The Mountain Goats

the Mountain Goats are an American band consisting of John Darnielle, Peter Hughes, and Jon Wurster.
==Personal life==
Darnielle grew up in California and moved to Portland, Oregon, after receiving his high-school equivalency. He returned to California following a drug addiction, and worked as a psychiatric nurse. In 1991, he enrolled at , where he studied English and classics.
He has two children.
==History==
In 1991, John Darnielle took the band's name from the song "Big Yellow Coat."
Rachel Ware joined the Mountain Goats in 1991. She left in 1995, when Peter Hughes joined. Jon Wurster joined in 2007.
John Darnielle originally started setting his poetry to music, using with a dual-cassette recorder and a guitar, in an employee-housing studio apartment.
He started playing them for his friend Rachel Ware, who played bass. John and Rachel began touring, and recorded two albums, and EPs. John moved to Chicago, so the Mountain Goats became "Mainly Just John," although Peter Hughes played bass on European tours. In 2001, the record label offered the Mountain Goats the chance to make records with them, which they accepted.
In July 2019, The Mountain Goats performed on .
In October 2021, the "gallows humor song" No Children went viral on TikTok, two decades after it was released. It was used as a soundtrack to choreography illustrating the divorcing couple in the song drowning. There was also a subgenre of cat choreography. John Darnielle said of the song "It was always our No. 2 song. It’s one of my better songs."
==Albums==
===Zopilote Machine===
Released in 1995. The Mountain Goats' full-length debut, it was primarily recorded on a cassette boombox.
===Sweden===
Released in 1996. It includes songs about broken relationships, food, and flora. Like Zopilote Machine, it was recorded on a boom box.
===Full Force Galesburg===
Released on June 10, 1997.
===Nothing for Juice===
Released on August 19, 1996.
It was the last full-length album to feature Rachel Ware.
===The Coroner's Gambit===
Released on October 17, 2000. Five songs were recorded with , members of , and .
===All Hail West Texas===
Released on February 19, 2002. It was Darnielle’s first attempt at a concept album. He wrote most of the lyrics in the margins of the handouts given to him in the orientation sessions at his healthcare job.
As advertised on the cover, All Hail West Texas is comprised of “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.”
On July 23, 2013, the album was reissued. The reissue featured seven previously unreleased tracks from cassettes recorded at the same time, and came with a new essay by Darnielle.
On February 18, 2022, a 20th Anniversary cassette was announced, in the form of a song.
===Tallahassee===
Released in 2002, Tallahassee was the first Mountain Goats release to be recorded with a full, traditionally-instrumented rock band. It was a late entry to the vote for 's Pete Townshend Concept Album of the Year award.
===We Shall All Be Healed===
Released on February 3, 2004. The working title was 'New Age Music Will Save Your Wretched Soul'.
===The Sunset Tree===
Released on April 26, 2005. John Darnielle's abusive stepfather, who "slyly receive[d] the album's dedication." The album's title comes from a 19th-century religious song, "The Tyrolese Evening Hymn," which was taken from a scene in the novel .
===Get Lonely===
Released on August 22, 2006.
Jon Wurster joined on the tour to support Get Lonely. A reviewer wrote that "every song is about… a sort of existential dread, the thing that happens when the most important person in your life walks out."
===Heretic Pride===
Released on February 19, 2008. It features artwork by .
===The Life of the World to Come===
A Biblically themed album, released on October 6, 2009. Every song on the album is named after a particular Bible verse. John Darnielle wrote that it is about twelve "hard lessons that the Bible taught" him, and said in an interview that "one way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can."
===All Eternals Deck===
All Eternals Deck was recorded in four different studios in , New York, , Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Florida with four different producers. It was released in March 2011. The Mountain Goats recorded with death-metal musician on the album.
===Transcendental Youth===
Released on October 2, 2012.
===Beat The Champ===
Released in 2015. It is dedicated to John Darnielle's favourite pro-wrestlers from childhood, and relates them to his life.
