I.

Anecdotally speaking, I can think of few singers whose voices are hated with the comfort and clarity with which people hate the voice of John Darnielle. Several of my friends have barred it from car trips, and my wife usually responds to the sound of it by sticking her tongue out and mock-barfing.

I concede that I understand her frustration even if I don’t share it. Darnielle, who has fronted the Mountain Goats for the past 24 years, has the kind of flat, insistent voice that makes everything sound like an emergency. At times it reminds me of some 19th-century plains preacher, powerful and shaking and possessed by spirits beyond all mortal control; at times it reminds me of my grandmother Harriet, who was deaf and would regularly announce cocktail hour as though she was yelling “fire.” To my knowledge, Harriet did not sing, and I’m not sure she would have been encouraged had she tried.

Between 1991 and 2001, Darnielle recorded his songs on a Panasonic RX-FT500 boombox, which in Mountain Goats lore has taken on the talismanic aura of Excalibur. According to the device’s operating instructions, its frequency range is between 50 and 12,000hz, which is another way of saying that the RX-FT500 was not built to make recordings most people would buy or sell. Early Mountain Goats albums sound as monochromatic as Xeroxes: no shadow, no nuance, just hard black lines and clean white space. In his liner notes for 2002’s All Hail West Texas—the last of the band’s Panasonic albums—Darnielle notes that the gears of the tape player were so close to the microphone that recordings were accompanied by a constant, hypnotic whir, a stamp that has become as comforting to me as the hiss of the ocean in a seaside town. One fan has gone so far as to make a three-minute and thirty-three-second loop of the whir, “to help Mountain Goats fans sleep at night.”

The Mountain Goats: Panasonic RX-FT500 Whir Sound (via SoundCloud)

Darnielle has often been described as a “literary” songwriter, which I take to mean that the words he sings are more important than the way in which he sings them. I like Darnielle’s writing a lot. It is sad, tender, smart, and above all, funny. His stories—and more pointedly, the humility with which he tells them—have pulled me through some seriously miserable times and made me think twice about certain hard drugs.

He recently wrote a novel called Wolf in White Van. Anyone who is a Mountain Goats fan should read it, and probably will, but I also think it handily transcends whatever expectations you might have for novels written by cult indie singer/songwriters. I ended up experiencing most of it as an audiobook, on a drive between Los Angeles and Tucson. It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be read by Darnielle himself. I enjoyed the story, which is knotty and intriguing and written in the slow and sometimes-breathtaking language of revelation, but I mostly got lost in the sound of his voice.

Which is to say: I take the “literary” classification with a raised eyebrow. On a simpler level, the reason I listen to the Mountain Goats is because I like to hear Darnielle sing. As someone who believes that most of life is spent grabbing around in the dark for a light switch that turns out to actually be a snake, it is a force I have felt an almost-umbilical connection to. The power in it is all adrenaline, the vulnerability a function of exhaustion. It is the sound of a fighter who goes down swinging seconds after the bell has rung. It tells me what I want to hear and what I think I already know.

I got married last summer, and my wife is now seven months pregnant. I mention this in part because I’m proud and in part because we’re at the moment in the pregnancy where literature says that the baby can understand our voices. Growing up, I didn’t care about singers the way I didn’t care about actors. It was about the hook, the structure, the story. Performances were like tasting notes in coffee: Everyone who talked about them sounded vaguely pretentious, especially to someone who was only in it for caffeine. I sensed that John Darnielle was a “bad” singer, at least compared to “good” singers like Mariah Carey. But over time, “good” or “bad” has just become “distinctive” or “not distinctive.” (Mariah Carey is good and distinctive.) I do not like the sound of my own voice, at least on recordings—I find it nasal and wishy-washy. But when I speak to my unborn child I know that they won’t be able to mistake the sound for anything else.

II.

I recently went to São Paulo, Brazil, where I had a chance to see one of my favorite musicians, Tom Zé. Zé started making music in the late 1960s, at the crest of the Tropicália movement, which was more or less a streetwise, youthful branch of the avant-garde. He has put out some of the best records of his career since turning 60. Last October, he turned 78.

Zé’s music is spiky and oddly shaped, as though cobbled together using things he found in the dumpster that afternoon. I know from reading about his life that he is a satirist, though I could never assess that for myself—I don’t speak Portuguese. Still, I have the feeling that I know what he means without knowing what he’s saying. It’s his voice, which jabs and pokes at certain syllables like a playground tease, curdling into baby talk or mock-romance.

Listening to Zé—or any other non-English-speaking musician I like, really—animates a kind of elemental processing mechanism in me. Deprived of language as a way to understand what someone means, I have to focus on other, more subterranean, less logical things. Personally, this is kind of a blessing—there’s nowhere I’d rather be than somewhere where I have no idea what’s going on. Hearing without understanding is like knowing without judging: a small step toward real, raw experience.

For his encore, Zé played “Augusta, Angélica e Consolação”, a song from his 1973 album, Todos os Olhos. (The album’s cover depicts what looks like an eye, but is actually a marble stuck in someone’s butthole—a visual pun that handily evokes the spirit of Zé’s music: funny, bodily, clever, rude.) Earlier that week, my friend Nate had pointed out that the song’s name came from three arterial roads that ran through São Paulo. In the middle of the performance, Zé stopped the band and had them repeat a section of the song two or three times, then said something that made the audience laugh.

At the time, I’d declined translation from my friend Lara, but after the show, my curiosity got the better of me. I asked another friend what was so important that Zé had to stop the music to say. She explained that it was a pun about how the Largo de São Francisco, another street in São Paulo’s city center, wasn’t largo—wide—enough to contain Zé’s afflictions. He wanted everyone to pay close attention, she said, because he thought it was the best line he’d ever written. It was an interesting explanation, but I immediately regretted asking.