The Mountain Goats sure as hell haven’t been hanging around during lockdown. The band’s talismanic leader and frontman John Darnielle spent ten days in March of last year writing and recording Songs for Pierre Chuvin on his infamous boombox. The record saw the light of day the following month. Come October the band from Claremont, California released their nineteenth studio album Getting Into Knives. And now we learn that The Mountain Goats will be releasing their twentieth album Dark In Here on the 25th of June.
Out on Merge Records, Dark In Here was recorded in the week between Getting Into Knives and Songs for Pierre Chuvin at the world-renowned FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Studios. In Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a recording institution that over the years has captured the sound of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, Gregg Allman, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and many, many more musicians besides.
The first single to be taken from Dark In Here is ‘Mobile’ which features famous Muscle Shoals players Spooner Oldham on electric piano and Will McFarlane on lead guitar. Mountain Goats bassist Peter Hughes reflects upon that experience and his interpretation of John Darnielle’s lyrics:
“The Mountain Goats have been playing together as a band long enough to have developed a degree of musical telepathy, but listening to these two guys responding in real-time to us and each other revealed another level of connectedness altogether, one bordering on the supernatural. We ran through most of these songs three times; I’m pretty sure the performance of ‘Mobile’ you’re hearing is a second take.
One of my quarantine projects after getting home was going back to Moby Dick and actually finishing it for once, and I was amused to encounter early on the retelling of the story of Jonah. If Melville gives it to us as a fiery 19th century New Bedford sermon, what ‘Mobile’ offers might be understood as Father Mapple’s modern-day Gulf Coast flip side, the breeziness of McFarlane’s electric guitar and Matt Douglas’ accordion belying its protagonist’s guilty conscience.”
Photo Credit: Jade Wilson
You can listen to ‘Mobile’ here:
