THINGS I'VE BEEN DOING SINCE TRANSCENDENTAL YOUTH: 

1) raising first son, assisting in debut of second son
2) seeing novel Wolf in White Van through publication, nomination for National Book Award, NY Times Bestseller list, repeatedly pinching self and writing letters to younger self about how awesome 2014 is
3) writing songs in living room, office, van, hotel rooms, basement

SUBJECTS OF SONGS I HAVE WRITTEN SINCE TRANSCENDENTAL YOUTH:

1) vultures, pigs, dinosaurs, necklaces, plates with pictures of cats on them, attachable dragon tails
2) the career trajectory of Black Sabbath
3) professional wrestling

THREE NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS I KNOW I'M GOING TO KEEP

1) write more
2) tour more
3) release album of songs about professional wrestling

The songs about the animals and dinosaurs you can only wrangle out of me if 1) you're one of my sons or 2) I'm feeling sentimental, and the Ozzy songs must ripen in the darkness until the fullness of the last days. But the wrestling songs, several of which, surprise surprise, are really more about death and difficult-to-navigate interior spaces than wrestling -- those will all be let out of their cages on April 7th in North America. (Europe and the UK prefer to let the album cellar for a week to develop its bouquet, so it comes out there on April 13th. Australia and NZ are always first in everything as we know so y'all get it on April 3rd.)  The album's called Beat the Champ, and features cover art by Leela Corman; the vinyl will be two LPs at 45 rpm with lyrics printed on the gatefold. Why lyrics now, after a whole career of refusing to print lyrics? I don't know. Instinct. I am especially proud of these ones. They are rather more emotional than you might guess at first blush.

There's more about the album over here, on Merge's site. The vinyl comes with a download code because that is the natural order of things, seriously everybody needs to get with the program on this. On the last night of tracking we did a not-like-the-others song called "Blood Capsules"; it's been pressed onto red vinyl 12" at 45 rpm and is backed with "Dub Capsules," Scott Solter's full dub treatment of the A-side, reassembled entirely from sounds originating on that A-side, bearing almost no resemblance to its source. It costs a little extra to get the deluxe edition with the 12", because the powers of industry have repeatedly declined my requests to press up my records for free. There'll be a handful of deluxe-edition copies at retail and in Europe, but if you think you want it, I'd recommend the pre-order. All copies of the deluxe LP are gold and green vinyl until we run out --- gold for the championship belt, green for the payout LA wrestlers got when they took home the Beat the Champ title. All that glory. All that shine. Nameless bodies in unremembered rooms. Some people might be thinking to themselves, JD, wrestling, I don't know, I've never really been into wrestling, but did I steer you wrong with the Bible album, even though you may not have been super-into the Bible? Fear not. In a world of false promises and hollow gimmicks, please rest assured that the old maxim still holds true, whether scrawled on the back of a claim check or carved into a bench in an abandoned locker room: you can't trust much, but you can trust the Mountain Goats.

Tour dates are over here. A song about my childhood hero, Chavo Guerrero, may he live a thousand years and all his days be filled with joy, is streaming here: enjoy! We will see you in the spring!

I'm putting this up here on Mountain Goats Dot Com because it seems probable that a number of people who like our music will also be interested in the book, but for purposes of clarity be advised that I am leaving my guitar at home for this one and will play no songs on this tour, though I can't promise that Mr. Hodgman and I won't do an a capella chorus or two of "Sing a Song About Love", or possibly "We Bite."

See you out there!

9/15 - New York, NY
Le Poisson Rouge
158 Bleecker Street
New York, NY 10012
With John Hodgman
7:00 pm

9/18 - Durham, NC
Motorco, presented by The Regulator
Motorco Music Hall
723 Rigsbee Avenue
Durham, NC 27701
7:30 pm

9/22 - Raleigh, NC
Quail Ridge Books
3522 Wade Avenue
Raleigh, NC 27607
7:30 pm

9/24 - Nashville, TN
Parnassus Books
3900 Hillsboro Pike
Nashville, TN 37215
6:30 pm

9/25 - Oxford, MS
Thacker Mountain Radio
Off Square Books
129 Courthouse Square
Oxford, MS 38655
6:00 pm

