Artists
Biography
On October 6th, 4AD will release The Life Of The World To Come, The Mountain Goats 6th album for the label. Less a profession of religious faith than an immersion in Biblical poetry and imagery, the songs on The Life of the World to Come take their names from verses that informed or inspired them, or which, sometimes, came up against them at right angles.
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD THAT WAS
The Mountain Goats began life in a Norwalk employee-housing studio apartment that had awesome deco tiling on the bathroom floor but little more to recommend the place as a living space. Still, you take what you can get, and it was ridiculously cheap. In this room, equipped with a dual-cassette recorder, John Darnielle started setting some of his poetry to music, using a guitar he'd gotten for a few bucks at a nearby strip mall music store. His idea at the time was that eventually his day job would be "poet." Young men have all kinds of crazy ideas about what they're going to end up doing for a living.
After a while the songs became more like songs than poems set to music, and John started playing them for his friend Rachel, who as it turned out, played bass. John and Rachel toured the eastern U.S. & Europe once, the midwest twice (if "Chicago, Columbus and Madison" count as "the midwest"), and played San Francisco a few times, and they recorded two albums and a couple of EPs. Then John graduated from college and moved to Chicago, and the Mountain Goats became Mainly Just John, except for a couple of European tours where John's friend Peter Hughes played bass. In 2001, though, 4AD called up and asked if the Mountain Goats wouldn't like to make records with them. John called Peter. They hit the studio.
As a duo, the two toured at a pace that can fairly be called "relentless" from 2002 until 2007. They made records: Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed, The Sunset Tree, Get Lonely. They took to recruiting drummers from their opening acts to play the last few songs with them. And then they met Jon Wurster, and the three took to the road in support of Get Lonely, from Fairbanks, Alaska to Hobart, Tasmania, and a few points even further south. They enjoyed playing together so much that when it came time to repair to the studio again, all three went in. In 2008, the three recorded Heretic Pride, and in early 2009, The Life of the World to Come.
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME
Somewhere in between 2007 and 2009 the same stuff started happening in JD's life that happens in everybody else's life: some people got sick, and some people stayed sick, and some people died young, and John started doing what he does when things go south, i.e., turning to old religious texts both musical & otherwise and trying to take comfort in creeds and prayers that he can't wholly buy into. In what friends (wrongly, in John's opinion) thought an excessive gesture, he bought an Amy Grant box set. He learned about an amazing songwriter named Rich Mullins, who largely gets overlooked by people who don't listen to Christian music, and he listened to Vaisnava Kirtans, and he listened to Yolanda Adams. He played hymns when he could, and he prayed the odd prayers of the faithless, and then sat down and wrote songs about what happens when you feel sick in your spirit but you're not sure if "spirit" is really a meaningful term.
The songs that flowed out of him to make this album brewed from all of these influences converging in his time of need. He dug deeply into his longstanding love of the Bible, and tried to write honestly about wanting to believe. The songs that came out are about losing people you love, and leaving places to which you can't return, and about things from which people don't & can't recover. They are about faith and doubt and the long dark hallways that run between the two.
The Life of the World to Come was recorded across three studios with three producers, from April through June of 2009: with Brandon Eggleston at Chicago's Electrical Audio; with John Congleton at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas; and with Scott Solter at Baucom Road in Monroe, North Carolina. Owen Pallet, with whom the band shared a stage in Australia this past January at the Meredith Music Festival, arranged & played strings. The songs find John playing piano more than he has in the recent past, although it's the only instrument on which he has any formal training. As of press time, no members of the Mountain Goats had joined up with the Vineyard Fellowship, but do watch this space: there are stranger things in Heaven & earth, et cetera.
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD THAT WAS
The Mountain Goats began life in a Norwalk employee-housing studio apartment that had awesome deco tiling on the bathroom floor but little more to recommend the place as a living space. Still, you take what you can get, and it was ridiculously cheap. In this room, equipped with a dual-cassette recorder, John Darnielle started setting some of his poetry to music, using a guitar he'd gotten for a few bucks at a nearby strip mall music store. His idea at the time was that eventually his day job would be "poet." Young men have all kinds of crazy ideas about what they're going to end up doing for a living.
After a while the songs became more like songs than poems set to music, and John started playing them for his friend Rachel, who as it turned out, played bass. John and Rachel toured the eastern U.S. & Europe once, the midwest twice (if "Chicago, Columbus and Madison" count as "the midwest"), and played San Francisco a few times, and they recorded two albums and a couple of EPs. Then John graduated from college and moved to Chicago, and the Mountain Goats became Mainly Just John, except for a couple of European tours where John's friend Peter Hughes played bass. In 2001, though, 4AD called up and asked if the Mountain Goats wouldn't like to make records with them. John called Peter. They hit the studio.
As a duo, the two toured at a pace that can fairly be called "relentless" from 2002 until 2007. They made records: Tallahassee, We Shall All Be Healed, The Sunset Tree, Get Lonely. They took to recruiting drummers from their opening acts to play the last few songs with them. And then they met Jon Wurster, and the three took to the road in support of Get Lonely, from Fairbanks, Alaska to Hobart, Tasmania, and a few points even further south. They enjoyed playing together so much that when it came time to repair to the studio again, all three went in. In 2008, the three recorded Heretic Pride, and in early 2009, The Life of the World to Come.
THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME
Somewhere in between 2007 and 2009 the same stuff started happening in JD's life that happens in everybody else's life: some people got sick, and some people stayed sick, and some people died young, and John started doing what he does when things go south, i.e., turning to old religious texts both musical & otherwise and trying to take comfort in creeds and prayers that he can't wholly buy into. In what friends (wrongly, in John's opinion) thought an excessive gesture, he bought an Amy Grant box set. He learned about an amazing songwriter named Rich Mullins, who largely gets overlooked by people who don't listen to Christian music, and he listened to Vaisnava Kirtans, and he listened to Yolanda Adams. He played hymns when he could, and he prayed the odd prayers of the faithless, and then sat down and wrote songs about what happens when you feel sick in your spirit but you're not sure if "spirit" is really a meaningful term.
The songs that flowed out of him to make this album brewed from all of these influences converging in his time of need. He dug deeply into his longstanding love of the Bible, and tried to write honestly about wanting to believe. The songs that came out are about losing people you love, and leaving places to which you can't return, and about things from which people don't & can't recover. They are about faith and doubt and the long dark hallways that run between the two.
The Life of the World to Come was recorded across three studios with three producers, from April through June of 2009: with Brandon Eggleston at Chicago's Electrical Audio; with John Congleton at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas; and with Scott Solter at Baucom Road in Monroe, North Carolina. Owen Pallet, with whom the band shared a stage in Australia this past January at the Meredith Music Festival, arranged & played strings. The songs find John playing piano more than he has in the recent past, although it's the only instrument on which he has any formal training. As of press time, no members of the Mountain Goats had joined up with the Vineyard Fellowship, but do watch this space: there are stranger things in Heaven & earth, et cetera.