{"id":278966,"date":"2025-11-12T21:14:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T21:14:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/278966\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T21:14:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T21:14:09","slug":"how-john-darnielle-of-the-mountain-goats-lived-to-tell-his-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/278966\/","title":{"rendered":"How John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats Lived to Tell His Story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Darnielle wants me to call this story\u2014about his band of the last three decades, one of the United States\u2019 most fascinating songwriting projects ever, the Mountain Goats; about his midlife career as a novelist, which has put him in the running for the National Book Award; and about the family of four he has built despite his teenage ambition to die around 17\u2014\u201cJohn Darnielle Is Not Special.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He tells me this, repeatedly, on a Friday afternoon in his book-cluttered living room in Durham, North Carolina, the little city where he has lived since 2003 and where, he says, he hopes to live until he dies. Darnielle and I have spent about eight of the last 24 hours talking about ways he, or at least his work, might actually be special. And this, mind you, comes a week or so after I spent three days on Darnielle\u2019s big orange tour bus, sleeping in a middle bunk as we ping-ponged among mid-sized markets and major-city suburbs along the East Coast. By this point, I have trained up to tell you that Darnielle is special, like a young preacher leaving the seminary, high on the good word\u2019s supply.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou know that legendary Gay Talese piece? What\u2019s it called\u2014<a data-offer-url=\"https:\/\/classic.esquire.com\/article\/19660401106\/print\" class=\"external-link\" data-event-click=\"{&quot;element&quot;:&quot;ExternalLink&quot;,&quot;outgoingURL&quot;:&quot;https:\/\/classic.esquire.com\/article\/19660401106\/print&quot;}\" href=\"https:\/\/classic.esquire.com\/article\/19660401106\/print\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">\u2018Frank Sinatra Has a Cold\u2019<\/a>? But this is \u2018John Darnielle Is Not Special,\u2019\u201d he says, laughing and bouncing on the balls of his feet as he motions for me to follow him into a little office crowded with 58 years of creative detritus. He pauses to repeat the line to his wife, Lalitree, who rolls her eyes and smiles.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDon\u2019t you think I should have been a motivational speaker\u2014or a pastor?\u201d he continues. \u201cI could take the empirical reality that I\u2019m not special and make that part of my motivational-speaker schtick: \u2018Thanks for paying $3,000. I want you to know I don\u2019t deserve a dime of that.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This idea is, by now, not new ground for us; it is a refrain. \u201cI am the kind of person who has shared needles with people in a bathroom,\u201d he had told me 10 days earlier, as we walked several miles across Rochester, New York, looking for apples. \u201cI am not the kind of person who should give advice.\u201d Yesterday evening, sitting on his back porch as the early-autumn daylight started to dim, he proclaimed, with wild gesticulations and a big grin, \u201cI don\u2019t think you can write something that doesn\u2019t show who you are. Therefore, there\u2019s no need for me to keep putting up a sign that says, \u2018John Darnielle, what a special fucking guy, that he survived all this shit.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"John Darnielle wants me to call this story\u2014about his band of the last three decades, one of the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278967,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,569,75,341,19835,18549,343],"class_list":{"0":"post-278966","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-culture","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-music","13":"tag-onecolumn","14":"tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","15":"tag-web"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278966","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278966"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278966\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}