9/29 - San Francisco, CA
Green Apple Books
with Robin Sloan
7:00 pm

9/30 - Los Angeles, CA
Skylight Books
1818 N Vermont Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90027
7:30 pm

10/1 - Portland, OR
Powell's Books
1005 W. Burnside Street
Portland OR 97209
with Matt Fraction
7:30 pm

10/2 - Denver, CO
The Tattered Cover
2526 E. Colfax Avenue
Denver, CO 80206
7:00 pm

10/5 - Dallas, TX
The Wild Detectives
314 W 8th Street
Dallas, TX 75208
Presented by WordSpace and Deep Vellum
7:00 pm

10/6 - Austin, TX
BookPeople
603 North Lamar
Austin, TX 78703
with Joe Gross
7:00 pm

10/7 - Chicago, IL
Lincoln Hall, presented by Unabridged Books
2424 N Lincoln Avenue
Chicago, IL 60614
with Mairead Case
7:00 pm

10/8 - Brookline, MA
Coolidge Theater, presented by Brookline Booksmith
290 Harvard Street
Brookline, MA 02446
6:00 pm

Last year Peter and I did a couple of duo tours: the U.S. one took us as far west as Chicago, and the European one went all the way out to Barcelona. We don't really get a chance to do the duo thing much any more. It is a blast, and it gets us into all-ages rooms, and we get around to a bunch of  songs that've been lurking in shadowy corners for ages waiting for the bright fuel of the footlights. I would like, therefore, to alert the west coast, my old stomping grounds, that we are stomping your way duo-style for the first time since 2007, and that all the shows are all-ages, and that if the all-ages duo tour from last summer is any indicator, it is going to be a huge party. 

THE MOUNTAIN GOATS TWIN INHUMAN HIGHWAY FIENDS TOUR 2014

June

5 - Gothic Theatre, Denver, CO
7 - Kilby Court, Salt Lake City, UT
8 - Knitting Factory, Boise, ID
10 - Showbox, Seattle, Wa
11 - Wonder Ballroom, Portland, OR
13 - Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, CA
14 - Bottom of the Hill, San Francisco, CA
17 - Mayan Theatre, Los Angeles, CA
18 - Crescent Ballroom, Phoenix, AZ
20 - Dan's Silverleaf, Denton, TX
21 - Fitzgerald's Upstairs, Houston, TX
22 - The Mohawk, Austin, TX

27 - Boys Rock for Girls Rock NC, Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw, NC [SOLO SHOW]

If you're in or near Chicago, please note that the Old Town School is a much smaller room than we usually get to play around those parts, so, you know, tarry not. Or tarry at your own risk if you're a low-grade thrillseeker and tarrying's your thing. See you out there!

GHOST CAVE INCUBATION CHAMBER SOLO NON-TOUR TOUR
April
16 - Somerville Theatre, Somerville, MA,
19 - Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, IL
20 - Old Town School of Folk Music, Chicago, IL

Listen, big-label dudes in suits. The Mountain Goats are going all the way to the top whether you like it or not. For years you've been trying to hold us down, but we just keep getting stronger. You have mergers, but we're on Merge, which means we get the capital M, which reminds everybody of that awesome movie where Peter Lorre scares the daylights out of everybody. The point I was initially going to make, anyway, was that there are seven songs written during the sessions for the album which now appear for the first time on it: either as downloadable extras if you buy the bad-ass gatefolding vinyl (the download code includes the entire album, too), or appended to the end of the CD after a brief moment of silence. Traditionally, these sorts of things are called "bonus tracks." "Bonus" means "good" in Latin, which I used to study in another lifetime. It's singular, not plural, but we gotta let that slide. I personally feel that we whose gothness knows no limits should refer to our bonus tracks as "malus tracks" but I haven't been able to get any other goths on board with this. Poseurs all! Anyhow, once again I seem to have strayed from my theme. That order link from Merge again. Free shipping! Malus tracks! No? Nefas tracks, maybe? I will personally tour for free if major label guys start routinely referring to their supplementary material as "nefas tracks," but I'm not holding my breath.

