http://www.emusic.com/features/spotlight/2008_02-mountain-goats.html

My Five Favorite Mountain Goats Characters
by John Darnielle
February 15, 2008
eMusic Magazine

Since 1991, John Darnielle, the principal --- and sometimes only --- persona
behind the Mountain Goats, has been documenting the lives of the broken, the
hopeful, the messed-up and the malcontent in a series of inspired,
meticulously-drawn songs. His knack for narrative is, among his immediate
peers, without any clear equal. He writes characters who are nuanced, rounded
and believable, instilling them with a humanity and identity that makes each
of his compositions feel like a compact short story. 

Asking any songwriter to name their "favorite moments" is an unfair
enterprise, but John was game to identify five songs he felt particularly
proud of. His explanations are as rousing --- and raise as much gooseflesh ---
as the songs themselves. 

"Going to Bolivia" 
This is kind of an unlikely candidate for a character song, but that is kind
of why it has always held a special place for me. You come into the story
already lacking pretty much any information that might be helpful in
understanding what's going on, and a short while later you'll leave the song
in more or less the same condition. That's because the speaker is either a
little crazy or is so deeply into his own trip that he can't imagine everybody
else doesn't already know the basics. And, actually, we run into people like
this all the time, right? 

We work with them, run into them at bus stops, they're pretty much the gold
standard for your online random encounter. Sometimes you'll get a voicemail
from a stranger who dialed the wrong number --- that's the speaker in this
song.  He comes correct with plenty of physical detail, which would be useful
in figuring out why he's getting bad chills from the stuff that's going on
around him; if he'd only explain what his position in the whole thing is. He
won't, though. As close as he gets is the "chrome/home" rhyme interrupted by
the "sun" off-rhyme, and then we get the sense that he's been isolated for a
little while. Why am I partial to this dude? Because sometimes I get the
feeling that I *am* this dude.

"Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" 
Obviously --- or I'd think obviously --- the work I used to do in psych
hospitals and residential treatment homes is what informs this song. People
ask me sometimes if Jeff or Cyrus are based on anybody, and of course the
answer's "no," but only because of course they're *dozens of guys*. I knew a
dude in high school whose girlfriend didn't know he'd been locked up until
he'd already been gone for half a day: by the time she found out, he was in
Utah, not to emerge for, I think, a year or two.

To take somebody's adolescence away is to deny that person some of the closest
looks at God's face that we ever get on this planet; I try not to hate the
parents who, as misguided as confused, take young men and women away from
their friends and their lives to send them away. But it's hard. I try not to
excuse the destructive things adolescents sometimes do to express their pain,
but in my gut, when I write a song in which a couple of teenagers vow to take
revenge on the grownups who're fucking up their lives, well, I cast my lot
with the teenagers. They may do wrong sometimes, but their hearts aren't
rotten yet, and the light is strong within them. 

"Twin Human Highway Flares" 
There are two people in this song --- or three, if you count the highway,
which I generally do. They look a lot like me and the woman who would later
become my wife, driving from Chicago to northern Iowa on a summer day. Only I
don't think that ever happened. I know we never had any '50s road movie
conversations like the one that opens the song. We weren't, at the point in
time when this song would have had to've taken place for it to be true, using
overnight bags. We had suitcases. And there wasn't enough backstory between us
for buildings to appear as "monument[s] of desperation." 

But the picture I get in my head, or got in my head when I was writing it in a
Grinnell apartment circa 1996, was of my girlfriend and I heading a little
ways west and digging in for a long life together. I think it's almost a
symbolic scene for me in that way. On one tour we opened the set with it quite
a few times, and I enjoyed it more and more each night. The characters in this
song aren't keeping secrets from you; anything they don't tell you just isn't
any of your business. 

"Waving at You" 
This is rather the best of the early divorce songs, written a good five or six
years before I got married, drawn from --- what? Some imagined hurt? A lonely
Thursday night in December, maybe? Seems like it; I feel like I was having
some sort of disagreement with somebody. The main thing I remember though is
the riff, if you want to call it that. A fingered C chord that becomes an Am7
and then some kind of modified F whose name I don't know that resolves finally
at G, this circular droning looping process that suggested a guy who's trying
to break free from a pattern that's never going to let him go, because that
pattern is exactly who he is, down deep where all the ghosts and jackals live.
He tries at the end to shift the focus, to call his love for somebody a habit,
but it's not that: it's love. It's always going to be love. So the song
doesn't really end, it just gets stuck. And then I strum a chord for a long
time really energetically, because I used to always dig ending my songs like
that.

I can tell, listening to this song now, years removed from the night I
recorded it, that I was getting pretty into the story: not from the strength
of the strumming, but from the way I get real quiet during the end of the
vocal. To me, that's the signal that I'm getting so involved with the plotline
that I can't really tell the difference between myself and the narrator any
more. That is really the point at which I feel like I've succeeded in getting
somewhere. Everybody else assumes the louder I sing, the more deeply I'm
feeling the emotions, and I do try to oblige, but it's the quiet moments where
the shadows sort of start to flesh themselves out. 

"San Bernardino" 
This is a big jump ahead. All the preceding songs are old ones. I prefer the
newer songs to the older ones by a wide margin, and I suspect that most eMusic
listeners would, too. With my early stuff, it's wise to take advantage of
those thirty-second song clips, because my early recording technology was more
primitive than anybody's. (I repeat, *anybody's*. Nobody could touch my
boombox flow.) But it's always harder, much harder, to talk about newer songs.
I feel like I don't really know anything about a song until it's five or six
years old.

Here, however, the story is pretty clear, or I hope it is, and the song gave
me a pretty good punch in the face as soon as we were done recording it,
because I just lost my mind for about five minutes. Gone. Slumped over a piano
a few feet from the microphone I'd been singing into, Erik Friedlander sitting
in his chair where he'd been playing. (I did my vocal live with one of the
cello parts, sitting facing Erik as he played.) I was thinking again about
people who others talk down to: young mothers and fathers who have no
prospects, no money, nothing going on.

The two kids here give birth in a cheap motel somewhere in San Bernardino,
probably right off the freeway, and the young man tries to express his love
for the girl who's about to give birth. Which she does, and they feel at home
in the world, even though the world isn't giving them its best yet. I feel
hope for them, because they love each other. I know that that is a corny thing
to say, so for people who have corn allergies I apologize. But these two,
they're going to be the future, so it'd be awesome if we could give them
enough leeway to become who they're gonna become, and encourage them when we
can. I have a fondness for them though I barely know them. Their feeling for
one another inspires me, is what it is.