The Mountain Goats frontman on keeping the faith, loving the occult, and sad songwriting.
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More recently, No Childrenblew up on TikTok.
I have great publicists now, right?
Obviously, I did 20 years of touring to get the music out there.
And it was onMoral Orelyears ago.
This time, one teenager at some point was like, This is funny.
And it was completely organic.
I had a lot of pressure: Oh, would you shoot a video of yourself doing the dance?
That would be the most herbed-out thing to do.
I said, Im not going to do that.
It belongs to them.
Other times, thats not what you want.
I think most people who like my stuff know theres a nice axis in what I do.
Its sad and emotional.
Theres also a lot of humor.
For me, its only theGet Lonelyalbum that kind of doesnt have an exit.
My sadness, however great it is, is one small story in a world full of stories.
So you indulge it, but you find the season to escape it.
Theres the legendary Method Manline: Say what you like, just spell my name right.
I think of that.
If they peg me as a sad songwriter, they pegged me.
Its good to be seen.
How does the exercise of writing a concept album start for you?
I thought,Thats two songs about wrestling.
You feel like youre on the spot.
You want to pitch something, right?
Thats what I did.
I said, You know, I used to writethesesongsaboutthisdivorcingcouple.
Ive always wondered what would happen if I wrote a whole album about that.
But I can write anywhere.
Thats how I work.
I also have the native iPhone app I keep a list of song titles in.
So theres always raw material around.
I didnt want to split a song into two sessions.
Now it doesnt really matter.
If I dont finish it, I can come back later and make it happen.
You workshop song titles separately from songs?Yeah.
Probably Our Home Outside the Trailer.
Its an idea I had somewhere.
Theres a very old document in my iPhone thats a list of song titles that I add to.
Heres another one: He Will Appear in the Smoke.
I dont know what thats supposed to be.
I was probably reading someones prayers or something like that.
Like, He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
Thats how it happens.
Im not anymore, but Im from the Catholic tradition.Paganhas a pejorative air.
These pagans they have to go!
Its a garbage-bucket term for all the people who werent in the Catholic church.
I was interested in that.
This is another thing thats good about being older.
A lot of that stuff youd play for glitz when youre a younger writer.
They werent doing anything not even proselytizing.
They sense an opportunity.
Its a scary time.
So when you write about that stuff now, there is a sense of urgency to it.
Everybody cant do Hattie Carroll.No, its true.
We didnt know Kanye as a vocalist or a rapper at first.
And when hes really in the zone, hes very good.
He has succeeded at becoming the guy who you have a lot to say about.
How do you feel about his contemporary Christian music?So, you know, Im a CCM guy.
I like that stuff a lot a big gospel choir, a mass choir.
It takes me back to my childhood.So you went to those churches.
Then I saw a thing in my early 20s calledThe Gospel at Colonus.
It was a musical.
Morgan Freeman played the narrator.
It setOedipus at Colonus, Sophocles last Oedipus play, in a Black church on a Sunday morning.
Its a stage thing, but Ive only ever seen the film.
Its an extremely important piece in my life.
The choir is big, but theyre singing Sophocles and connecting to this music that I know.
Then, when I was 21, I worked the graveyard shift in a nursing facility.
I would listen to gospel radio all night long.
Theres a song called Im Blessed that changed my life.
It took me years to find it.
Its a giant choir and Reverend Clay Evans.
So when Kanye does that stuff, Im thinking about formative times for me.
Im 19, 21.
Im coming out of a period of intense drug use and being a terrible person.
Im trying to locate my better self.
Im looking for Jesus.
When Kanye does that, anything I have to say about Kanye gets in the back seat.
The divorce happened, and I was no longer in the church.
From the age of 5 to about 18, I wasnt around the church anymore.
If the church says, This is going to lead you to Satan, I say, No.
For one thing, Satan personified is a weird modern invention.
Thats not what the Bible is talking about.
So I wouldnt believe in a radical evil force or in hell.
I dont think Jesus did either.
None of it figured into my getting into games.
Lets talk about your new album,Bleed Out.
Thats true of any fan base.
Swedenis good food for that argument.Its 19 songs.
My energy level, if you findtape of me back then, was bonkers.
It was probably a lot of nervousness.
I used to lose my voice on every tour in those days.
When I was making tapes, like pre-Sweden(93, 94), I was in school.
When youre in school, you mess around a lot.
I would rent some video tapes and sit there watching movies and study at the same time.
I would get an idea while I was watching the same way we were talking about grabbing lyric titles.
Somebody would say something in the movie, and Id go, Oh my God, this is amazing.
Id hit pause and grab my guitar.
Those songs were being written very quickly.
The next night, I watched another action movie, and I had the same thing happen.
Action films are a peculiar strain of Americana.
Theyve got amazingly violent action movies in every country.
I got really into watching [East Asian] action movies likeIp Man.
Theyre all so gonzo.
But with the American ones, they totally hit differently.
you could tell it in the first person, and we get catharsis vicariously.
I mean, its just writing.
People shoot people, because people are messed up, generally speaking.
It seems like youre flipping slogans on their heads on this album evaluating them in different contexts.