To speak plainly: we are coming to England, and to Scotland, and to Germany, and to the Netherlands; and to Belgium and France also; and also, for the first time ever, to Spain. This tour will be an extension of the Tuttlingen Warriors tour presently underway, and will be in the same formation: John Darnielle, vocals, guitar, piano, defense of dragons; Peter Hughes, bass guitar, harmony vocals, torque analysis. The dates are over there on the post-it to the right! Hope to see as many of you as will fit in the rooms we play in!

Getting the reissue together has been a really interesting project for me, because it involves going through old boxes of tapes, which necessarily means exhuming the corpses I became at several turns between then and now. All Hail was the last grinding burst of the machine on which I'd built whatever name I had at the time. It was recorded in the final frenzy of the boombox-era writing style (hit a stride, work absolutely every night until you write a song you don't like, sulk for a couple of days, start up again), though I'm hesitant to say final, because who knows, I still track demos on a couple of the working decks I still have and I have ~~~ideas~~~about restricting myself to demo'ing on tape for a season at some point, who knows, life's long, "seldom say never" remains my non-committal motto par excellence. It's the only album where one of the worktapes went missing not by accident (the fate of untold handfuls of worktapes) but because I made good on my generally-empty promise to myself to destroy stuff if I don't want to see it out in the wild at some point. In between the songs that made the album on the two surviving worktapes there's a lucky 7 that didn't make the cut, sometimes for technical reasons ("ran out of tape"), sometimes for artistic ones ("this chorus: what were you thinking?"). These songs have been transferred from the original cassettes and are now on the reissue as bonus tracks, mainly ones that fit into the former category. Several more I didn't transfer from the original cassettes at all, because after listening to them, it was learned that they kind of sucked. RIP, "Red Southern Curl," you are just plain not a good song.

There's more to tell, but most of it's in the new liner notes, and the rest of it's in this piece Matt Fraction wrote about it, which is legitimately all you really need to know. The vinyl's 220 125grams, mea culpa on being wrong when I wrote this update , and who really knows what the CD weighs, because who weighs CDs. Preorder is up right over here; Merge picks up the shipping costs on US orders. Bonus! See you next month!

It was really cool: the duo set was how we lived from 2001-2007. On the Transcendental Youth tour last year we started structuring the set for a little duo space on either side of a solo section in the middle, playing "It Froze Me" and sometimes "Jenny" with just me and Peter on one side of the set-break and "Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace" with just me and Wurster on the other. Then, in January of this year, Wurster and I played a few songs in New York and again it was way cool, and I got all chin-strokey thinkin' about "oh yes, the dynamics of a duo vs. a trio vs. a quartet, the particular qualities inherent to various arrangements," etc., I like to think about stuff like that and in those sorts of terms, I am a record collector and music nerd, that is how we operate.

Peter and I toured our asses off back in the pre-trio days, but that was before our ascent to the absolute upper echelon of global media saturation. We are pleased to report that a year-plus worth of talking about touring the Mountain Goats in alternate configurations to all-ages rooms is yielding its first fruits this June, in the form of the TUTTLINGEN WARRIORS TOUR 2013, whose name is an inside joke, I'll tell you about it between songs at some point during the tour, I have too much else still to cover here to get into it right now. We're bringing out the Baptist Generals, one of our favorite bands, who have a new album coming out -- their first in years -- and for Peter and I this is a huge event, like on an "unheard post-Marquee Moon pre-Adventure Television album discovered" level: some bands you know will someday get the acclaim that's due them and this is one of them. Their new album is so deeply moving I'm not even going to get into it right now, here, try this, see what I mean, are you enjoying the continuing effects of José Saramago on my use of the comma, I hope so because I can no longer help it.

We're hitting several places we haven't been before and some we haven't managed to get back to in years (what's up Hoboken), and yes, in case you missed it in the avalanche of dependent clauses above: all dates are all-ages. All of them. Hell yes, I say, it's about time, sorry it took so long. I have been squirreled away cobbling together a master setlist through the early months of this year (will we be attempting "Fall of the Star High School Running Back"? signs point to "yes") and Peter and I will be getting into rehearsal sometime this month, where I look forward to hearing "no, John, that's not how you played it on the tape" at least once and realistically more times than once.

