The Story John Darnielle Lived to Tell

Grayson Haver Currin’s profile of his friend John Darnielle, founder of the beloved and prolific band the Mountain Goats, plays a bit like a Mountain Goats album. Its ten sections alternate between Darnielle’s nearly 35-year music career and Currin’s 10-day stretch on the road with the band, traveling to Rochester, New York. Each section, like many of Darnielle’s songs, cinches an off-kilter detail, a harrowing backstory, a bit of hard-won heart. (Surely two men holding ten pounds of apples and talking about Geto Boys as they wait for a ride is a scene from some future Darnielle song?) The cast of characters holds big names like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Craig Finn but also makes space for the Pitzer College freshman who, in 1991, turned the PA system back on so Darnielle could sing to six people. “I’d never been so close to something so good,” that student told Currin. It’s hard to imagine getting much closer to Darnielle than this.

He does wonder how long he can write, record, and tour at this pace. In a few months, after all, he’ll turn 59. The list of ailments he’s accrued, whether through life on the road or simply aging, is mounting. This morning, he went to see his doctor again about a retina that’s possibly detaching. (It’s holding steady, thank you.) He is self-conscious about his belly and mentions it often. He laments that, at least at the moment, a string of injuries has kept him from running, a relatively recent enthusiasm. Every time I ran on tour, before I could even catch my breath upon returning to the bus, he would say, “How far did you go? Man, I wish I went with you.”

He tells me more than once he’s looking for an off-ramp, for ways to spend more time at home, hanging out with the kids and writing novels. I remember that in 2006, the first time I interviewed him, he suggested he might stop touring if he had kids. He now gives himself maybe four more years on the road, possibly as many as seven. He loves the work and the people, but he is honest about the indignities of the road, like a 30-hour ride from Maine to North Carolina this summer in a tour bus where the air conditioner died. Wurster remembers that, whenever things would get bad during his early days in the band, Darnielle would joke he was going to jump off the nearest bridge. “Tell them I died taking progressive thrash to new levels,” he would tell his band.