Darnielle has written nearly 600 songs and written three novels, the first of which was published in 2014, “Wolf in White Van.”

Last year, The Mountain Goats released the album Jenny from Thebes. The album is structured as a rock opera and serves as a sequel to the band's 2002 album All Hail West Texas. The album tells the story of Jenny, who first appeared on “All Hail West Texas” but has appeared in other Darnielle songs over the years.

Last week, the Arizona Daily Sun had the opportunity to speak with Darnielle on a brief phone call. Below is that conversation, edited only for clarity and space.

Contributor Austin Frick (AF): It was nice to talk to you. I'm looking forward to the show.

John Darnielle: So are we. I've never been to Flagstaff.

Adrian Skabelund (AS): Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?

darnielle: I've gone to the tip of that. I'd like to see more since I've never actually done it, but you don't really get to see much on the tour.

as:So, you're touring with just Matt Douglas now?

darnielle: Yes, it's a duo.

as:From what I understand, it's been a while since there was just you and one other person on stage. So, I think I was wondering what happened, especially after releasing “Jenny from Thebes,'' which was kind of complicated musically.

darnielle: yes, [“Jenny from Thebes”] Very orchestrated, very arranged. But I don't remember starting a duo with me and Matt. I know you toured Europe as a duo in the fall of 2019. It was November or December of 2019. It worked really well. I forget if it was the first. But it has a unique atmosphere and is really fun.

Look, I can play those songs. [from “Jenny from Thebes,”] It can actually be stretched in many different ways. I only do one or two things in a set. On this tour, we're playing “Jenny III” almost every night. However, we [Matt and I,] We have a real relationship musically. […] It's so energetic that you wouldn't expect it to be an acoustic live show, but it's also kind of like “one night.” There's an ease to it and it has a real energy to it, and I love that.

AF:I think it also opened up a bigger catalog of your songs. It's a little simpler, so you can play things you wouldn't normally be able to play.

darnielle: Yeah, yeah, and Matt is a great musician, so almost every night if I remember something I want to play, he can fill in for me. He's a jazz player, so it's not ideal for him, he would like to have heard the song at least once. But he played some songs on this tour that he had never heard before I started playing them. And he's still doing those things well, it's going somewhere. There are also jazz elements. We're not playing jazz. But there's an exploratory, improvisational element to what we do every night, and I love that.

AF: Now, speaking of songs and songwriting, I had a question about your broader songwriting process. In many cases, the protagonists of your songs may be categorized as working Joes or regular people. However, many of your influences may be categorized as highbrow media or academia. As you know, there is Russian literature, and “Jenny from Thebes” is inspired by Greek tragedy, and there is also an album by Pierre Chuvin, which from my point of view is quite vague.

darnielle: Yeah, but okay, let me stop this. It depends on where in literature you're talking. Pierre Chuvin writes about pagans. Although an aristocracy existed among the pagans, the pagans were simply a people. These were pre-Christian peoples preserving traditions that existed before the Christianization of Rome. That is a folk religion. It's something that you and I feel every day: “Why are God's eyes hanging above the door?” So this book may be academic, but it's not about an academic topic. It's about civil religion. And while civil religion sounds like an academic term, it describes the everyday lives of ordinary people, and the whole album is basically about that.

I read a lot of Tolstoy. Although Tolstoy generally writes about aristocrats, or at least people who own land, I like to have one or two scenes in every book where we see peasants and feel romantic about their lives. However, his main characters are usually people who have money, that is, “important people.” Dostoyevsky is definitely not like that. In Dostoevsky's books there are crazy people, desperate people, gamblers, etc.

Whenever I write, it's kind of obvious, I mean, I don't know anything about aristocrats or anything like that or special people.You know, I'm an American, and I start from the premise that people are all essentially [equal] or have the same potential or the same value. I know this country hasn't always lived up to its values, but those are the expressed values ​​that we would like to think about. That's why the first thing I ask when I write a book is: What does this guy do for a living? For eight hours a day, unless you're wealthy, you have to do something to pay the rent. And it's only natural that I think so. I don't notice it when I look at other books. But people say, “All your characters are doing their jobs.” And I said, “Well, otherwise I would have had to write them as homeless. They have to pay the rent.” Here's what I thought. I'm more interested in people than “exceptional” people.

AF: Yeah, I mean, I think the most “exceptional” character you've written is the main character in “The Wolf in the White Van,” but I wouldn't call his life particularly brilliant.

darnielle: Yeah, he's just a guy who still has a job. He is a very rare person. Since he is an outcast, he has had to figure out how to make a living on his own, but he lives in an apartment in Montclair.

