"900 ccs of raw whining power, no outstanding warrants for my arrest"

An excerpt from an interview in The Believer with John Darnielle with which I can, in some way, sympathise:

BLVR: You are revered as a sort of cuddly troubadour.

JD: I was always hoping people were afraid of me.

BLVR: I’m not aware of anyone who’s afraid of you.

JD: Then I’m not doing my job.

Also some thoughts on having musical tastes that most people would not expect:

THE BELIEVER: I think it would surprise many of your fans to hear that you’re a death-metal fan.

JOHN DARNIELLE: I hear that a lot, but the thing is, I don’t know why if you make the kind of music I make you would listen to more of that kind of stuff. [...] Deicide is a band that is single-mindedly focused on hating Christ. Now, a lot of death-metal bands, that’s a part of their ideological arsenal. Deicide is a one-issue candidate; it’s all they’re interested in. And I think they’re charming.

BLVR: Christianity or Christ?

JD: Christ and Christianity, but they like to focus on Christ.

BLVR: They’re opposed to loving your neighbor?

JD: That’s all secondary. Human ideology is secondary, I think, to the sort of Sharks and Jets thing: you guys are the Christians and fuck you—we’re not. Then later I think they developed the whole “we don’t like Christians because they’re weak, we don’t like Christians because of false piety” or whatever. So I had an advance [copy] of the new Deicide, and I was going to transfer it to the iPod, to listen to it on the plane. I put the CD into the Macintosh, and the drive starts doing the “whir whir” that suggests it’s not going to be able to pick up the CD. Fine, I’ll try and eject the CD. No. Press the button. No. Press the button. No. What about the drive? Okay. Force-quit iTunes in order to try and open it. No, iTunes won’t force-quit. Deicide has taken over the computer. I can’t play the CD. I can’t do nothing with it but sit there and wait for my wife, who’s more proficient with the Macintosh than I am, to come home and say, “Umm, shut down the computer, I guess.” It was pretty great, it was like the ghost of the art haunting me.

Also:

JD: I never actually shot anybody.

The rest is worth reading.

And just because it's now relevant to the post:


The Mountain Goats, 'Jenny' (From the album All Hail West Texas)


The Mountain Goats, 'See America Right' (from the album Tallahassee)

Previous Mountain Goats references here:

The 'Satanic Messiah' EP
'The Best Ever Death Metal Band Out of Denton' and 'Dance Music'
Daytrotter sessions
'This Year'
'The Sign' (cover, originally by Ace of Base)
'Going to Georgia'
'Sax Rohmer #1'
'Woke Up New'