The Mountain Goats

The Mountain Goats is the musical project of singer, songwriter and guitarist John Darnielle. Other musicians have occasionally collaborated with the band, but Darnielle solo is the essential "Moun

The Mountain Goats is the musical project of singer, songwriter and guitarist John Darnielle. Other musicians have occasionally collaborated with the band, but Darnielle solo is the essential "Mountain Goat." While The Mountain Goats have recently put out several studio albums, they were originally a fixture of the lo-fi Shrimper scene of Upland, California, having frequently recorded on an 80s boombox and released early work exclusively on cassette tape. Darnielle's lyrics are highly literate, full of metaphor, and present a skewed take on the mundane. Many of the individual songs fit together to form a larger narrative (see: The "Going to..." series, the "Songs for..." series, the "Alpha..." series, "Standard Bitter Love Song #..." series, "Orange Ball of..." Series, "Pure..." series, and the "Quetzalcoatl..." series).

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. John became friends with Dennis Callacci who ran a local cassette only record label, Shrimper records. Dennis convinced John to release an album of recordings he had made on a boombox, entitled Taboo VI: The Homecoming. Many of the first recordings and performances of the group featured Darnielle accompanied by a members of the all-girl reggae band The Casual Girls, who became known as The Bright Mountain Choir. One of the members, Rachel Ware, accompanied Darnielle on bass, live and in studio for the next several years. Often he recorded by himself. In fact, a good portion of all tracks feature only Darnielle's nasal bleat and his frenzied acoustic guitar. At the time the focus of The Mountain Goats project was on the urgency of writing (, June, 1999.). If a song wasn’t recorded adequately to tape within days of being written it was forgotten. Darnielle's songs generally dwell on one or a combination of many subjects ranging from, conflicts within relationships that lead to irreducible contradictions; to food, water, the mythology of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, animals that can talk and more. His early tapes on the Shrimper label were low-tech presentations, recorded on a Panasonic RX-FT500, a dual-cassette recorder with built-in condenser microphone that doesn't condense. The engineers designing the recorder also placed the microphone next to the cassette wheels, which is the source of the "wheelgrind"-like noise that is present in many of the recordings. The boombox is a classic example of machinery taking on and embuing organic qualities. No one could duplicate its ferocity in a studio. For Darnielle's own encomium to his old friend, see the liner notes of "All Hail West Texas." 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. Every release contained new songs, so that owning only the full length albums would be insufficient. Each EP, album is a project to be understood alone and as a part of an inter-related whole. Scattered among the releases were song series. The two main series were the “Alpha” series and the “Going To” series. Releases would often contain quotes, mostly in Latin, that gave hints as to the theme of the piece. A tight knit group of fans formed who were dedicated to tracking down every song in order to piece together a cohesive story (such as that of the couple portrayed in the “Alpha” series). Since a song might show up in any country, on any label, and any format it was essential that fans work together to obtain a complete set of works. In this way Darnielle is engaging the listener in a conversation, and a game that is in sync with his own obsession with finding and collecting music.