===Goths===
A concept album released in 2017. In an interview, John Darnielle said that when he was a teenager, he was a self-described "death rocker." He "loved that the word 'death' was right there up front." On the album, he used memories from this phase of his life to construct comical tales.
===In League with Dragons===
In League with Dragons was released in 2019, and aimed to sculpt a new musical genre, "dragon noir." John Darnielle stated that it "began as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called Riversend ruled by a benevolent wizard, for which some five to seven songs were written.” As he "worked on the Riversend stuff, weird noir visions started creeping in." John thought about the wizard's health failing," "the invasion by sea almost certain to wipe out half his people," and "what such a person might look like in the real world."
===Songs for Pierre Chuvin===
Released on June 19, 2020. The album was inspired by 's book A Chronicle of the Last Pagans. John wrote a song every day for ten days while reading it.
It was released to help the group's crew and accompanists recover income lost to COVID-19.
===Getting Into Knives===
Recorded shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown went into effect, and released on October 23, 2020. It was dedicated "to the secret priests of the Bell Swamp, those oracles of Brunswick County, wizards of Winnabow, night lords of the thousand acres: whose domain yet grows, may its borders encompass the sky and all beyond."
===Dark In Here===
Dark in Here was released on June 25, 2021. It was recorded the week between Getting Into Knives and Songs for Pierre Chuvin.
Recorded in , it featured keyboard work from the songwriter and producer .
==Bleed Out==
Bleed Out became available for pre-order on June 2, 2022.
John Darnielle described the album as "all uptempo jams except for one more accurately described as midtempo," and "plenty of songs about people whose stories are not gonna end well for them."
==Recognition==
The Mountain Goats are John Green's favourite band. The second epigraph in his third novel, , is a lyric from a Mountain Goats song.
In 2017, the studio behind announced the podcast I Only Listen To The Mountain Goats, a podcast featuring John Darnielle in conversation with Welcome to Night Vale co-creator Joseph Fink. On every episode of the first season, they discussed a song from the 2002 album All Hail West Texas. With every episode, Joseph recruited an artist to cover each song. Based on these, a tribute album was created in 2018.
 was featured in the series finale of .
At the end of 2020, the song This Year was voted the No. 1 song for a New Year's Eve playlist by readers of .
==Literature==
John Darnielle is the author of four books. He had wanted to be a writer long before wanting to be a musician, and "became a musician kind of accidentally." In an interview with , John said that "in any of my books, you can probably find the character that I prefer to think of as the most me, as the one, as my dude."
===Black Sabbath's Master of Reality===
Black Sabbath's Master of Reality was published on April 15, 2008, by . is an album by .
===Wolf in White Van===
Wolf in White Van was published on September 1, 2015, by . It is about Sean Phillips, who suffered a disfiguring injury, and crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to explore. He created "Trace Italian," a text-based role-playing game played through mail. When Lance and Carrie, two teenaged players, take their play outside the game, Sean is called on to account for a subsequent disaster. In the process, he is pulled back through time.
It was longlisted for a United States .
===Universal Harvester===
Universal Harvester was published on February 7, 2017, by . The novel is about Jeremy, who works at the Video Hut in the late 1990s. Whena local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of the movie Targets, she complains that “There’s something on it." Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, saying “There’s another movie on this tape.” Jeremy brings the movies home. In each, the screen blinks dark for a moment and the movie is replaced by a few minutes of home video, shot just outside of town.
===Devil House===
Devil House was a shortly after its release on January 25, 2022. The release was surrounded by a book tour.
The protagonist, Gage Chandler, is a writer supposedly descended from kings, reckoning with the fallout from his book, The White Witch of Morro Bay, and its on-screen adaptation, and investigating a pair of murders amid the , during which he trained as a psych nurse in a children's unit.
The book is set in the town of , where John lived for around two years as a child. It was there that he first decided that he wanted to be a writer.
==References==
Category:Music YouTubers
Category:American YouTubers
Category:Users who joined in 2018