Punk’s Reviews > This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days > Status Update

Lines from "Family Happiness" that as Darnielle put it "look down the line toward “No Children":

I hope the stars don’t even bother to come out tonight.
I hope we both freeze to death.

"One reason I began performing under a collective name was to put distance between what I was doing and the confessional mode of songwriting. I prefer that my stories speak for themselves. They seem stronger to me when they do."

I still haven't heard any of these early songs out in the wild (i.e. without looking for them), and I haven't heard Horseradish Road at all, but on the page it very much sounds like a Mountain Goats song.

"Financial ruin is an almost irresistible theme for me; as soon as I feel tempted to drain a character’s bank account, I do it, whether owing to bank error or poor money management skills on their part, it does me no force, I must have their money, the better to flush it down the toilet for them."

Guys, I just really enjoy John Darnielle's whole thing. On "Commandante": "There is a tradition, from the earliest folk musics, of songs in which the speaker boasts of his talents, or his successes, or his sexual prowess. There is a tradition in Mountain Goats songs of boasting about having, e.g., “a storage locker full of cow figurines.” This song is as firmly inside that tradition as you can get."

"One longstanding aesthetic goal of mine is to be writing in poetic language that comes out sounding like speech—there are a lot of ways to think about poetry, and about how it relates to speech, and still more ways to think about how song does or doesn’t differ from poetry in how it does or doesn’t resemble speech."

Darnielle on his initial resistance to including lyrics in his liner notes and a song that addressed both "you" and "You": "There is something hilarious—no, something fun to me—about working in a communicative medium while expressing, in that medium, a palpable ambivalence toward the whole project of communication."

NEW BRITAIN :
You’ve had it up to here with my west country talk.
You can hardly understand a word I say.
The shortest tree around here is a hundred feet tall.
It’s going to rain today.

Darnielle: I like this narrator who steps into the frame and immediately makes four declarations of which he seems absolutely convinced: supposition, accusation, declaration, prediction.

"We all have things we like best about ourselves. Sometimes these line up with the things others like best in us, and sometimes not. “Stories that take place against a backdrop of hazily defined political tension and that seem to be careening toward an unhappy resolution for all involved” is probably not high on anybody’s list of most desired qualities in a Mountain Goats song, but on my list it’s very high indeed."

"The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and that you’re standing in the doorway"—I read that line in "Going to Georgia" and felt like I was close to a Mountain Goats breakthrough, but–what it really is–as I discovered paging backwards through this book is that he just likes to have people standing in doorways or near them or by a window.