John Darnielle, aka The Mountain Goats, cares about his music and his audience with equal passion. This passion is evidenced in every recording. Listen to any song by the The Mountain Goats and you'll hear Darnielle giving away his heart and soul. His guitar strumming and emotive vocal delivery have made him a hero among indie fans and indie bands alike. The first time I heard The Mountain Goats was after I read a recommendation from the band Hefner, in which the band listed their favorite artists as Built to Spill, Neutral Milk Hotel and The Mountain Goats. Very good company indeed!

Back to that guitar strumming... Darnielle attacks his guitar like a rabid dog scratching an infected sore, detailing break-ups amid beautifully poetic vocals. In a recent e-mail interview, I poked and prodded Darnielle about his guitar style and asked him what it is that fuels his emotional delivery (sort of). I also asked his thoughts and feelings on a variety of other issues (hey, it's always interesting to learn which bands your favorite artists are listening to). So read on, and learn a little more about an artist who deserves a bigger audience... an artist who puts his music/art and his audience on equal pedestals.

John Darnielle: For the most part I am making it up. Certainly the stories in the songs aren't things I've lived through, unless they involve Portland, Oregon and large amounts of alcohol, in which case they're pretty autobiographical. I think that regret actually does play into the stuff I write, but in a pretty roundabout way. I love performing; it's not really therapeutic for me, no.

Splendid: Do you see the Mountain Goats breaking away from your cult favorite status to become a major label media darling someday? Maybe being a spotlight artist on VH1? Just kidding about that. Is your audience of chief importance, or are you making your music for mostly personal reasons?

John Darnielle: The audience that I presently enjoy is of paramount importance; I sing and play mainly because they've been kind enough to respond to my songs. The people who listen to my songs are special to me. But "building" the audience isn't something I work on, no. I've always said that the people who will enjoy what I do will naturally gravitate toward it, and that the work I do is way more important to me than its public profile. Not that I don't have the insane craving for worldwide recognition that all us singer-songwriter types have, of course. It's just not something I'm working on. Major labels, by the way, are pretty inimical to songwriting, so I don't expect or want to have much to do with them.

Splendid: Does emotional fatigue factor into your performances?

John Darnielle: I'm not sure what you mean, but I think the answer is "no." Maybe the question is predicated on the idea that my songs are vignettes from my life, but since they're not, the stories don't exhaust me -- except for the songs from Sweden, with which I got pretty personally involved. It does wear me down to sing some of the more bitter songs from that record, yes. I feel bad about what I did to the characters in those songs.

Splendid: Do you ever feel vulnerable when playing for an audience, especially since your lyrics and themes deal so frequently with relationships gone sour?

John Darnielle: Not really -- again, I play my cards pretty close to my chest. My songs are stories dressed up like letters to friends and ex-wives. I'm not divulging much about myself when I play, unless I have a lot of whiskey in me and wind up playing an unrealeased song called "You're in Maya," which is pretty much straight autobiography and does, yes, make me feel intensely vulnerable when I sing it. But I don't do it very often at all.

Splendid: Do you see yourself abandoning the lo/medium-fi ethic in the future? Being a fan of distortion myself, I'm quite happy listening to audio "imperfections." Do you see tape hiss as a vital element of your recordings?

John Darnielle: I prefer the sound of my Panasonic dual-cassette to any other recording medium, but I'm flexible; the stuff on the YoYo one-sided 12-inch records is mainly ADAT stuff and super-clean sounding, and I plan on doing some stuff in an all-digital studio here in town before too long. The Extra Glenns -- Franklin Bruno and myself -- recorded at the ultraswank Tiny Telephone studio in San Francisco a few months back and the stuff sounds awesome. But given my druthers and a receptive audience, I think that the more primitive the recording, the better it sounds. I was listening to a song by Ma Rainey and Tampa Red last night, probably recorded direct to wax cylinder. It sounded so much better than any other recording I've heard recently -- there's nothing like monoaural sound. It's just spooky.

Splendid: Which one of your songs are you most proud of, or at least, what are your favorite self-penned songs?

John Darnielle: Always when this question comes up it's the newest songs, but it's cheating to name those, I guess. I like "Jaipur" a lot. The version of "There Will Be No Divorce" that wound up on The Coroner's Gambit -- I'd been recording different versions of that song for two or three years. "Twin Human Highway Flares" and "1 Corinthians 8-10" I'm pretty happy with. But really, the ones I wrote last summer are my favorites, and nobody's heard them yet.

Splendid: Since you've toured a great deal, you must prefer certain cities over others. Which cities have the best scenes? Which cities have the worst scenes?

John Darnielle: I don't see much of the scenes -- I just see the places I play. Recently, though, Greensboro, North Carolina was a complete blast -- great people, great record store, great Hare Krishna restaurant unexpectedly smack dab in the middle of town. Philadelphia, too, on the recent tour, was an utter joy.

Splendid: What's your favorite record/CD store in the US?

John Darnielle: I'd step on too many friends' toes if I singled one out. These are my favorites, in no order at all: Vinyl Fever in Tallahassee, Aquarius in San Francisco, Rhino Records in Claremont, Gate City Noise in Greensboro, Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis. There was a place in Nashville with a totally unreal vinyl selection but its name escapes me, which is probably for the best since I don't have that kind of money and don't have the space to put all the records in either.

