The new Mountain Goats album All Eternals Deck-- out March 29 on Merge-- is unlike many of their recent records in that it has no easily identifiable central theme. Accordingly, frontman John Darnielle recently told us his inspirations for the record ran from gruesome, centuries-old paintings to headbangers Cannibal Corpse to 70s cult movies to Judy Garland to outdated theories about the neanderthal man (!). But it's not totally random-- the record is suffused with a central feeling of dread that runs throughout.
Over the phone last week, Darnielle-- a massive metal fan-- also told us about the album's head-turning collaborator: Former Morbid Angel guitarist, current Hate Eternal frontman, and all-around death metal O.G. Erik Rutan, who produced a few tracks. Click on see the All Eternals Deck cover and read our extensive interview with Darnielle about the new album, how he hooked up with Rutan, maintaining an indie ethos in the age of Twitter, and the fan-generated Facebook campaign that's currently trying to help him nab a cameo on his favorite TV show, "Law & Order: SVU":
Pitchfork: How did you end up working with veteran metal dude Erik Rutan on this album?
JD: This is a long story. First, did you see the Cannibal Corpse documentary Centuries of Torment?
Pitchfork: No.
JD: Tom, come on. You have to get this thing tonight because it's the greatest. It's like four hours long but it's seriously one of the best rock docs ever made. Cannibal Corpse are a bunch of dudes from Buffalo who've been doing it forever. They are amazing musicians and characters-- just amazing dudes to listen to. I brought this documentary out on tour, and there was a DVD player in the back of the bus, so the documentary was playing 24 hours a day. Any time you wanted to see Cannibal Corpse you could just go to the back lounge and they were there.
Centuries of Torment trailer:
Pitchfork: Does it have the part where Cannibal Corpse are in Ace Ventura?
JD: They talked about it. You know, that was big moment for a lot of people. Imagine knowing there's something missing in your musical life, and then you go see this funny movie when you're 13 and boom: There's the kind of music that you've been looking for.
Anyway, [Mountain Goats drummer Jon] Wurster especially got obsessed with the documentary. We were in the studio working on this album and Wurster's calling up Cannibal Corpse clips on YouTube. It turns out they had done another documentary and there were clips of them working with Rutan. In one clip, Rutan is behind the board feeding George "Corpsegrinder" Fisher lyrics one line at a time. Rutan's reading the lyric sheet and his delivery is kind of actorly. He lifts his head from the page and meets Fisher's eyes and says, "Cadaver-stuffed carcasses flood the land." We hit the floor-- we played it over and over again.
Watch the clip John's talking about:
So I was like, "I could call this guy and see if he wants to record some other style of music. What could it hurt?" I sent him an e-mail and the next day I had an e-mail back saying, "Hey, I love death metal but I listen to all kinds of music. I would love the chance to work with something else." He was stoked, and I was stoked.
We recorded with him for three or four days, and it was just a blast. When we got to his studio, he's like, "I have this great drum kit." Wurster takes a look at the kit and goes, "Wow, that is great. I'm only going to need one of those kick drums." And Erik's like, "Really?" And I said, "Wait, Erik, have you ever recorded a band that only needs one kick drum?" He says, "No, I don't think I have." That was awesome.
To me, the way that you keep making music interesting is to not just do what you do. Some old school fans wish I was still yelling at people for the entire evening but, if I were to do that, everyone would lose interest, especially me. It's like when you go see a band that's doing an all-hits set list for the tenth year in a row. Even if you're loving the songs, you have to look up at them and say, "Wow, does this really inspire you creatively? Is that who you are?"
It was just really great for everybody to be out of their comfort zone a little bit. For instance, the electric guitar sound on [All Eternals Deck track] "Beautiful Gas Mask" is going through an ENGL Powerball, which is Erik's amp. We would never have thought to put my guitar through this gigantic powerful amp and then have me play it with my fingers real quiet. It's got this crackling, haunting presence in the background.
It was really one of the best sessions I've ever had. Erik was so into it, too.
Pitchfork: A few years ago, you told me in in an interview that the best indie-rock guitarist is not fit to carry strings for a B-list death metal dude.
JD: It remains true. Although I gotta say, Annie Clark from St. Vincent can shred. So can Kaki King. So there are people-- only women, that I know of-- who would be qualified to go work with death metal dudes at their level.
Pitchfork: After listening to All Eternals Deck a few times, it's tough to get a bead on what it's about thematically.
John Darnielle: I woke up in the middle of last night, and started listening to Joni Mitchell's For the Roses. And then I listened to my new record-- which always makes me feel weird because I think listening to your own stuff is kind of vain. But that's what I felt like doing. And that's when I got a bead on it myself.
A lot of ghastly things and crystal-ball symbolism run through it, but there's more to it than that. There's a lot of abuse-survivor stuff, like "The Autopsy Garland", which is about Judy Garland. And then "Birth of Serpents", "Outer Scorpion Squadron", and "Never Quite Free", which are all more or less about me. It was a weird five a.m. revelation. Like, if The Sunset Tree was about living in the middle of abuse, this is more of a surviving record.
