-
- Ghent concerts
-
Artists
Get your tour dates seen by one billion fans: Sign up as an artist
John Darnielle was born on March 16th, 1967 in Bloomington, Indiana. At the age of two he lost his birth father, leading him and his mother to relocate to Central California where he grew up with a physically and emotionally abusive step-father. To cope with it he retreated into music and writing in a big way, but found that once high school was over, he couldn’t bring himself to stay in his hometown any longer. He found a job as a psychiatric nurse at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Norwalk, California and began writing songs on the guitar when he wasn’t working. He started performing live around 1990, and made a valuable friend in the form of Dennis Callaci.
Callaci was the owner of Shrimper Records, and after Darnielle gave him a boombox recorded demo tape of some of his early songs, Callaci released it as Darnielle’s first album “Taboo IV: The Homecoming”. Unwilling to perform under his own name, Darnielle took the moniker The Mountain Goats from the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song “Yellow Coat” and began to tour with only himself on guitar and his friend Rachel Ware on the bass guitar. In 1991, Darnielle started attending the Pitzeer College in Claremont to study for an English degree, and it was during this time that he started properly focusing on songwriting, becoming renowned for his massively prolific output of songs.
Between 1991 and 1995 he released a large number of cassette’s and seven inch vinyl’s and built up a devoted following because of it. However, once he left college he decided to take his band more seriously and make a go of starting an actual career in music. His debut album proper, “Zopilote Machine”, had been released in 1994, and he spent the rest of the 1990’s building his following into a proper, nationwide fan-base. While the group have never been commercially succesful, they remain one of the most critically acclaimed and respected acts in American indie rock. Darnielle remains as prolific as ever, and has grown into a truly captivating live act to boot. The Mountain Goats are a band to see as soon as possible, and they come highly recommended.
I’ve seen many, many live shows in my time but it’s hard to remember a band with more fanatical followers than John Darnielle’s The Mountain Goats. Darnielle’s released thirteen or fourteen studio albums since launching his band back in the early 90s, with his records normally following the same pattern of passionate and wordy lyrics, acoustic guitars aggressively strummed and communal, rousing choruses on songs that cover all of human life, from everyday vignettes to musings on religion. The likes of Tallahassee and All Hail West Texas are the apex of Darnielle’s vision, and quite the ride to listen to. When it comes to seeing The Mountain Goats live, be prepared for the person next to you to holler along word-for-word to each and every song. Darnielle switches between full-band shows and ones where it’s just himself and long-time partner Peter Hughes delivering stripped down versions of ‘Linda Blair Was Innocent’, and the biblical and beautiful duo of ‘In Memory of Satan’ and ‘Genesis 30:3’. The show is bound to finish on the euphoric sing-along of ‘No Children’, and Darnielle often goes walkabout in the crowd for the affecting ‘California Song’. It’s a rollercoaster of emotion and it’ll leave you exhausted, and you may come away as a new Mountain Goats fanatic.
Log in to your account
