeLillo, geographical escapism or the depressing day-to-day of down home deadbeats.
"Usually the song comes out of nowhere to begin with. It's amorphous and grows like cell division, starting with one little idea, then two ideas, and at some point in the middle of things, usually by the chorus, I can say, 'Oh, this fits into the schemata I'm working on, or not', but it usually takes four or five songs before I stop and say 'Look, you're repeating yourself.' Not exactly repeating myself, but these feel like multiple examples of asking the same bigger question, and then the series will sorta announce itself. But I can't sit down and tell myself to write a song in a particular series because that would feel sterile to me."
But then, as a vivid exception to prove his own rule, sometimes he does just that. In 2002, Darnielle opened his account with the 4AD catalogue with an album-long treatment of struggling working classes and poetic drunkards, centered around his long suffering Alpha Couple, who fall finally in the abyss of self-destruction long threatened in their earlier appearances.
"It was a never-ending thing, and then I just stopped, and then I had a moment where I decided to really examine these characters, and put some flesh on their bones, so I recorded
Tallahassee, a whole album about them. When we had finished 'Alpha Rat's Nest', the last song on that record, I felt like that was the end of them; the song has a lot of fire in it, like two people going up in flames. But I have to be honest, about six months ago, I had a good chord progression and a phrase or two and I ended up writing an epilogue song which was interesting, not that I ever expect anyone will ever hear it, but that's the tragedy of writing really - nothing really dies."
While
Tallahassee isn't strictly autobiographical, the world of the Alpha Couple is still seeped in his working class roots, but there is an apparent disconnect between the subject of his writing and and the style in which he writes about them. The Mountain Goats' songs are poetic, often highly referential, and the inherent intellectualism that comes with this feels at odds with the boozing, brawling, grease-stained everyman at the centre of it all. You can blame Charles Bukowski, perhaps, but as Darnielle points out, half the drunks you know consider themselves worthy of poetry's great canon.
"I write about working class people, because that has been my reality since I was a child. The circumstances of the people I am writing about tend to be my own - houses where the plumbing breaks and you have to go a month with crappy plumbing - but I don't really think about it. The food they're eating is food that I would eat. If they're drinking cheap booze, it's because I drink cheap booze. But as far as whether their socio-economic status is related to their intellectual status, I hadn't really thought about that. I think of those people as being theoretically literate people. They have other things on their mind, namely drinking and destroying each other, but if they were in better emotional circumstances, I would think of them as leaders. I hadn't thought of them as anti-intellectual people, but as fairly literate people who lack the ability to make good decisions for themselves."
July 20, 2010 01:06AM | Groove Guide- NZ interview
