Photo by D.L. Anderson

The Mountain Goats: "Cry for Judas" (via SoundCloud)

As the Mountain Goats' guiding force, John Darnielle has explored some dark topics during his exhaustively prolific 21-years-and-running career. 2005's The Sunset Tree drew heavily from his personal history as a survivor of familial abuse, its most anthemic song doggedly proclaiming, "I am gonna make it through this year/ If it kills me." The previous year's We Shall All Be Healed zeroed in on drug abuse and the accompanying fallout, while "No Children", a highlight from 2002's Floridian opus Tallahassee, is a bile-drenched screed of negativity that ends with one-half of the song's anti-couple threatening: "I hope you die/ I hope we both die."

Transcendental Youth, the Mountain Goats' 14th full-length, has Darnielle focusing on those diagnosed with mental illness. Chin up, though: There's hope in these songs, and a strong sense of perseverance runs through the album, bolstered by the warm glow of singer/ songwriter/arranger Matthew E. White's gorgeous horn parts. Darnielle's still a storyteller first and foremost, and there's a sense of understandable bias present that makes the album a particularly sympathetic entry in his catalog: "I have a great deal of affection for the people that populate these songs," he tells me on a cloudy day in August as rain trickles down outside of Brooklyn's Wythe Hotel. "They're suffering, and I hope they're OK."

Considering how Darnielle is so frequently willing to plumb the depths of human failure and despair, the uninitiated (or, at least, Twitter-deprived) might be surprised at how effusive and easygoing he is face-to-face. He'll talk about the flawed individuals he's spent countless releases chronicling, but his excitability peaks when he breaks conversation to recommend the best pizza place in Southern New Jersey. (Marcello's in Bordentown, in case you were wondering.) He's an incredibly positive person, and to hear him tell it, positivity is a necessity for making it through life in general: "Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy-- you build yourself little worlds to enjoy."

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Pitchfork: We're in New York right now, and it's summer-- on new song "Harlem Roulette", you say there's "nothing like a New York summer night."

John Darnielle: It's really true, especially in early June. The last person that was [interviewing me] was talking about how the eyes you look through always feel young, even if you're fronting and saying, "Oh, I feel so old." You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like-- you feel like it's Friday and you're 17 years old.

Pitchfork: How often do you feel that way while looking out at the world?

JD: Every day. That's what makes me who I am. When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded. I was hanging out with Franklin Bruno a million years ago, and I needed crickets to feed my pet scorpion. The scorpion's name was Omeyocan, named after an Aztec god. So we go to the pet store and I'm like, "Oh my god, it's a tomato frog!" I'm like that every single time-- Franklin thought it was the funniest thing. I went there every week, but seeing the animals never got old to me. That's the defining aspect of my character: I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.

Pitchfork: Was that scorpion the weirdest pet you ever had?

JD: Probably, but it wasn't weird to me because it was an everyday thing in my life. Back then, I used to shop at a place called Lloyd's Pets and Reptiles in Lakewood, Calif. They had tons of snakes. I could never bring myself to buy one because you have to feed mice to them. You feel a little bad when you feed a scorpion crickets-- this was before I was a vegetarian, too-- but they're crickets. Mice run away. Crickets don't run-- they don't even know they're going to get eaten. Mice try to hide.

I almost had a boa constrictor. My girlfriend at the time saw me admiring the snakes and knew that I couldn't buy it myself because I didn't want to feed it mice, but she also knew that I would probably get used to that. She came to my house on my birthday with great concern on her face. She said, "Your present... it got away." "What are you talking about?" "Well, I got you a boa constrictor." "Wow, cool, where is it?" "I don't know. I put it in the bag."

She probably should have put the snake in a cage before going to sleep that night, but instead she left it in her brand new car, in a paper bag, and the snake got out. Her family kept a lot of chickens in their backyard, so they were concerned that this boa constrictor was going to eat all the chickens. Instead, he sought warmth, which he found in the engine block. So the snake roasted itself there, and they found out because it smelled terrible inside her brand new car.

"That's the defining aspect of my character: I still get really

excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years."

Pitchfork: You've lived in a lot of different cities over the years-- are there any that you haven't necessarily liked spending time in?