Pitchfork: When you wrote about the album on your website, you referenced 70s occult horror movies and their feeling of dread.
JD: The signal piece for me is Burnt Offerings, which is a movie that's almost exclusively about mood. In it, there's all this build-up to a chaotic last 10 minutes. There's this feeling of dread, which is a different thing from horror or terror; dread is just that awful sense that something terrible is going to happen. For those of us who are into horror, dread is a nice, sort of powerful feeling. It's not that you're afraid of something; you're riding that feeling. And that's what I think surviving stuff is about-- learning to ride stuff like waves instead of letting it crush you.
Burnt Offerings trailer:
Pitchfork: Did you have any other signal pieces that helped guide the album?
JD: There's the George Romero movie Martin (1977). It's about a guy who's a vampire-- or maybe he's not a vampire. Maybe he's just crazy. Yeah, he drinks blood. But maybe he doesn't actually need blood. Maybe he's just someone with uncertain motivations. That's the beauty of Martin.
And then I read a book about the development of neanderthals as a category, and that was really moving and weird to me. Do you know how people used to think of neanderthal man?
Pitchfork: No, I don't.
JD: Neanderthal is this branch of human development that doesn't seem to fit into the story. We have some fairly linear progressions, and then you have this little hook off to the side. For years, the theory ran that neanderthal man just went extinct. Either they didn't breed with cro-magnons, or cro-magnons wiped them out. We don't know what happened to them. This is no longer the operating theory, but it was the one that inspired me.
There is a William Golding book, The Inheritors, which operated on the theory that the cro-magnons hunted and killed the neanderthal. To me, that's a profound notion-- one race of man hunting the other for sport. It's Planet of the Apes weirdness. I read these stories about the development of the species, and there's interesting scientific stuff about people faking evidence and everything. It's got this weird occult vibe of trying to construct a secret false history.
Another inspiration was Goya's "Black Paintings". This is going to sounds really bourgeois, but my therapist used to teach art and I was talking to her about Goya, who did these gruesome paintings on the walls of his house. There's this amazing one of Saturn eating his children. They look like visions of a crazy person, but he really did studies for them. It's more like willing yourself to get to that state. And that's what this record is about.
I had this signal moment when I went to Portland at the end of touring The Life of the World to Come and I did what I always do, which is walk around where I used to live and look at things. I got my hair cut by this guy who lived in Portland when I lived in Portland, and I started asking him about people we used to know. He told me that somebody I knew was still working at the same place he'd worked, so I walked down there. But it turned out my hair dude's information wasn't current, and my guy had been hit by a car just a year before. It was weird. I had all these expectations about saying hello to my old friend who I haven't seen in 25 years. And, instead, he's dead. So I went to the hotel and slept. I woke up at 2 a.m. and wrote "Birth of Serpents", which is this marriage of images and the personal stuff underneath them. It's one of the most personal things I've ever written.__
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Pitchfork: What's your take on the Facebook campaign to get you on "Law & Order: SVU"?
JD: I've got to be quite honest with you-- I found out about it totally by accident. It came about organically overnight, based on somebody having read an old interview with me and putting up this thing. If I can be a little less modest than I am by nature, I would really like to move that idea forward. I really think I could do it. It would be the greatest thing.
Pitchfork: You've given out a couple songs on Twitter now, which got me wondering: If you were starting out now instead of 15 or 20 years ago, do you think you'd be giving songs away on Twitter instead of doing limited cassette runs? Does it seem like a natural progression for you?
JD: If I were coming into it now, I don't think I'd be making music. I wanted to keep it small. This was back in the mid-90s, when major label people would come talk to any indie rock dude and say, "Don't you want as many people as possible to hear your music?" And I would say, "No, I don't."
I want people who might like it to hear it. On the Internet now, you are presenting it to the whole world. And I think the young me would have found that intimidating, and maybe I would've written poetry instead. The Internet is a really great tool, but it also presupposes a degree of wanting massive exposure and wanting to blur public and private lines. I would have been like, "No thank you." Now, I can sort of handle it. But I think the whole indie rock bedroom tape movement was more about doing stuff in bedrooms that stays in bedrooms, small basements, and VFWs, and not sharing it with the entire galaxy.
There's a a musician I'm following on Twitter who I won't name. His album came out in late December, and seven times a day he tweets that you should buy it on iTunes. I mean, I feel you; it's very hard to sell records. But I don't want to be that guy. The way that the mediascape works now, if you are not willing to be the guy hanging yourself on a clothesline and waving your arms, you're going to sink like a stone.
I really enjoy where I'm at now. I like how 8,000 people might want to hear a new song and I can get it to them all with one hand while I'm talking to you with the other. But when I was getting started, I wouldn't have wanted to be judged by by the entire world. It would have been hard.__
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