I'll have more news on stuff soon but let's face facts, we're pushing up against a thousand words here, the trend of the times is toward brevity, don't tell JD that he'll cry. Peter and I will be rocking the cities you see in the yellow post-it to your right this June and we hope to see you there; if you follow a link and the tickets aren't on sale yet, don't panic, they should be up by later this week at the latest. Also don't panic under other circumstances if you can help it, panic is seldom a helpful or pleasant emotional state, unless you happen to be writing a piece called "What I Look Like When I Panic," then maybe OK. The Darnielle-and-Wurster duo tour is presently unscheduled, but will, when it arrives, include a Q & A about the lesser-known works of Bob Ezrin, so be sure to dust off your copies of Steve Hunter's Swept Away. Bonus points if you can hum the title track without looking it up. I don't know what, if anything, you can actually use the bonus points for, but this, too, will be addressed at a future date.

* get cinder blocks for desk/saw 2-3 inches off chair legs nb "new chair" is not an option, I love this chair
* clean office room
* at least 1-2 afternoons/wk in basement painting/collaging remaining Come, Come to the Sunset Tree LPs w/view toward actually finishing them in 2013
* book time @ The Kitchen for transferring materials from old 1/2 inch reels & Fuji Extraslim cassettes in shoebox
* hash out song list w/Peter of underplayed/unplayed/personal-favorite tunes for top secret tour plan
* contemplate regular exercise plan for 1000th time in life, put on v. serious face about it
* new songbooks for the baby
* stop calling son "the baby" when no longer baby
* WHAT DO YOU MEAN ONE DAY HE WON'T BE A BABY ANY MORE HOW CAN YOU EVEN SAY THAT
* reading plan now through June: finish Morte D'Artur, read Camellia Street or Time of the Doves, also new Blake Butler and maybe one Elsa Morante? be realistic you're never going to be a fast reader
* talk more w/friends nb email does not count as "talking w/friends"
* revise MS of novel w/any needed corrections, hand in to Farrar, Strauss & Giroux on schedule as per contract
* count blessings, check math, thank literally everyone

So hey umm it is with great pride that the Mountain Goats present to you one of the 12 songs from our new record, Transcendental Youth. (If you want to pre-order the album and get the bonus 7" that comes with the first thousand or so copies of it, you can do that here; the two songs on the 7" will eventually make their way to iTunes.) This here album track, anyway, is called "Cry for Judas," it is about survival but that's kind of an oversimplification, it's also about building a vehicle from the defeated pieces of the thing you survived and piloting that vehicle through the cosmos, it's kind of complicated but people who know what I'm talking about will kind of intuitively get the idea and the rest of you will I hope be able to get a sense of it through the song. You can grab it for free here, and if you dig its groove and wanna throw us a dollar about it, iTunes has it here & we thank you kindly. As I said yesterday, my portion of the proceeds will mainly be spent on candy, specifically Grape Vines. I don't know what Wurster and Hughes will do with theirs, it is not my business, but I know one of them is fond of cake.

Hope you enjoy the tune & see you soon!

That song was called "Until I Am Whole," and I played it for Brandon and we both felt like it was touching on some themes I'd circled but never set my claws fully into. So I kept writing through the summer, and in August the baby was born and I'd cradle him in my left arm while writing melodies at the piano with my right, and I said, let Osiris the keeper of the gates be my witness, other songwriters may go soft when they get to be parents but I am going to keep going all the way down into the inner darkness, it will set a good example for the baby, and besides, what am I going to do, suddenly start writing songs about cute things instead of songs about how to wrest cries of triumph from the screaming places? Please. May the baby grow up to spit in my face if I should pose that hard.

Some of the songs I sent to Owen Pallett to arrange for the Transcendental Youth program I did with Anonymous 4 in the spring; meanwhile Peter & Jon & I worked some of the band arrangements out onstage through spring, which is something I'd stopped doing, playing new songs live before tracking them. Shouldn't have ever stopped doing that by the way. Playing new songs rules. These arrangements & performances opened up the songs for me and showed me things about them, and when we hit the studio, I had a plan that was broad enough to let everybody contribute his own voice (a big thing with me; I kind of don't believe in the One Dude Telling Everybody What To Do model of album-making) but focused enough to keep dragging the songs by their hair back to the central point of the record, which has to do with whether anybody has the right to tell people whether their visions are sick or not. Spoiler alert, absolutely nobody has that right, what makes me broken also makes me whole, that is how it works and it's like striking gold when you find that out so keep digging, don't even get me started.

