Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
The atomic weight of the Mountain Goats
My phone conversation with Mountain Goats mastermind John Darnielle gets off to a bad start when I ask him about his love of black metal. He corrects me: he is a fan of death metal, not black metal. “They are different genres.”
The Mountain Goats do not sound like any kind of metal, but a conversation with Darnielle tends to jump from genre to genre, from Morbid Angel to Mel Tormé. Since the 1990s, Darnielle has been playing a kind of folk-rock, usually based on his acoustic-guitar playing and singing. But the focus is always on his lyrics. He’s often cited as one of the best lyricists working today, and rightly so.
On the recent Transcendental Youth, Darnielle packs a lot of meaning into every line. “Harlem Roulette” paints a character portrait of the R&B singer Frankie Lymon near the end of his short life. Darnielle’s deceptively simple refrain, “The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you’re never going to see again,” encompasses Lymon’s tragedy, the loneliness of people listening to his music decades later, and the way that music can comfort the lonely.
“Concision is very important,” Darnielle says. “It’s a lifelong journey. I used to be hyper-verbose in my writing. Now I want my words to have a very high atomic weight. The master of that is Mary Chapin Carpenter.”
Would he consider recording with a country artist like Carpenter? “I’d be really intimidated,” he says, “because the level of musicianship of those Nashville players is so high. I bet I could put wood on a baseball, but don’t put me on a major-league team!”
MOUNTAIN GOATS: The Irenic, Monday, December 10, 7 p.m. 619-624-9335. $20
Here's something you might be interested in.
The atomic weight of the Mountain Goats
The atomic weight of the Mountain Goats
My phone conversation with Mountain Goats mastermind John Darnielle gets off to a bad start when I ask him about his love of black metal. He corrects me: he is a fan of death metal, not black metal. “They are different genres.”
The Mountain Goats do not sound like any kind of metal, but a conversation with Darnielle tends to jump from genre to genre, from Morbid Angel to Mel Tormé. Since the 1990s, Darnielle has been playing a kind of folk-rock, usually based on his acoustic-guitar playing and singing. But the focus is always on his lyrics. He’s often cited as one of the best lyricists working today, and rightly so.
On the recent Transcendental Youth, Darnielle packs a lot of meaning into every line. “Harlem Roulette” paints a character portrait of the R&B singer Frankie Lymon near the end of his short life. Darnielle’s deceptively simple refrain, “The loneliest people in the whole wide world are the ones you’re never going to see again,” encompasses Lymon’s tragedy, the loneliness of people listening to his music decades later, and the way that music can comfort the lonely.
“Concision is very important,” Darnielle says. “It’s a lifelong journey. I used to be hyper-verbose in my writing. Now I want my words to have a very high atomic weight. The master of that is Mary Chapin Carpenter.”
Would he consider recording with a country artist like Carpenter? “I’d be really intimidated,” he says, “because the level of musicianship of those Nashville players is so high. I bet I could put wood on a baseball, but don’t put me on a major-league team!”
MOUNTAIN GOATS: The Irenic, Monday, December 10, 7 p.m. 619-624-9335. $20
Comments