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The Mountain Goats

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The Mountain Goats
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The Mountain Goats

The Mountain Goats are the band of American singer-songwriter John Darnielle. Darnielle began recording in 1991, and has become known for highly-literary lyrics and, until 2002 his lo-fi recording style.

Contents

History

Darnielle began performing under the name The Mountain Goats (a reference to the Screaming Jay Hawkins song "Big Yellow Coat") in 1991 in Claremont, California, where he attended Pitzer College and worked as a psychiatric nurse. Darnielle released his first album, , on Shrimper Records. Many of the first recordings and performances of the group featured Darnielle accompanied by members of the all-girl reggae band The Casual Girls, who became known as The Bright Mountain Choir. One of this group's members, Rachel Ware, carried on to accompany Darnielle on bass, both live and in studio for several years and records.

The first five years of The Mountain Goats' career were marked by a prolific output of songs on cassette, vinyl and CD. These releases spanned multiple labels and countries of origin many being unavailable to the majority of fans until recent reissues.

The 1995 album "Hail, and Farewell Gothenburg" for example, was recorded on a boom box and never released. The original cassette was said to be the only copy in existence and was given to a friend. In May 2006, eleven years later, the release found its way to the Internet.

Around this time the focus of The Mountain Goats project was on the urgency of writing (Brown, "Sermon on the Mount", June, 1999.). If a song wasn’t recorded adequately to tape within days of being written it was often forgotten.

Darnielle graduated from Pitzer College in 1995. At this point, Ware left the band. Most of what could be considered classic Mountain Goats conventions (boom-box recording, song series, Latin quotes and mythological themes) were abandoned in favor of a more thematically focused and experimental sound. This period was marked by collaborations with other artists including Alastair Galbraith and Simon Joyner.

2002 saw the release of three Mountain Goats-related albums: All Hail West Texas, Tallahassee and Martial Arts Weekend by The Extra Glenns. These albums mark a distinct change in focus for the Mountain Goats project, being the first in a series of concept albums that explored aspects of The Mountain Goats' canon in depth. All Hail West Texas marked the resurrection of the boom box for a complete album. Darnielle considers this album to be the culmination of his lo-fi recording style.

Tallahassee, recorded with a band and in a studio, explores the relationship of a couple whose lives were the subject of a previous song cycle running from very earlier in Darnielle's career (see Alpha Series below for a full list of songs on this topic). Martial Arts Weekend, released under the band name The Extra Glenns is a collaboration with Franklin Bruno, a project that previously had seen a handful of releases and performances. Since that recording, Bruno has joined Darnielle in the studio along with bassist Peter Hughes, who is the second official member of the band and accompanies Darnielle on tour. These three musicians form what may be considered the Mountain Goats studio band.

In 2004 The Mountain Goats released We Shall All Be Healed. The album marked a couple of changes for The Mountain Goats. It was the first time Darnielle worked with producer John Vanderslice and the first album of directly autobiographical material. We Shall All Be Healed chronicles Darnielle's life with a group of friends and acquaintances living with Methamphetamine addiction in Pomona, California.

In 2005 The Mountain Goats released their second Vanderslice-produced album, The Sunset Tree. Again autobiographical, Darnielle tackles the subject of his early childhood spent with an abusive stepfather. Darnielle had previously dealt with this subject in what he often refers to as the only autobiographical song he had written before 2004, the unreleased song "You're in Maya."

Discography

Albums

Singles and EPs

Other compilation appearances

Collections (of previously released material)

Related bands

Song Series

Scattered among the releases were song series: thematically interconnected ruminations on a single theme. Each EP album is a project to be understood alone and as a part of an interrelated whole. Releases would often contain quotes, mostly in Latin, that gave hints to the theme of the piece.

Alpha Series

Songs in this category concern the same fictional couple, described as a heterosexual lower-middle-class man and woman who originally loved each other genuinely and held generally ordinary concerns for one another's well-being but whose relationship has degraded heavily for a variety of reasons, most often a series of fights or drug and/or alcohol abuse, possibly both. Whatever the causes for their current situation, their love has not so much died as warped into the sincere, all-consuming desire of each of them to see the other drink themselves to death; thus, to facilitate this "walk down to the bottom," as described in the liner notes of Tallahassee, the couple keep whatever liquor they can afford on hand for each other and stay together.

The album Tallahassee, being entirely about the Alpha couple, begins with the pair buying a run-down house in the eponymous capital of Florida, follows their degradation and ends with a vision of the house and both of them being consumed in flames. Other songs not found on Tallahassee, however, usually named "Alpha" in part to signify that they're about the couple, deal with similar situations, if not the same situation. The songs below, not found on Tallahassee, fit into the series:

Going to

Song in this category are generally about needing to get out of the place you're in and/or thinking your life will magically improve by moving somewhere else. The characters aren't the same from song to song.

Orange Ball Series

The title of this series comes from a book by Don DeLillo in which the sun is repeatedly described as an "orange ball".

Quetzalcoatl Series

Pure Series

Standard Bitter Love Songs

Sources

External links

 

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