The Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle discusses their new album : NPR

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

A fishing ship is wrecked, leaving only the captain and a few crew members on a small island not fit for survival. They begin to starve and to hallucinate.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “FISHING BOAT”)

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: (Singing) Still as the sky on the ocean, mute as the moon overhead. Me and Peter Balkan and you, friend. Everybody else is dead

SIMON: “Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan” is the new album from The Mountain Goats, and the group’s frontman, John Darnielle, joins us now from Durham, North Carolina. Thanks so much for being with us.

JOHN DARNIELLE: My pleasure.

SIMON: The idea came to you in a dream?

DARNIELLE: It did. I have a little note app that I use to write down dreams in as soon as I wake up ’cause I’ve been told all my life you’re supposed to do that (laughter). So I – but often I go back to sleep. You know, if you wake up too early, and I wake up a few times. And I looked in my note app one morning, and I had had this dream that I was working on an album. There was no visual component to the dream. It was like dreaming about being a farmer or something without seeing farming implements, just dreaming of being in a certain state of being. And the dream I had was I was working on an album and that that was its title. And I had written it down in the app, so I wrote it down on a piece of paper.

SIMON: How did you get from the title to the album?

DARNIELLE: So the thing is, I then had to make sense of the title, right? ‘Cause your subconscious mind isn’t concerned with your demand for rationality, right (laughter)? And so the title was “Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan,” right? I don’t know a person named Peter Balkan. The whole album kind of explores trying to explain the title – right? – trying to sort of give it a narrative shape.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “THROUGH THIS FIRE”)

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: (Singing) There wasn’t any fire and brimstone left, just a hollow rattle inside your chest. Deep in the dark of our 45th day, it wasn’t ever going to go away. I began to understand the things that heat requires, looking at you through this fire.

DARNIELLE: And I learned this from people, actually, at Second City in Chicago – how to flesh out an idea that’s only got a couple of words or a sentence. Well, through this fire, OK, well, then there must be across from Peter Balkan, and then there has to be a person speaking who’s looking at Peter Balkan. So there’s two people, right? So on either side of a fire. Where do we speak on either side of a fire, either when we’re camping or maybe on the beach, right? So I started filling in images, asking a lot of what then questions, right? And that’s how I got to it.

SIMON: And how did you ever get Lin-Manuel Miranda as a backup vocalist?

DARNIELLE: Well (laughter), we’re friends. We exchange thoughts sometimes, and when – we’re similar people in that we get very excited when we’re working. And so I send him stuff, and he’s kind enough to listen to it and let me know if he feels like I’m in a good space. And so – and he had heard a lot of these, right? I’d be sending them along. And the morning I wrote “Armies Of The Lord,” I was very proud of it. I sent it to him, and he, you know, said it was good. And so when it came time to record, I thought we’re going to be in New York and I’ll ask if he want to come up and sing, and he did.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “ARMIES OF THE LORD”)

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: (Singing) Raise the flag and cut the cord. All aboard, that’s going aboard. All aboard. All aboard.

SIMON: You’re also a novelist. What makes this into an album and not a novel, or at least for the moment, a stage play?

DARNIELLE: Well, the dream. The dream was that I was writing an album, and that was its name.

SIMON: Boy, you really are trying to remain loyal to this dream, aren’t you?

DARNIELLE: Oh, yeah. No, that’s – that was it. It was – ’cause it really – ’cause it was capricious. It wasn’t – like, I didn’t say, well, then by God, I’m going to do this. It was just sort of a lark on a day. Like I said, well, what if you actually did that? But I wrote “Fishing Boat,” and I wrote “Cold At Night.” I was just starting to think about the things, right? And then I wrote the first song, and it was pretty good. So I wrote another one. But it was – at the time, I almost never set out on anything thinking, oh, this is going to be the next big thing. I just sort of tinker, and then when something starts to take shape, then I want to be true to the first principles as long as I can.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “COLD AT NIGHT”)

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: (Singing) Well, the first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to. And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night.

SIMON: I think it’s fair to say you’re known for writing music that comes from some of your own troubled times.

DARNIELLE: The thing is, I think I’m known for that because of one particular album, but for the most part, there’s two albums that do that, and the rest is mainly storytelling. But yeah, but the album for which I will be best remembered is absolutely about my adolescence.

SIMON: Yeah. Which wasn’t easy. Is that a fair way to put it?

DARNIELLE: Ah. You know, I worked with a lot of kids later who had it much worse than I did. So I don’t want to – you know, I mean, I lived with parental abuse, and – but, you know, I wasn’t hungry. So that’s, you know, I think that’s an important distinction. The fact is that I’m here and I’m 58 – right? – and so all that stuff – you know, it’s a terrible cliche to say that what didn’t kill you made you stronger, but I’ve managed to make good stories from the stuff that I learned to live through, you know? And to me, like, would I trade those experiences? I don’t think that I would. I am who I am, and I’m happy with who I am. And that’s part of my story. So yeah. So it’s complex, I think.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “DAWN OF REVELATION”)

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: (Singing) I will turn these stones to bread, and all who hunger will be fed. Plates will shift and the Earth will grow, and no one here is going to die alone. (Vocalizing).

SIMON: You have dedicated this album to Peter Hughes…

DARNIELLE: Yes.

SIMON: …Who played bass for The Mountain Goats for nearly 30 years. I guess it’s the first album since he left the band last year.

DARNIELLE: That’s right, yeah.

SIMON: Did his exit play any kind of role in the story, do you think?

DARNIELLE: No, he was still in the band when I was writing the album. He had all the demos, so he was going to be on it, and then he came in – his time came to leave. And we love Peter. He’s – Peter’s a brother to me. The thing is – so when he left it was like – the first thing I thought of was like, wow, wow. Thanks for 30 years of being in the band. And the second thing that I thought was, do I have to change Peter Balkan’s name (laughter)? And so – but I said to myself, no, that would be a cheap thing to do.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “YOUR GLOW”)

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS: (Singing) It’s time for you to go, but you never lost your glow.

DARNIELLE: I mean, it’s a story of friendship and of following people’s visions, right? Like, Peter Balkan loses his mind and starts to imagine the apocalypse, right? And his friends go along with him. And I think there’s something in that about the nature of friendship. If we’re stuck in a situation with one another, we want to cleave to one another’s visions, even if they go wildly astray. But it winds up being a story about care, right? It winds up being a story about caring for one another. I used to be a nurse. This is something I believe in. I believe that care is pretty close to the center of the human experience, that, like, we’re here to take care of each other, and that’s our – that’s what we ought to do. And these are people in a situation where they have to, and that’s what draws me into this story.

SIMON: John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, and their new record is “Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan.”

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

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