We spent a week recording at Overdub Lane. Brandon Eggleston produced and Matthew E. White did horn arrangements, and afterwards Scott Solter mixed it at Baucom Road, and then I called up Aeron Alfrey from the Satanic Messiah sleeve and he did a new original painting that completely knocks me out and that brings us to the present. The album's called Transcendental Youth, and it's coming out October 2nd on Merge and right around the same time on Tomlab in the UK & Europe and on Moorworks in Japan and on Remote Control in Australia & New Zealand, and I've been getting letters from South America so I'm doing what I can to get it released there. On this last tour that I just got home from, I went into Cloud City with Brandon and recorded four more songs by myself directly to 1/2" tape without overdubs, and from those four, two will be cut directly from the tape to a 7". The first pre-orders of the album will come with a copy of this 7", whose songs will probably be available digitally before long; the actual vinyl single, though, will be the end-point of a truly live all-analog chain that was never converted at any point to ones and zeroes, which as one of Those Guys makes me ridiculously happy. I will tell you more about these two songs later on: one was written for the album but never tracked, the other's been around in half-finished form for a while and finally got the bridge & last verse it deserves.

So that's what I've got. I cannot wait for everybody to hear what we've done this time. It is kind of a family effort for us: the four of us who spend half the year in a tour van together are the four who went into the studio to play & record songs whose choruses grew from things scrawled in notebooks in the back of the van and occasional demos recorded in hotel rooms between tour stops. We will be touring this fall until we run out of places to go or the winged serpent returns, whichever comes first. Here is the tracklisting for the album. I will see you in October!

1. Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1
2. Lakeside View Apartments Suite
3. Cry for Judas
4. Harlem Roulette
5. White Cedar
6. Until I Am Whole
7. Night Light
8. The Diaz Brothers
9. Counterfeit Florida Plates
10. In Memory of Satan
11. Spent Gladiator 2
12. Transcendental Youth

Anyway. Kids in junior high used to wait until after school to fuck with me, but I guess they didn't mind waiting, because I walked home by myself, and some of the kids most eager to fuck with me lived on the same block as me, which, I probably don't have to point this out, really sucked. It got worse every day; I was a scrawny dude with no illusions of toughness or any desire to sharpen my combat skills. I liked to hang out with girls and read science fiction books. Eventually it became clear to me that even if I ratted these dudes out to the school, any relief was going to be temporary; it was fight them or avoid them, and they moved in packs of three. So one day instead of walking home (south, down Mountain Avenue, past the little league diamonds and through a vacant lot, which was usually where the beatdown occurred), I cut left at Harrison Avenue and hoofed it all the way downtown; my tormentors followed me most of the way there, but I was bold enough to look behind me and see that the further out of the neighborhood they got, the less comfortable they looked. It was cool to feel a sort of power in flight: they weren't sure where I was going; that made them uneasy.

A few things happened as a result of me being too terrified of my bullies to face them. One, I ended up volunteering for work at the library. I filed books and microfiche, and cleaned vinyl LPs with water and a cloth. It felt weird not telling my supervisor "I'm here because the people who want to kick my ass won't follow me in," but that passed. Two, I ended up spending more time downtown, because that's where the library is. Downtown in Claremont there's a place called the Folk Music Center, it's been there forever; they have a lot of guitars. I only knew piano, but I used to go in and look at the chord charts and teach myself one chord at a time. D. D. D. D. Half an hour of what was probably the worst-sounding D ever. G. G. G. G. Really had to stretch that little left hand to make the G. I pity the people who worked the counter at the Folk Music Center when I'd come in.

