Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle: songs with a sense of place

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The Mountain Goats sounds like a collective, but for the most part, it’s just lead singer John Darnielle and whichever musicians happen to be joining him.

This time around, Darnielle is joined by Peter Hughes and Jon Wurster, who helped him record his latest album, “Beat the Champ.”

The Mountain Goats will perform Tuesday, June 2, at Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

Q: A sense of place defines a lot of your music. How has San Francisco been a character in your music?

A: We haven’t done a lot with San Francisco. It’s funny, because San Francisco is a huge town for us. As a child, I used to go to a lot of political meetings there. But I’m not going to write songs about political meetings. I also don’t write songs about touring.

Q: How do you avoid writing songs about touring when touring composes much of your daily existence?

A: You just have to be true to the child you were. There’s a lot that’s stressful and unpleasant about touring. There’s a lot of boredom. At the same time, you’re working the dream job. You should keep the complaints to yourself.

I don’t like books about novelists; I want my art to take you someplace dark or interesting or fanciful or something. I don’t want to read about the creator doing creating. That strikes me as really not specific.

Q: When you’re in San Francisco, what are you planning on doing?

A: You know, I don’t really go out a lot when I’m on tour. But hey, the last time I went through San Francisco, I got a tattoo. I could do that again.

Q: Where do you see the running back in “Fall of the High School Star Running Back” (a song off his 2000 album “All Hail West Texas”) living today?

A: It’s funny — I don’t write protest songs, but that essentially is a protest song. It’s about federal minimums — people went to prison for acid dealing because the way they were weighing the sentences was based on the weight of the paper. So if you had a certain amount of paper, that’s what they charged you with. So, I mean, that dude would be doing 20 years, and those are mandatory federal minimums, which are a terrible idea, and so he’d probably still be in prison.

Q: It’s a pertinent song, then, considering today’s political climate.

A: The thing is, there’s so much to say about it. The prison system beginning with the transition into private industry in the 1980s has resulted in the most inhumane prisons in the modern world. If you put someone in solitary confinement for 23 hours — what do you know, they lose their minds, and they can’t function anymore. It’s inhuman, and it’s a shame there’s not a more general resistance to it.

Q: You say you don’t write protest songs — why not?

A: I just don’t think I’m good at it. You listen to a good protest song, and it has to come from a place of outrage and hope. People who write protest songs have to believe they’re going to make a difference. Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez — you see that they believe they’re going to effect some kind of change. I just don’t think I have that faith. I can effect personal change by taking them to some emotional place that makes them feel safer or less alone — I’m good at that.

But I can’t write from a place of feeling like my work is actually going to matter in some broad range. Dylan helped get Rubin Carter free — amazing. To write that, you have to have the arrogance to believe that you can make a difference.

Q: Is there any artist in 2015 that isn’t disaffected enough to believe they can’t make that change?

A: Kendrick Lamar. A lot of guys in rap, which is the folk music of the present day. I think Kendrick Lamar could do anything he wanted right now — he’s really hot.

Michael Rosen is a Bay Area writer.

Mountain Goats: 8 p.m. Tuesday, June 2. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell St., S.F. (sold out).