Splendid: What are your feelings on being an indie icon? Do the indie kids sometimes get on your nerves? We can be a dorky group of folks.

John Darnielle: Am I an indie icon? I'm not sure that I am. Maybe I am more of an apocryphal indie icon -- only recognized in some iconographic schemes, totally missing from others. I like the indie kids, though. I am pretty much one of them, only I look better in oxfords than in gas-station shirts. They only get on my nerves when they listen to new-agey indie-rock synth bands and start talking about "textures" and "polyrhythms" and stuff like that. Then I want to lock them in a room and make them listen to Shumsky playing Dvorak until they admit that instrumental rock bands are boring.

Splendid: Your songs have a poetic quality that is becoming increasingly absent in modern music. Do you think your lyrics will ever wind up in a Norton Anthology, or some other collegiate literature compilation, for future generations to ponder?

John Darnielle: No, I don't suppose so. There are so many writers, and besides, I don't care if no-one remembers who I am when I am gone. My main hope is that my songs provide comfort or amusement to someone at some time. When I can soothe someone who is in pain, then I am perfectly happy with my lot in life. I would not sue the school that offered "Directed Readings in John Darnielle's Break-Up Songs," though, and would even provide copies of the lyrics if the professor asked me to.

Splendid: Given the chance to collaborate with any musician, living or dead, whom would you choose?

John Darnielle: The problem here is that I don't collaborate very well. I would love for Souled American to cover one of my songs, and I'd write for them or with them any day for free. I'd like to write something for Nick Cave to sing. I'd like to write an album of songs on a theme, any theme, with Tanita Tikaram. I think that would be fun.

Splendid: What bands are you listening to right now?

John Darnielle: Nomeansno; Deicide; Manishevitz; Lifter Puller; Gogogoairheart; Rotting Christ; Bablicon; the Zambonis; the Monorchid; Radiohead; True Love Always; a band whose name is either "Ape Has Killed Ape" or "Mattricide" (the one that's not their name is the album title, but I can't figure it out). I took "right now" to mean bands that are still active or were until quite recently, which explains the currency of all those bands on that list.

Splendid: What are your favorite albums of all time? Of the past ten years?

John Darnielle: Last ten years: Propagandhi's Less Talk, More Rock, Lifter Puller's Fiestas and Fiascos, Nomeansno's No One, Nothing Painted Blue's The Monte Carlo Method, Furniture One's The Adventures of Pussyman and Cuntboy, whose title I am ashamed to type but which is a completely great tape, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' Henry's Dream, Alastair Galbraith's Cry, the last three Radiohead albums in any order, Steely Dan's Two Against Nature, Diskothi-Q's The Football Albums, Suede's Sci-Fi Lullabies (completely great B-side compilation, eclipsing the band's album work), Charlie McAlister's Mississippi Luau, the first Naughty by Nature album, the Goodie Mob's Still Standing and Refrigerator's Anchors of Bleed.

All-time would be too long a list and would take days but Jackson Browne's Saturate Before Using and The Pretender would both be on the list, as would the Birthday Party's Junkyard, Joni Mitchell's unspeakable Blue, and Alma Mater by the Stockholm Monsters, which is probably my favorite album ever.

Splendid: Can you remember the first album and/or CD you ever purchased? If so, what was it?

John Darnielle: With my own money, I think it was Benefit by Jethro Tull, from Rhino's 23-cent bin. I still think "To Cry You a Song" is a great song, too.

Splendid: A web search for Mountain Goats on Napster just brought up far more than 100 results. That's very impressive, no? Also, do you have any thoughts on the whole MP3 controversy -- being an independent artist with a rabid cult following?

John Darnielle: I think it's great that people are listening to music instead of watching television, and I don't much care if the music business collapses in on itself -- it won't affect me much, or anybody whose main mission is writing songs and playing them for people.

Splendid: How do you play the guitar so fast? Sometimes it sounds like you're going to break your guitar, because you're playing with such intensity. Don't you get tired?

John Darnielle: Sure, I get tired. That is the fun part. Once, in Tallahassee, my hand bled. That was pretty cool, and shocking to see when I looked down at the guitar while playing and saw my own fresh blood on it.

Splendid: Do you have any grand plans for the Mountain Goats, or are you living your dreams/goals right now?

John Darnielle: Here are the lyrics from a song I'll probably never finish writing and will consequently never release, but it states my megalomaniacal desires pretty well: "I have a song that kills everything it touches/and I've been saving it up since I was nine years old/it is the shining jewel in the back of my throat/it is the quicksilver burning a hole in my tongue." My grand plan is to either comfort people or make them cry, or do both at once. Commercially speaking -- again, I'd love to make a lot of money, but that has nothing to do with the records I make. I am working, as comedians would put it. I am always happy to be working.

Splendid: Is there hope for the masses to someday appreciate fine music, such as that of the Mountain Goats, or do you think we're forever destined to live in a world where the majority of people are satisfied living in their personal, cultural wastelands?

John Darnielle: I have so much to say about this question! I think that what the public likes isn't so bad as we arts-and-literature people say it is -- that is my main point. I think what I do appeals to a small group of people, and that's fine with me. I think that some of my songs might appeal to larger groups, but I'd have to record them slickly to get the larger public to do that, and I'm just not interested in doing that. I do think that the masses already appreciate good music; they just don't get a chance to hear it much, since commercial radio is so uniformly awful these days.