\u2018In League With Dragons.\u2019<\/a> He\u2019s also published three novels, \u2018Wolf in White Van\u2019\u00a0(2014),\u00a0\u2018Universal Harvester\u2019\u00a0(2017), and\u00a0\u2018Devil House\u2019\u00a0(2022). His new book \u2018This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days\u2019 collects 365 of his song lyrics with commentaries on what inspired them. This excerpt includes the book\u2019s preface and the lyrics and commentaries for six songs. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\tA book can take a while to find a form. This volume began as Compleat Lyricks<\/em>, the antiquated spelling there to mark the effort as out of step with the times: an enormous tome collecting everything, with the ones that still seemed good to me there in detail alongside their brethren, boisterous and vocal but occasionally unkempt.<\/p>\n\n\tI picked and pecked at <\/span>Compleat Lyricks <\/em>for several years. I wrote long pieces about the room in which I started doing this, an employee- housing apartment in Norwalk, California, to which we\u2019ll be return- ing frequently in the pages that follow. I dug up old songs on master tapes, ones that nobody besides me had ever heard but that felt, to me, like part of the picture. \u201cPart of the picture\u201d\u2014what picture? That was the question, for me, that pushed the book past one deadline and then another: What are we trying to do here? \u201cTrace a path across thirty- odd years of writing songs\u201d was, I decided, the answer.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\tYou trace a path through time methodically or it\u2019s no path at all: You use a piece of chalk and eventually it becomes a stub, or you write in a diary until it\u2019s full, or you mark a calendar from January through December. I remembered a late Psychedelic Furs album called Book of Days<\/em> <\/em>(look it up; it\u2019s underrated), and I had my form.<\/p>\n\n\tThere\u2019s one song for each day of the year here. Some are accompa- nied by detailed explications, and some by autobiographical reflections; some get elliptical glosses and some get extended question marks. Most were first released on records, or tapes, or compact discs, but some of what you\u2019ll find here has only ever been played live; a few songs in what follows have never been seen or heard by anyone but me until now. Some differ in small ways from their recorded versions: a phrase here, a line there; sometimes because that\u2019s how I found them in the notebooks where they originally resided, sometimes because that\u2019s how I sing them now. The shape they trace, together, resembles me; the songs beside which they first appeared would form a different view of the same person, but this one seems truer. That\u2019s a notion I\u2019d have resisted fiercely back at the beginning of all this. I don\u2019t, now.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor me, the form of this book evokes that Norwalk apartment\u2014 a place where, in 1991, I hung a Warhol calendar on the wall above the radiator: This calendar became immensely useful to me as my once- chaotic life took on, or at least began to hint at, form and direction. I was only then coming around to the idea that I might live a long life, full of years. It was novel territory. Some of the ideas that emerged in that time have faded into dim memory (a one-hundred poem cycle about a man who thinks he is a pig, entitled Theodicy<\/em>), and some have endured: specifically, the project that eventually results in this volume.<\/p>\n\n\n \t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tYou can read This Year <\/em>however you like; if you want to assail it in a single sitting, you can do that, but you can also take it in twenty- four-hour doses, going deep into the weeds on some days and skating across a frozen pond on others. My misconception, for the first sev- eral years of the effort, had been that I was writing a book, but in truth I was making <\/em>a book: These are two different things. To make a book rather than write one is to assemble something whose external form masks its more flexible potential.<\/p>\n\n\tI did not expect, when I began writing \u201cthe Mountain Goats\u201d on the J-cards of blank cassette tapes, that the project would encompass so many forms over time. In truth, I did not anticipate any audience at all. The existence of an audience\u2014one that genuinely spans the globe\u2014the privilege and honor of it, still seems, to me, like a dream, or a miracle. The distance from my station as a state hospital psych nurse grafting poems onto crude chord progressions to\u2014well, to whatever I am now: It\u2019s a road marked by the songs that, over the years, paved it. Back in the beginning, I didn\u2019t expect that anything I was then writing would see print; indeed, I had whole theories about how lyrics weren\u2019t meant for the page. I\u2019ll still rehearse these theories aloud, if you let me get started: Songs exist in the air! Poetry is its own discipline, which informs all the others but reserves its essence for itself! <\/em>And so on. I resisted for years; but that resistance was, really, only the search for a form, for this form. What more fortunate situa- tion could there be, for a person, than to be glad of having been wrong? And really, come to think of it,<\/p>\n\n\n \t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tJanuary 1<\/strong>The summer crawled by indetectably
with every ounce of energy left in me,
because I saw you
it was hard to even see you at all
let the years come and take away my memory
when I saw you
\n\tLet\u2019s start here. It\u2019s the last song on Chile de \u00c1rbol<\/em>, the second 7\u2033 by the Mountain Goats and the first of several works I\u2019d release in part- nership with Chicago\u2019s Ajax Records. Ajax ran a distro whose cata- log made for some of the best coffee table reading around; almost every item listed got a capsule review explaining what you could ex- pect from the record, tape, or CD under review.<\/p>\n\n\tTim Adams was the guy who ran Ajax, and he\u2019d contacted me through Shrimper\u2019s Dennis Callaci to ask if I wanted to do a single; I did, and I had a whole lot of songs to choose from, because I al- most always spent a little time every day working on songs. Some of the songs I wrote had their roots in a sequence of poems called Songs from Alpha Privative <\/em>that I\u2019d been working on before I got the bright idea to set some of them to music\u2014poetry is its own dis- cipline, one into which I\u2019d poured countless days and nights, and the characters in the poems were like real people to me. Sometimes I\u2019d use the word \u201calpha\u201d in the titles of songs that sprung from this series: a note to myself about the song\u2019s origin, a breadcrumb for imagined listeners who might come along later to try to piece things together.<\/p>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\tMy time as an aspiring poet seems as distant to me now as our collective cellular origins beneath the ocean bed, but in this song I can still find what seemed important to me then: a central image (Richard Hugo\u2019s thoughts on anchor figures in writing and the imagination inspired me here), characters who reveal details of their past in the way they react to the present, a working cocktail of image and humor and wistfulness. A tendency to make that wistfulness the foundation upon which the other stuff is built.<\/p>\n
\n\tBecause writers are also always telling their own stories even when they\u2019re trying not to, there are also real people in this song, who I can still see, if I squint.<\/p>\n
\n\tJanuary 18 <\/strong>There\u2019s a north wind coming in
There\u2019s life and liberty on my tongue
\n\tThere are songs that appear to me as flashpoints, growth spurts, songs within which I\u2019m audibly getting better at the thing I\u2019m trying to do: songs where I\u2019m both gathering up the skills I\u2019ve learned so far and locating, within them, my own voice\u2014as a writer, as a songwriter. This is one of those for me. It\u2019s kind of a song about form: image, image, image, image, image, mood, image, physical fact in time and space, physical fact in time and space. That\u2019s the structure of the first verse. The second verse retains the formal characteristics of the first for two lines, and then begins to wander \u2014 a \u201cbut\u201d instead of an \u201cand,\u201d a \u201cmaybe\u201d after that; there\u2019s an insta- bility taking hold that echoes both the chord progression\u2019s wild neck wanderings and the melodic modulation that happens in the second half of the verse, deeply uncharacteristic of the Mountain Goats in that time and for the next twenty years or so until Goths <\/em>breaks the seal. The structure of the lyric is rigid for half the song, and fragments across the space of the second half. Finally, you can\u2019t miss that there\u2019s a story inside it\u2014a person, he\u2019s leaving, something seismic has happened, the world is too much with him, he appears to be in the desert but it\u2019s time to go, somebody else has to stay be- hind, it\u2019s a time of excitement and sorrow and fear and uncertainty, something has happened and can\u2019t un-happen and we\u2019re not sure what.<\/p>\n\n\tThat\u2019s the soil I sought out in those days, and occasionally, with some luck, I found it.<\/p>\n
\n\tApril 13<\/strong>Sophomore year \u2014
Junior year \u2014
By July,
so I sing this song for you,
\n\t\u201cAnd early though the laurel grows\/It withers quicker than the rose,\u201d right? But William doesn\u2019t die, he goes to prison, because the laws passed in the nineties let prosecutors charge LSD possession by weight\u2014including the weight of the paper the drug saturated. Those laws fed the increasingly hungry prison-industrial complex; they are a stain. This is an explicitly political song. All Hail West Texas <\/em>is probably my most political album; its politics favor the people who don\u2019t have the means to escape the grinding gears of the system. Those are still my politics, which I was learning to articulate as things got, I think it\u2019s fair to say, worse.<\/p>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLalitree Darnielle<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\tJuly 17<\/strong>Shuffled up Sixth Street in the rain
They come out to Broadway
Sun sets on the broad square and lights come up
\n\tShould I live to be one thousand years old, and write every day, and pursue my craft like an assassin on the trail of his quarry, tireless, my vision narrowed to take in only the object before it, viz., to write a better title than \u201cWizard Buys a Hat,\u201d yet do I know that it will never, ever happen; I will never peak, but, as titles go, \u201cWizard Buys a Hat,\u201d for me, is it, the grail toward which my titling days aspired, and every song after it ought to have gone nameless, or, better, to have been titled using a numbering system: 1+WBaH, 2+WBaH, et cetera. Just trying here to be honest with you about how I feel about the title of this song, which, in case you missed it, is \u201cWizard Buys a Hat.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tDecember 4<\/strong>If you prick us, don\u2019t it sting?
