Vanity Fair: So the new album is a bit inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, but not really. There are mystery songs, and some take place in the modern era. The phrase you used to describe it when you announced the album was “dragon noir.” What does that mean?

John Darnielle: What happened here was I was using the term “rock opera” in my mind, but the problem with writing rock operas is [that] I start to go, “Oh. Well, now you’re writing the song that moves the action from the woods onto the shore, or whatever.” And those feel fake to me. They feel bad. They just feel like, “Well, this is obviously the placeholder.” No matter how good it is, it’s literally just a blocking exercise.

I can’t do that, so I abandon 95 percent of the projects I do like this. Usually the songs never see daylight, but I really like doing actual dragon and fantasy-based stuff. I was really enjoying it, and I wanted to maintain that. Whenever I’m writing one thing, I have side-burner stuff going on. I had this “An Antidote for Strychnine” song that was pretty clearly not in a fantasy realm, but is much more of a noir kind of thing. It’s a poisoner describing his strategy, but it really does feel like a lot of fog, and rich black-and-white imagery in it. Noir usually doesn’t have flash drives in it, but it’s in the same detective-y realm. They’re sharing space with things that have big leathery wings, and playing together that way.

It reminds me that Dungeons & Dragons, it was a visual medium, not immersive. It’s not like a video game, where the designer is curating both what you’re seeing and what you’re listening to. How did you think about D&D as you were writing?

It’s a storytelling medium. With D&D, there are a number of mechanics that you're playing. You’re fighting things that have a power, and you’re trying to wear down that power—and they can strike back at you, and so forth. You’re making your way across a map and narrating your journey.

Think of Smaug [a dragon in The Hobbit]—one reason he’s such a great character in Tolkien is he’s got a real personality. He’s not just an avenging, singeing force. Obviously, the other thing is about dragons, when we talk about facing our dragons, it’s a metaphor. I like actually leathery-skinned, green dragons, but a dragon is also a metaphor for usually something you oppose—but I’m also about sort of making peace with your dragons, and enlisting them in your aid.

It seems logical that you would go to someone like Owen, whose old project was called Final Fantasy, to produce a project about a mix of fantasy and the modern world. What was it like working with him?

It’s funny. We talked so much about the music and what I wanted to accomplish musically, [but] Owen and I didn’t talk that much about the substance of the lyrics. I mean, he would say what he thought was good, but for the most part, we were very focused from the first conversation we had on what was going to happen musically.

It has taken me 20 years to feel comfortable handing somebody that kind of control, but we were sitting around a dressing room in Pittsburgh, and we got the idea to call up Owen and really let him produce. Let him say, “Which of these songs do you want from this bunch, and which don’t you want? How do you want to orchestrate them? How should we play them? What do you want us to do? How do you want me to sing?” Normally, people don’t get to tell me a whole lot about that. Owen wrote up a big thing, and it sounded interesting. I really wanted to actually let Owen produce, and let him make decisions, and tell me how to sing or not sing, and so forth. Tell everybody a little bit of how to play. Of course you get pushback with that, but it worked out very well.