The New Yorker called him America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist, so is it any wonder John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats turned his attention to fiction? Halfway through a book tour, he talks to Guardian Australia about writing, wrestling and whether the Chicago Cubs really are cursed

What’s the difference between a book tour and a record tour?

Music is a cathartic release. At the end of the show people are clapping and I’m like: “Thank you, guys, but there’s no way you’re having as much fun as we are.” A reading is fun and enjoyable, but it never reaches that point of the cork coming out of the bottle. But parts come alive, you do them over and over again and you find new things, new places to go.

When you were writing the book, were you writing for the audience you were familiar with?

It’s so immersive and takes so long that the idea that there’s any audience outside of my brain and my wife is really hard to imagine. I think once it’s done I wonder how it’ll be met, but my first responsibility is to the page.



Is there any crossover between the characters in your books and songs, or do they inhabit their own completely separate worlds?

It’s discrete. To me it would be crass to be porting people from songs into books and stuff. I’ve written a lot about southern California, but I don’t use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.



Sean, the protagonist of Wolf in White Van, creates a complex play-by-mail game called Trace Italian. Has that game culture been lost?

You could do it, but it would be an affectation, like wearing a monocle. We have glasses now, so if you’re wearing a monocle, you’re doing it because you like the way it looks, and if you’re playing a by-mail game, you’re doing it for the pleasure of it.



These things used to feel like an outsider thing, although now it turns out everyone was doing it, we just weren’t talking about it.

Wolf in White Van review – John Darnielle’s dark debut Read more

Right, it was a smaller world then. And there’s this phenomenon in place now, where we who played fantasy-type games, or liked science fiction, or comic books, we always considered ourselves away from the mainstream. But at this point, that is absolutely not true. Which movies are practically carrying Hollywood? The superhero movies, right? The Lord of the Rings sold well in the 70s, but it was wasn’t topping the bestseller list, it was a nerdy pursuit, and now it’s not. Everybody saw those movies. So it’s an interesting time – the culture still fancies itself outside the mainstream but it’s not, it’s absolutely the dominant culture.

When you read others people’s books, are you inspired or worried it might affect your own creativity?

I think there are some writers, like if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he’s the type of writer whose voice infects you. And the same is true if you listen to a lot of Leonard Cohen, when you sit down and write a song you find yourself writing in a Cohenesque voice. In my early twenties, I had to be careful. But if there are good things you read and they come back out in your writing, that’s good.



The new Mountain Goats album is about wrestling – do you still watch it, or is it just the golden age that you’re interested in?

I hadn’t been, although I knew about CM Punk because he’s kind of great, and there are some good stories like Daniel Bryan, who’s pretty amazing. But once you start talking to people you find out there’s a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are. Bob Mould [of Hüsker Dü and Sugar], who used to write wrestling scripts, told me that I had to check out New Japan Pro Wrestling and it really is amazing. I also found myself picking up a load of old matches and watching those. Kevin Sullivan had a Satanic gimmick which was amazing.



So do you identify more with the heels, the villains?

I was just thinking about this on the plane. The heels are obviously the ones who tend to have the more developed characters. The good guy (and this is the same in Arthurian romance), you already know what his values are. He’s there to protect what’s pure and good. But when I was a child I liked the heroes, specifically the hero Chavo Guerrero. People who say the heels are the more interesting ones are selling the babyfaces short. There aren’t a lot of heroes in real life but you can have them in wrestling.



Has Chavo Guerrero heard your new song The Legend of Chavo Guerrero yet?

Oh yeah, he totally has. He started retweeting everything about it. And I cried like a child because this is my hero, you know? I mean, I can’t even tell you. You have to understand, this is my for-real hero, and I knew about kayfabe – that wrestling wasn’t real – but it is real. It’s real in the way that fiction is real. The fact that Raskolnikov [in Crime and Punishment] wasn’t a real person doesn’t mean that you don’t respond to him in a very real, human way. Chavo would save the other good guy from a beatdown and drive the other guy out of the ring. That was my dude.





Wrestling is about disguise, pretending, an area you’ve written about in your songs …

The masks we wear, right? I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy. But that’s expressing a very real urge.

You might at some point be frustrated with the fact that you always have to be good and you might be thinking “Well, I wish I could just be a bad person.” But of course, you don’t want to be a bad person, because you would live a miserable life and have no friends. In wrestling you can vicariously watch somebody ally with the darkness and do it right there in front of everybody and bask in the hatred the audience then gives him.

Speaking of frustration, how do you think the Cubs will do this year?

People are predicting good things, but I’ve heard this song before. Nothing’s going to happen. All the hopes will be dashed against the rocks like a sad ship and that they’ll finish third in the division.

You know the old saying: “Fool me once, shame on you.” The Bartman year [2003, when the Cubs lost a crucial game after a fan interfered with a catch], I was allowing myself to believe. It was time! And look what happened. So no matter how good the chances look, the Cubs manage to find the way out of success. And all Cubs fans’ identity is wrapped up in not succeeding.

How would you cope if they did ever win?

I’d be stoked. For one thing people wouldn’t talk about the ridiculous curse. There’s no curse. The curse is not spending enough money to put a good organisation in place. The curse is knowing that people are going to show up to that beautiful ballpark year in, year out, and not having to put together a good team. But the Cubs are my team and I just enjoy watching them play. It doesn’t matter if they win or lose.

John Darnielle appears at Adelaide writers’ week on 28 February. The Mountain Goats’ new album, Beat the Champ, is released on 7 April

Adelaide festival 2015 runs from 27 February to 15 March at venues citywide. Find all Guardian Australia’s coverage here