PEOPLE caught up to Darnielle as he and Goats backing band Peter Hughes (bass) and Jon Wurster (drums) were preparing to embark on a stripped-down, mostly acoustic tour.

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How’s prep for the tour going?

Like juggling cats, honestly. I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now. Finding the space to practice and work up set lists is difficult, but it’s actually easier to get work done on tour now, because then you’re in the middle of it. We’ve got the bones of a master list together – we don’t play the same setlist every night – but we got the two main lists sorted.

With so much material, what’s the process of sorting set lists for a tour?

I use the Internet a lot. Because if I was looking through my collection well, there’s a lot of stuff. It’s really quite easy to find a master list of every song I’ve ever written – there’s several sites that have that – and some of them are sorted by year, or by album. And then you look at old set lists – there’s a site called setlist.fm that catalogs the sets at shows people play – and you sort of remember which shows were good and you go, “What was good that night?”

It’s like testing out fantasy rosters for a fantasy baseball team. You line ’em up and you go, “Well, that’s pretty good, but I feel like we need somebody who bats .360 there,” and you pull out one of the bigger numbers you might have saved for the encore. The other thing is leaving a lot of flexibility – there’s a lot of spots on a set list that say “this or this or depending on the room, the crowd, you know.

Is seeing your catalog laid out like that kind of surreal? Particularly with your oeuvre, where there’s so much analysis and discussion, are there moments of, ‘Wow, what am I looking at here?’

Well, no, because I don’t really engage with it on that level. I’m literally just mining it for information. Because I do think that over-engaging with what anybody says about you is pretty unhealthy for an artist. We live in this age where people are wanting to deny that – “No, no, it’s good to get all the feedback” – I don’t think it is. I think it’s bad for your craft to be thinking too hard about whether people like it or not. Of course anybody who makes stuff wants people to like their stuff; it’s extremely human to want to read your reviews. But I haven’t been doing it for a long time. I would say that I stopped after the first seven or eight years. I just don’t read ’em! There’s nothing in there for me. People can tell you if you saw a really good review, and you can say, “Cool, somebody liked it,” but to over-engage with all that – the hermeneutics and so forth It’s unhealthy because you write a song and it means one thing to someone, but you might have meant something else when you wrote it it’s kind of like Do you have kids?

No.

Okay, well, when you give a kid a Christmas present, you may have the one that you consider the really cool present – “Oh man, they’re gonna go ape for this” – the tiniest thing, something that was in the stocking, is the thing they end up carrying around for the next six months. My older son had a little dinosaur that he had before his third Christmas, and for him, the best part of Christmas morning was showing his new toys to the dinosaur. So when you’re writing stuff there’s a thing in recovery programs – “Stay out of the results” – you kind of have to do that. You do your work, and you feel it how you feel it, but you’re making it for someone else, so it belongs to them. So for that reason, I try to avoid, not always successfully, thinking too hard about what people make of this or that song.

Your career has spanned this transitional era where artists have become super-accessible through social media. I know you’re on Twitter, so with respect to everything you just said, where do you draw the line?

Well the thing is, on Twitter, even though the handle is the Mountain Goats and there’s a performative aspect to what I write, I am just a guy on the Internet like anyone else. I first got online in ’94 – I go back a ways – but I’m just a guy yelling at the TV like anyone else. And I think that’s maybe a positive aspect of this new era of engagement with artists. I’m just a person, I do a thing. I’m not a special person because I’m an artist. That’s just what I do, that’s my work.

Coming off Beat the Champ, where you have some really beautiful, lush arrangements, you decided to do a consciously pared-down, sparse tour. Why is that?

A while back, we were playing City Winery and we showed up, and I had left my cell phone in the cab and was running around trying to find it. We’d just gotten into New York that day, and it comes time to play, and the whole band wasn’t there, so we ended up playing with I think just the snare drum and sax accompanying me on guitar – I don’t even think we used mikes. And it was awesome! I always worry that if I don’t yell enough, people will be bummed, but it was a really special show. And I thought, that’s a sound worth keeping. We’re not putting out a record this year, but we’ll be touring, so you start to think, what can you do besides, “Hi, we’re back. Did you like us last time? Here we are again,” which I think is crass. I think you should always be trying to bring a little something different than the last time, because you owe it to people.

It seems to me like a lot of musicians either prefer recording or playing live. With 20-plus years of doing both, how has that balance evolved for the band?

I have a very childish mind. When I started out, I was writing a song, and as soon as I’d written it, I’d hit record, and what you hear is like, the third time it had ever been played. It was a very much a live-recording project. So it was curated, but it started out as an attempt to reconcile that tension between recording and live performance. Over the years, we’ve really gotten more comfortable in the studio. Ben Harper told me, “It should always be better live than it is on the record,” and I’d never thought about that, but it’s true. There should always be something extra. That should be where the songs come to life. Listening to music can be a very solitary experience, but live, you’re getting down to a much more primal level of theater, and that’s where it becomes flexible, and, I don’t want to say “dangerous,” but there’s an element of risk. In the studio, even if you’re making a risky record, you’re still trying to make things sound as good as they can be.

Beat the Champ just came out last year, but are there plans for a new record? Is that insane? Has the record/tour cycle become super-compressed for bands now?

Well, I used to put out a record every six or seven months. In 1995, I did an album called Nothing for Juice and then a label in Texas got in touch and said, “Let’s do a record,” and I said, “Great,” and we cut an EP, nine songs. I didn’t tell either of the labels that the other record was coming out. So they literally came the same day – one album that had like 17 songs and an EP with nine songs. So for me, an album a year that doesn’t seem like that much to ask of a band – to write, what, 10-12 songs? But now at this point, I’m also a novelist and a father to two kids, so I’ve got a bunch of stuff going on. I have a ton of new songs, because I’m always working, but I wouldn’t expect to see anything this year, though we are going to go into the studio, and in my off months, I’ve been working on another book.