If there's any point to this story, and I'm not sure there is but, it's that the songs I sing, which are often about finding ways to call a dark dungeon a glittering castle & really mean it, have some of their genesis in me being a fearful young kid with just enough presence of mind to turn to music as an escape. The fact that I'm able to play them on guitar certainly owes much to my finding a path home that other kids on the block didn't want to take. All this stuff occurs to me because I'm finally getting around to doing a West coast solo tour, whose dates are off to the right on the yellow post-it note, and which dates conclude with me playing a show at, where else, the Folk Music Center. Most dates (not that last one, though) I have the pleasure of Dustin Wong as my opening act. Dustin's music is so awesome, you guys. I am really excited to hear him every night, and to finally, after years of wondering when I was going to get around to it, be embarking on a solo West Coast run.

Please note, in case you hadn't, that these rooms are a good deal smaller than the ones we usually play out west, so, you know, not to be blunt and presumptuous or whatever but in towns where we sometimes sell out a room, these rooms may sell out faster, so act accordingly and don't say I didn't warn you. Because I did warn you! Just now! OK this update has gotta be like 3,000 words nobody asked you to write the whole history of the world JD c'mon. See you soon!

The other thing I'm doing, much sooner, is playing a benefit to defeat the latest "deny people who love each other the right to marry" bill. We can actually beat this bill, and in the wake of Citizens United, the way that happens is if we raise enough money to do it. Dollars buy requests at this show, anything in my catalog is game. If I don't know it I'll improvise something. Mac McCaughan'll be there, Greg Cartwright, the amazing Tara DeFrancisco emceeing and moderating, it's going to be a proper Durham party so dress how you please and prepare to holler some. It would mean more to me than I can say if my adopted home of North Carolina could say to the world "you love who you want here, all are welcome." There is nothing I won't do to try to help this happen.

See you at the shows!

January
19 - Antone's, Austin, TX
20 - Fitzgerald's, Houston, TX
21 - Tipitina's, New Orleans, LA
23 - Club Downunder, Tallahassee, FL
24 - The Social, Orlando, FL
25 - Crowbar, Tampa, FL
27 - The Original Cafe Eleven, St. Augustine, FL
28 - The Earl, Atlanta, GA
30 - 40 Watt Club, Athens, GA
31 - Visulite Theatre, Charlotte, NC

February

2 - the Grey Eagle, Asheville, NC
4 - the Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw, NC

One small word about these shows. For years bands have been pretty judicious about playing unreleased new material, because much of it becomes available online immediately, even when the new songs are still in fairly raw form. We, too, have gotten into the bad habit of holding new stuff back. We are done with that whole philosophy, though. I miss playing stuff that's unreleased & unrecorded, stuff that still stings fresh. So we got together and decided to tour the new songs before we even record them. I don't guess that we'll be touring all ten of the new songs I've written for the next album (eleven if you count one that's presently being herded back and forth between its cell & the chopping block), but be advised that if you're the sort of person who wants as many surprises as possible when you hear a new album, you should tread lightly around recordings of these shows, because we're not going to be holding the best ones back for the album release like people tend to do now.

We will be supported on all dates by Nurses, who have forever endeared themselves to me by calling their album Dracula! Links to the venues all on the post-it to the right! See you all soon!

Then! As the time draws near! I will do like I do in December and play a couple of special shows! First, I'm returning to Second City's Letters to Santa. Last time I was there it was one of the most inspirational things I've ever been part of. Second City's incredible regulars do improv for 24 hours, and all proceeds go toward bringing holiday cheer to people who're short on funds. It is an awesome thing, the whole deal: Last time I ended up trading in on a sketch & improvising a verse and chorus for song before a live audience. Seat of the pants stuff. So cool. C'mon out!

Then! Toward the end of the year, and of this age! I will head out to my old home turf to play a benefit for Invisible Children at the Troubadour. I hardly ever get to play solo shows in southern California; to finish out 2011 doing one at the Troubadour for a great cause is about the best wrap-up to Known Reality that I can think of. As at Letters to Santa, I'm doing a full solo set. Because I grew up in California I think I'll premiere a couple of new songs there just for the hell of it.

I'll have one other piece of news soon - maybe next week - and hopefully most of the stuff it covers will actually come to pass before we're all compelled to kneel, singing, in the intolerable infinite glare of the New Pyramids, whose crystalline angles rise forever.

See you there!