Photo by Chrissy Piper

Mountain Goats frontman John Darnielle has never been afraid to take on vast subjects in his songs: loneliness, fear, joy, abuse. But on the forthcoming The Life of the World to Come, due October 6 from 4AD, he sinks his teeth into just about the biggest, heaviest subject imaginable: the Bible. Every song on the album is named after a particular Bible verse, with the verses interacting with the songs in complex and fascinating ways.

Pitchfork spoke with Darnielle last week about what, exactly, this book and these verses mean to him. Darnielle is one of indie rock's great talkers, and he had a lot to say here.

Pitchfork: How's it going?

John Darnielle: I'm doing pretty good. Actually, I don't know if you're aware of this-- the album leaked today.

Pitchfork: I was not aware of that.

JD: Yeah. A few years ago that would have been, [gruff voice] "Oh no." But I live in the real world. It kind of takes a little pressure off when the album leaks.

Pitchfork: So are they going to start selling it online early or anything?

JD: No, no. Any thoughts I have about that stuff are just clod-talk. My stance on that stuff is that I have all sorts of weird ideas, and if I say something and somebody wants to run with it, that's cool. But I pretty much just focus on making the records-- unless I'm self-releasing them, then I do my own thing. But at some point, you have to stop worrying about chains of distribution or it takes out of your time to write.

Pitchfork: Have you been getting a lot of texts about the album today?

JD: Yeah. [laughs] There's a person in my chat list-- I don't know who they are, they only appear by screen name, but the chorus to the second song of the album suddenly popped up as their status. [laughs] "Oh, well, I'll be damned. It must be out there."

Pitchfork: That's one way to find out.

JD: It was pretty funny. What's funniest for me is to see the evolution. I seriously used to be crestfallen when a leak would happen. And I could still probably get into this frame of mind, but I used to really, really want people to experience the thing as a whole. That's what I used to enjoy so much: Bringing a record home, having it arrive in the mailbox. Having the whole experience of hearing it as you're holding it and looking at it and reading the liner notes, if they're anything. My liner notes are more sparse these days, but they're still something I work on. Instead of just raw data coming at you through the distraction of whatever else you're looking at on the screen, and so on and so forth.

All that, at this point, is a romanticized past. It's real cool to have love for those experiences, but it's kind of ridiculous to demand that everyone must experience what music was like for me as a child. That would be dumb, to think that.

Pitchfork: You wrote on your website that this record is about 12 hard lessons that the Bible taught you. What do you mean by that?

JD: The thing is, when you're writing those sorts of things, you sort of labor over what you're going to say. I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, "Well, here's what I've been doing." And that would be it. But there's this sort of tradition of trying to frame it in such a way so that the person who reads it has something to grab a hold of, instead of just having to receive random pieces of information and order them themselves. Because you want some sort of framework to know a little about it.