I will rise
I spent several thousand years
I will rise
I\u2019ve been trapped too long
I will push
\n\tReasons why as a child I was more drawn to the Mummy than to Dracula, the Wolfman, or Frankenstein (partial list):<\/p>\n
\n\t1.\u00a0 Obscurity of the Mummy\u2019s motives for mischief as vs. Frankenstein\u2019s (revenge), Dracula\u2019s (sustenance), or the Wolfman\u2019s (primal rage)<\/p>\n
\n\t2.\u00a0 Obscurity of the Mummy\u2019s generally unspecified powers as vs. Frankenstein\u2019s (strength of large body, motivated anger), Dracula\u2019s (hypnotic sway plus fangs, shape-shifting), and the Wolfman\u2019s (feral strength)<\/p>\n
\n\t3.\u00a0 The Mummy is free from the burden of speech in a way none of the other big three can accurately claim.<\/p>\n
\n\t4.\u00a0 Frankenstein movies are about Frankenstein. Dracula movies are about Dracula. Wolfman movies are about the Wolfman. Only the first Mummy movie is about the Mummy; he is otherwise seldom the center of the story that bears his name. Someone must speak up for the Mummy and give him a story of his own. It took me a while, and he still didn\u2019t get to be on an official release, but this one is for the Mummy.<\/p>\n\n\n \t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n<\/section>\n
\n\tDecember 17<\/strong>Every time they knock me down
I\u2019m gonna bleed out
Every bender needs a blackout
I\u2019m gonna bleed out
Somewhere beyond imagination
I\u2019m gonna bleed out
There was a chance we\u2019d make it through this
The blood is pooling underneath me
I\u2019m gonna head into the darkness
I\u2019m gonna bleed out
I\u2019m gonna bleed out
\n\tThis is my \u201cHallelujah\u201d insofar as the morning I wrote it I thought: I just want to do this, I want to spend years doing this, my whole life, I want \u201cBleed Out\u201d to become my legacy, I want it to have a thousand verses but I only use six of them; I want to grow to resent \u201cBleed Out\u201d and hear it sung by people who would no sooner bleed out on the concrete than swallow thumbtacks for their breakfast, I want to wash up on the shores of \u201cBleed Out\u201d where my bleached body will serve as a warning to others, viz., that to linger is to languish, indulgence is its own reward and also its only reward, I\u2019m going to call the band right now, I thought, Hey fellas, throw all those other songs away, this is it<\/em>, no further songs are needed, I found the One. And I think this hap- pens to everybody in their normal lives, like when you make toast and it\u2019s perfect and you think: Just this toast forever, let this moment freeze in time and I\u2019ll be fine\u2014that was me writing this, bleeding out in my own imagination, having lived an entirely different life from the one I have actually led, palpably lying on the concrete in an alley: toast.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nSource link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Revered singer-songwriter John Darnielle has been leading the Mountain Goats since the mid-1990s, putting out brilliant albums like 2002\u2019s \u2018Tallahassee\u2019 and 2019\u2019s \u2018In League…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":53646,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop","article","has-excerpt","has-avatar","has-author","has-date","has-comment-count","has-category-meta","has-read-more","thumbnail-"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53645"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53645\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/musicianvoice.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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