Philadelphia Weekly

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It's a rainy Friday afternoon in New York City and lead Mountain Goat John Darnielle holds court in his record company's conference room. The California native and Carolina resident hates talking on the phone, and a trip to the city will save at least a few email and phone interviews with music writers more than willing to paint him as the current king of all literate indie rock dudes. This journalistic attempt, notes Darnielle, is "a time-honored angle," and one that's likely to grow even deeper roots.

In many ways, Darnielle is the quintessential descendent of such geek rock acts as Elvis Costello, They Might Be Giants and Weezer. For instance, he once maintained a comic book collection. A big one, he says. Preserved in protective plastic.

"I was a science-fiction fan when I was in seventh and eighth grade," he says. "I was reading nothing but science fiction. Only by the grace of God did I escape becoming a Dungeons & Dragons player."

Darnielle has been known to pose as a music journalist himself. Subjects he's written about have ranged from an analysis of Barry Manilow's career for Nerve.com to an ongoing progression of death metal pontifications for Decibel. He maintains at least two blogs.

And then there's the music.

As much as any in-vogue singer/songwriter, Darnielle manages to eschew the autobiographical (excepting his "stepfather album" The Sunset Tree) in favor of a variety of characters in a variety of situations in a variety of settings told in a variety of points of view. Sort of like a novelist. Or at least an author of musical short stories.

Take the Mountain Goats' latest (and by most counts 15th full-length since 1995) Heretic Pride. Though certain broad, bookish subjects may cross Darnielle's autobiographical path, the protagonists themselves are not John Darnielle.

"In rock 'n' roll," he says, "once you have a guitar, people assume you're speaking out of your gut and your experience. That works both for and against you. It works for you because then you can really tell a good story, but at the same time people won't read it as hard."

"Lovecraft in Brooklyn," for example, while a tip of the cap to his preteen preoccupation, chronicles the unhappy outer-borough period of a racist New England science-fiction writer. The album's lead cut (and video) "Sax Rohmer No. 1" passes through yet another fiction writer, this one a pulp novelist.

And now Darnielle himself can add book-length prose writer to his array of accomplishments.

On April 15, when most of us will be speeding to the post office for a special Tax Day postmark, John Darnielle will be celebrating the publication of his first work of fiction, an entry into Continuum's well-regarded 33 1/3 series of album-inspired tomes, Black Sabbath's Master of Reality.

Darnielle's novella is divided into two parts: the first half told by a 16-year-old Sabbath devotee currently residing in a psychiatric hospital, the second told by the same fan 10 years later.

Does the art of songwriting translate to the creation of prose?

"You know," says Darnielle, "I'm glad I didn't try to write a book until I'd been a songwriter for about 10 years.

"When you write songs--even if you cram a lot of words into them like I often do--you learn to get the job done in a timely manner. Get in and get the hell out, right? Before anybody notices what you did. And so keeping it compact like that really helped me move the narrative along at a quick pace. You learn how to throw stuff away and, you know, excise whole bits. It doesn't help? Get rid of it. Songs make you merciless. The writing of a song is a surgical act."

In one Master passage the narrator Roger Painter writes to his counselor Gary: "I tried to tell you what the song did for me, how it spoke to me where I was instead of trying to tell me where I was supposed to go. I did the best I could to explain how this music was a part of me."

"Yeah," says Darnielle, "I'm trying to explain what it is that the people who love Black Sabbath directly, you know, [relate to] rather than people who, like me to some extent, are coming at it from some different angle. Like the people who heard it and went, 'That's awesome.' Right? Not the people who got curious about it and wondered, 'Well, maybe I'll like this in addition to the artsy music I like.'"

This story holds a certain significance for Darnielle. After high school he worked as a resident counselor at a psychiatric hospital.

"I tried to be one of the good guys," he says. "I tried to actually relate to the kids I worked with."