John Darnielle wants me to call this story—about his band of the last three decades, one of the United States’ 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—“John Darnielle Is Not Special.”
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’s 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’s supply.
“You know that legendary Gay Talese piece? What’s it called—‘Frank Sinatra Has a Cold’? But this is ‘John Darnielle Is Not Special,’” 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.
“Don’t you think I should have been a motivational speaker—or a pastor?” he continues. “I could take the empirical reality that I’m not special and make that part of my motivational-speaker schtick: ‘Thanks for paying $3,000. I want you to know I don’t deserve a dime of that.’”
This idea is, by now, not new ground for us; it is a refrain. “I am the kind of person who has shared needles with people in a bathroom,” he had told me 10 days earlier, as we walked several miles across Rochester, New York, looking for apples. “I am not the kind of person who should give advice.” Yesterday evening, sitting on his back porch as the early-autumn daylight started to dim, he proclaimed, with wild gesticulations and a big grin, “I don’t think you can write something that doesn’t show who you are. Therefore, there’s no need for me to keep putting up a sign that says, ‘John Darnielle, what a special fucking guy, that he survived all this shit.’”