JD: I spent a month in Germany during the winter and I wasn't having much fun-- I didn't speak German, and it was rainy. The year I spent in Portland was dark, but that was my fault, not Portland's. I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

Not to be a total hippie about it, but every place on earth has a frequency. It's not good or bad, it's just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that. You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too. I don't like to say, "Oh, I don't like this kind of music." I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it.

Pitchfork: Does your background as a survivor of abuse contribute to your focus on positivity?

JD: I've always been like this. My mother would tell you that-- from a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about. My birth father is one of those guys who thinks he's a jazz listener, but to him, jazz ended during the first year of bebop-- to him, it was no good after that. He's an English professor who didn't like poetry that was written after 1931. That's not me. I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.

Pitchfork: You started putting out Mountain Goats albums in the midst of 1990s indie culture, which some associate with generational cynicism.

JD: People are afraid of not looking cool, which involves dismissive and exclusionary stances. I grew up in Claremont, Calif., and when we would all go to L.A., we'd always worry that we weren't fitting in. When our bands would try to play there, we'd get a big "no" from all the clubs. We didn't know any of the right people. So we constructed our own scene where there were bands that you could not, for the life of you, try to figure out what they were trying to accomplish-- but you'd find the beat and nod your head to it. There's been a movement over the past few years toward focusing on good-hearted things that bring pleasure. Thrash kids back in the day talked about being badass, wicked, and evil. Those were all positive terms in that scene. You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are.

Pitchfork: You and your wife recently just had your first child. How does that play into your general outlook on life?

JD: The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality-- not broader philosophical outlooks. It's great, but my wife hasn't slept through the night in 11 months now. You have to figure out schedules and how to get health insurance for everyone. He's an incredibly positive-minded kid, unsurprisingly, someone who takes delight in stuff. I know a lot of babies now, so I can confirm that not all babies are like this-- but my son, who sees me almost every day of his life, will look at me and go, "I know that dude! I like that dude!" It's incredibly affirming.

It's a cliché to state that one should think like a child, but it's clear that kids know something that the world tries to make you unlearn later in life. There's so many strategies people use to try to get that something back, and most of them don't work. It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world. Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you.

Pitchfork: The cover art for the new album is quite evocative.

JD: It's people escaping from something, but rising towards a demon-haunted universe. It represents learning to seek out the dark things that give you pleasure and seem threatening but which also belong to you. By taking possession of them, they lose their ability to harm, and instead become the things you can own. It feels terrible, but anything that is within you is a gift. To be able to take possession of that and say, "Whatever it is, I am bigger than it," is to learn to cherish even the hard and painful things. Every character on this album is mentally ill, to some extent.

"Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need--

but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill."

Pitchfork: "White Cedar" sounds like one of the darkest songs on the album-- the lyrics seem to address a sort of finality.

JD: The song's about accepting the permanence of one's condition. The narrator is a guy who's in and out of hospitals a lot. I've worked with people who've experienced that, and I always assume there has to come a point where it's really hard, but then you try to find some way to be OK with it. There's a lot of sadness in that song.

What I've been learning over the course of my life is that diagnoses exist to help get people services they need-- but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle. That's bogus-- you're in the same boat as they are! Maybe some people are better at pretending they don't harbor all kinds of issues, but, really, everyone has them. Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

Pitchfork: Do you think it's impossible for someone to approach contentment in their personal life?

JD: No, but it's impossible to be content all the time-- you have to learn to be content in places where you're unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are. It's like when people say, "Well, music's gone to hell"-- no, it hasn't. Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music "got bad" is infantile. The same is true with your life.

Pitchfork: As a project, the Mountain Goats have been in existence for two decades now.

JD: [laughs] I refuse to acknowledge that.

Pitchfork: How do you feel about where your life has taken you at this point?

JD: It's constantly something that I can't believe-- but at the same time, I don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments. Once you start doing that, you're saying, "Here's my body of work." I don't have a body of work-- I have the stuff I'm working on now. That's why the process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along. You feel like the brave and true artistic thing to do would be to abandon all those songs forever and move onto the next bunch, but people don't want you to do that-- they want you to play the songs they know. I try not to reflect too much, and I don't really like to focus too much on myself. My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.