AF: Actually, that moves very nicely into my next question. There are plenty of hints that you have a connection to role-playing games, such as his Trace Italian from Wolf in White Van and his Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) concept album, In League with Dragons. . When you get inside the head of a new character, whether it's a D&D character or the protagonist of a new song you're writing, what's key for you?

darnielle: It was improvised. When you have a name and you know something about someone, you just start talking about it out loud, on paper, etc.

That's what you do when I play D&D. I don't usually play D&D. I play the game using simpler stats. And D&D is more of a war game. You have a character, but that character is secondary to what you're doing. There are many games that feature more primitive characters. What we're actually doing is improvisational theater, and rules are set to move the action forward. And that's the kind of thing you're doing. “Okay, you're a Kazakh nurse, and now he's 1950,” you say. I don't know anything about Kazakhstan in 1950, but you might want to do a little research before you sit down to the table. And you say: “There are no supplies. All supplies are in Moscow.” And proceed from there, so. “How do you practice?” [medicine] Without supplies? what am i doing? Do you use leaves for bandages? ” You think a lot on the spot and think in the moment. It's very childish behavior in nature. It's playing “Make Me Believe.” But as your vocabulary expands, pretend play also seems bigger. And in order to refine it and make it better, we assign to it some kind of formal limits, in terms of mirrors and rhymes.

as: Do you ever find yourself doing things like that, improvising and putting yourself in that character's shoes, when you're writing songs about new or existing characters?

darnielle:Oh, that's how you do it. Like at the beginning of this album, I played a B minor chord on the piano. And I just started singing something. And the first line, “Jenny was a warrior. Jenny was a thief,” is taken from a nursery rhyme. Taffy was a thief. Taffy came to our house and stole the beef. ' So I sang it, I just needed something to fill in the little melody that was taking shape in my head. So I sang it, and I think, “There's a character, if I'm making these claims about her, what is she doing?” It's so freeing. It's a shape. By the time you hear it, I've fixed it. I don't hear freestyle, but it always starts like that. And halfway through the process of writing it, literally singing it out loud, I got a notebook. Sing some out loud, transfer it to your notes, and sing what you've got so far. When I get stuck, I try singing whatever words I can think of in an imaginary universe that's happening right now.

It's a very exciting space to be in. And it's also something that's very familiar to me now, so I feel free to go into it. Like anything else, it's a practice. If you tried to do it today and you didn't do it, you feel embarrassed and ashamed.you [think] “What if that sounds bad?” And as you grow up, you lose those things. If the sound is bad, the sound is also bad. Maybe you didn't do a good job that day. But I think so. Of course, half the time it's going to sound bad. But I don't care, because I understand that this improvisational process sometimes produces real gems.

as: Yeah, I mean, In League with Dragons started out as this kind of rock opera and evolved from there. And “Jenny from Thebes'' has been described as a rock opera. Did that idea appeal to you? I mean, what brought you back to that?

darnielle: Yeah, if we're going to reintroduce this old character, we already had her in the song “Transcendental Youth” 10 years ago, so we thought, “What if we focused on that?” And it's exciting when I allow myself to think, “What would happen if I wrote a rock opera, like a real thing with a plot?'' Many people did, especially those who grew up in the New Wave era, which rejected concept albums and described them as bloated and pretentious. New Wave, the punk era, Lambs Lying on Broadway, Yes Song, Rick Wakeman albums – all such concept album ideas were ridiculed as pretentious. But to me they are ambitious. It can be very stupid sometimes, but I don't know, life is short. So it's okay to just try it out. Yes, I wanted to actually put in the effort and actually lean into it. This is a phrase I always use.

as: Well, I think our time is almost over. He's one for random questions, but we're just curious. So Arizona is clearly cowboy country.

AF: Yeah. You've made an album for Wizards, you've made an album for Wrestlers, but when will you do a concept album for Cowboys?

darnielle: So it's obviously going to be a country album, right? I don't like it when people who aren't good at a certain genre decide to do it because there are fans.

Elvis Costello made country records, and I think there were at least two in the '80s and '90s. And his love for this genre was so genuine that he was as skilled as a musician and executed it. What you're doing is playing that music and surrounding yourself with the people who make it. But now a cowboy movie is being shown in front of the bus. There's a station we're watching.

But I don't know. From that perspective, I'm more interested in the silent film industry. Westerns were huge back then. And they began filming in the eastern desert of California. I don't know if they filmed it in Arizona. But that's something I'm always trying to figure out. I'm interested in things like the stars of that era, how their work was different, and the fact that there are so many lost films from that era. That's what I'm thinking.

The Mountain Goats will perform at Flagstaff's Orpheum Theater (15 West Aspen Avenue) on February 1st. Doors open at 6pm and show begins at 7pm. Visit the Orpheum website to purchase tickets. orpheumflagstaff.com.