Name: The Mountain Goats
Start: 2026-05-30T19:00:00-04:00
Location: 40 Watt Club

The Mountain Goats

40 Watt

40 Watt Club

Hi it's John Darnielle and this is the new Mountain Goats bio. Everytime you make a record you have to have a new bio and it's a wholething. Sometimes you have to have conversations about who'd be agood person to write the bio and other times one of the press peopledoes it and you vet it and it goes through a whole process, but weare eliminating the middle man this time. My other job involveswriting prose and I'm regarded as decent enough at it so let's fastforward through the prelims here.Days is the something-somethingth album by the Mountain Goats. Ifthat last phrase has a number in it then you will know it has beenedited by bad people and you should stop reading now. If it says"something somethingth" then we are still together. Like at least twoother tMG albums, specificallyGoths andBeat the Champ,Days getsborn one day when I have a funny idea. The idea in this case waswriting a followup toGoths about the 90s and calling itGrunges. Imade this joke on the popular recipes blog "Bluesky" andaccompanied it with a brief ad-lib called "Contemplating Pearl Jam inthe Carolina Dawn" that I recorded in my back yard.But the thing about jokes is there's often something deeperunderneath them, most theories of comedy attest to this, don't getme started. I'd written out a fake track listing forGrunges but then Iwrote a poem about Layne Staley in the underworld getting rescuedby Orpheus and I started thinking about the past, a popular themeamong writers for many years now, and then I got both sad andsmitten with wonder by how the past is a place upon which you bothcan &amp; can't enact a sort of renovation: can, by changingperspectives; can't, because you can't actually move any partsaround or change anything.You think about this stuff as you get older, if you're lucky enough tobe getting older.We recorded the album at Sear Sound in Manhattan, still managedby the legendary Roberta Findlay, with whom I was fortunateenough to have a talk on the phone during the session; Rob Jostplayed bass on it; he plays in the pit onDeath Becomes Her; he alsoplays French horn here. The group backing vocals are by CatherineRusssell, Jamie Leonhart, and Carolyn Leonhart; the layered backingvocals on "Hidden Majesty of Later Venom Albums" are by JanisSiegal of the Manhattan Transfer, who was tracking on anotherfloor in the same building while we were at Sear. Giant honor for meto have Janis, I am a huge Manhattan Transfer fan. I called my oldfriend Matt Nathanson to add vocals to "Candlebox." He knocked itstraight out of the park. Mikaela Davis added harp to "Going toFennario." You can read about all this in the credits.Looking back on what I've written I see that "bio" isn't exactly whatyou'd call this, as it tells you very little about me, or about JonWurster, the best drummer in rock and if you think I'm exaggeratingthen bless your heart, or about Matt Douglas, who plays guitars andhorns &amp; writes horn arrangements and plays keys besides. I playedpiano and guitar but mainly I'm the singer. Other biographical detailsare honestly insignificant to my way of thinking, who really cares, butI get that my opinions about this stuff are a little out of step with thezeitgeist.This isDays by the Mountain Goats.”

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The Mountain Goats

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The Mountain Goats

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