It sounds like a nightmare.That was recorded at probably two in the morning, and it was live.
Theres not an overdub on that song.
So the exhaustion is real in there.
First Blood is explicitly about how our action-movie stories are myths.
Theyre just bad guys, right?
The human tendency to dwell on the lurid is a thing that we dont address.
After the 80s, it got so that nobody wanted to be seen as prissy.
And the thing is, Im the same way.
I love violent movies.
Thats something human, especially if you were ever a young boy.
The first time you see somebody on a screen beating somebody elses ass, you go, Thats amazing.
Hes beating that guys ass.
Characters like that are formative to a certain understanding of masculinity.
Theyre folk figures.Theyre types.
There are analogs for most of them in Greek literature.
Theres a degree of commentary in Hostages and First Blood especially.
Hostages made me go back and rewatchRed Dawn.
My takeaway is that they got it all wrong.
Itll be our sense of entitlement providing the thread that unravels it all.
It wont be some existential enemy weve been battling all these years.
Itll be us.So many of the things we need to be doing will involve undoing centuries of human behavior.
But scoundrels use context to excuse bad behavior.
That makes it harder to talk about.
I dont know if its about defense or discrediting disagreeable opinions.Thats a human impulse.
I was the worst of the worst.
We already hadBeavis and Butt-Headat that point.
They kind of perfected the form, right?
I decided I was going to make a zine where all I did was write about stuff I liked.
That was a big thing for me.
Just the nature of the way things went from the 80s outward …
I dont blame social media.
I remember my favorite line of any mean review ever: Robert ChristgausEagles review.
Its two paragraphs about who they are.
Then he says, Another thing that interests me about the Eagles is that I hate them.
Its one of the greatest things Ive ever read.
I want to apologize to Hall & Oates right now, because I was wrong.
Its bonkers how many bangers those guys had in a row.
Anything I used to hate I want to look at it later to find out why.
Throughout the AIDS crisis, there was a lot of moral panic too.
There was talk about closing bathhouses.
But the Satanic panic I was at ground zero for that.
I was working in pediatric psychiatric care in … 87, 88, 89?
I was new to the job but very pretentious.
Rebecca and Mary Ann called me in the next day.
Hey, weve got to have a talk in the office.
We found this on the unit.
Would you care to explain yourself to us?
I think about how highly Id regard myself now if Id said, Thats because I worship Satan.
I said, Its poetry.
Its not actually about that.
I go to church.
And that was true.
I have had to confront that, though I was not the one admitting the kids.
I couldnt say, Youve been held here wrongly.
Go home, 5-year-olds.
It was a moral panic, and we were all in it.
In a moral panic, plenty of good people believe plenty of nonsense.
I dont think half the people doing that actually believe it in earnest.
Theyre weaponizing the possibility.
you could get depressed.
Youve also seen people likeBrian Zahnd,Rachel Held Evans,William Barber.
There are people doing what I believe is the Jesus work.
There is hope within the body.
How do the angels get to sleep when the devil leaves his porch light on?
Good never shines as hard as evil does.
This is what true-crime allure is about.
Thats what Baudelaire referred to as the shimmer of evil.
Theres something that we groove on hard.
It reaches a primal place.
Were trying to cultivate moments of sublime beauty.
You experience sublime moments and think,I love my action movies.
Im never going to put them down.But better still are the great things, the feeling of mercy.
I have the bands I like that theyre never going to do like War.
War did Low Rider and Why Cant We Be Friends?
but they have an incredibly deep catalog.
I do think what were talking about plays into War.
Theyre a very positive band preaching a positivity gospel.
In all their songs, theres a real uplifting thing that I think kind of costs them.
Its a little too soft for people.
On the West Coast, theyre legends, mind you.
Its not like they were small.
But theyre never first in the conversation.
I dont think people love them enough.
And its a better album thanTales from Topographic Oceans.
You write a lot about underdogs.
You got what you wanted, you know?
American Christians have not been persecuted ever.
They came here and did the persecuting.
it’s possible for you to make a case in China that youre being persecuted.
There are many countries where Christians are in bad shape.
But it aint here.
But my work, for sure, my whole life pulls a bit from Christianity.
I relate to people who get over who arent supposed to, people who survive who werent expected to.
Thats the stuff thats always spoken to me.
Thats why you wind up cheering for the bad guy a lot of the time.
Its very easy to go, How come no one asked him, Howd you get this way?
The Joker keeps coming up in interviews, and I think its the key to so much right now.
Were on such a What made him like that?
Now hes the Joker because people made fun of him.Its such weird fan service too.
Thats one of the great performances in film history.
Its just absolutely miraculous.
Well, Stan Lee was doing the real basic, liberal, Cant we all live together?
But for the most part, it was cool stories, places to escape to.
It became kind of reactionary as it went on.
I dont think its on the writers.
Thats nowhere more evident than in comics.
When you read the older books, villains are supposed to be hated.
Theyre telling you, This is the bad guy.
It goes back toParadise Lost.
Lots of people have had to do that.
I think a mature position toward ass-kissing is, Whose ass must you kiss and why?
This interview has been edited and condensed.
