2020: ‘Getting Into Knives’

So - here we are, then. It’s the 12th of February, 2026, at 2:59pm. Over the past five years, I’ve written about thirty years of music by the Mountain Goats, and in the process told you a fair bit about myself. The central premise of the project, as I stated every week in the intro to the audio version, was this: each episode looks at a year in my life through the lens of a song by John Darnielle. Both my life and John Darnielle’s songwriting have, thankfully, continued to develop well beyond that thirty-year window of limitation, but this is the last chronological entry in this series of essays. (I’ll follow it up with an epilogue, looking at broader questions of legacy, catalogue, and memorialisation - but then it really will be over.) Today we’re in 2020, and the song is ‘Getting Into Knives.’

‘Getting Into Knives’ is a song about something being over, or really, something which is imminently about to be over: the culmination of a true thirty-year project. Writing in the annotated book This Year about a well-loved non-album track, Darnielle described a similar quest: ‘Should I live to be one thousand years old, and write every day, and pursue my craft like an assassin on the trail of his quarry, tireless, my vision narrowed to take in only the object before it, viz., to write a better title than “Wizard Buys a Hat,” yet do I know that it will never, ever happen’ (pp.385-6).

Like the song he’s referring to, whose autobiographical narrator is anticipating his own early death, the fantastical frame of Darnielle’s storytelling partially displaces some deep personal truths. Writing every day in tireless pursuit of his craft sounds like a decent estimation of how Darnielle has reflected - in recent years, increasingly openly - on the longevity and unusual arc of his career as a songwriter, recording artist, and, for the past decade and a half, author of acclaimed literary fiction. ‘Work hard and consistently at what you do’ is not an uncommon principle of writing advice, but the image of ‘an assassin on the trail of his quarry,’ in both Darnielle’s parodic picture of his own working habits and in ‘Getting Into Knives,’ speaks engagingly to elements which have been mainstays of his catalogue: focus, structure, discipline, precision, and sudden eruptions of ferocious violence.

Patience, perhaps, has not always been a hallmark of the Mountain Goats’ music, but here, after thirty years of making it for increasingly appreciative and numerous audiences, Darnielle pays tribute not merely to ‘the broken bones you had to use to build your ladder,’ but to the careful accumulation of every step along the way. ‘Getting Into Knives’ - the title track of the album of the same name, its closer, and for my money, its highlight too, along with the remarkable slow-build of ‘Bell Swamp Connection’ - begins with an image which could be spoken by many of his earlier narrators: ‘I hit the cul-de-sac on the spiritual path.’ Here we could be in the world of ‘Against Pollution,’ but also in the embodied struggles with faith across The Life of the World To Come which, it’s fair to suggest, seem increasingly personal given Darnielle’s more overt professions of Christian practice in the last few years.

Religious references persist throughout the song. Ashes in the mouth seem connected to the rifle with which the narrator sleeps, but also evoke a verse from Isaiah; a later quote from Revelation (‘Behold I stand at the door and I knock’) is still more explicit, while ‘it’s a gift to be simple, it’s a gift to be free’ is drawn from a popular Shaker hymn. ‘May I be worthy of my reward’ is perhaps as pure a prayer as Darnielle has committed to record - and yet its context is not an imagined heavenly reward, but the reward of finally being able to kill a ‘perpetrator’ hunted down for three decades.

As you may be aware, this is not something the Bible endorses - and nor does the song’s author, who presented a potted summary of the brutal, cyclical feuds of Greek tragedy for a Wilmington audience in 2021 who seemed initially sceptical of his assertion that ‘revenge is bad.’ ‘The nature of revenge,’ he commented, is that ‘you always take too much and so you never get enough,’ although the ‘delusions of power’ associated with it feel ‘fantastic’ in the moment. The home the perpetrator burned down is gone, and this single-minded quest seems likely to have made it challenging for our speaker to settle into a new one. Being in the grip of that delusory moment, however, as a ‘great thing to inhabit if you have issues,’ and in defiance of all such sensible moral precepts, is ‘what this song is about.’

Darnielle’s songs, over the decades, have repeatedly tapped into the creative energy of inhabiting those kinds of spaces, but this isn’t the only thing this one is about: at least, not to me. The narrator’s journey here begins by loading up his ‘toolkit with every hateful instrument’; thirty years later, that starter set is presumably still present, but other things have been acquired along the way which reflect the author’s trajectory too. Encounters with ‘sages’ and ‘master tacticians’ speak to the fantasy landscapes of In League With Dragons, while the ironic touches seem in line with the more comic voice Darnielle seemed to rediscover around the time of Goths.

Plenty of early Mountain Goats lyrics feature characters travelling with ‘hateful instruments,’ or otherwise carrying hate in their hearts; if ‘Baboon’ isn’t a masterclass in expressing what Darnielle in his obituary for Ozzy Osbourne called ‘profound feelings of alienation and frustration,’ I don’t know what is. Images of pursuit and hunting, meanwhile, remain a feature across the likes of Heretic Pride and All Eternals Deck - but the narrator of ‘Going to Georgia,’ frighteningly absorbed in his own ‘motion’ and incapable of self-restraint, would never have described himself as ‘getting into Colt 45s.’ There’s a wry distance to lines like ‘I’ve been up and down the buffet several times’ and to the song’s hook which don’t diminish the force of spending five minutes with its hyperfocused protagonist, but confirm his ability to ‘keep things in perspective’ by showing us the story from a range of angles. They’re a testament to everything that’s been learned along the way, and to the virtue of holding to your own ‘vision all these days’ and years.

The album, in its musical variety, shows off the fruits of that journey too. Opener ‘Corsican Mastiff Stride’ and ‘Picture of My Dress’ see the band leaning into country-rock, a logical approach for their studio sessions at Sam Philips Recording in Memphis; ‘Rat Queen’ and ‘As Many Candles As Possible’ prefigure some of the harder-edged stompers of Bleed Out, while gentle and lush arrangements on the likes of ‘Wolf Count’ and ‘Harbor Me’ create surprisingly tender contexts for phrases like ‘the only dream worth dreaming: the thronging plain, the bloodbath.’ Reflecting on the latter song - which, like ‘Getting Into Knives,’ tells a story of a dogged pursuit, though here from the perspective of the one ‘living in fear’ of being caught up with - Darnielle seems to acknowledge the counterintuitive approach he took to setting the lyric: ‘This is not the song people are going to be yelling for, because it is a very … mid-tempo, downbeat sort of groove track,’ in which ‘my phrasing … never really rises above a conversational tone.’

Having been ‘a long while on the highway’ himself - with the theme of duration also explored in ‘Tidal Wave’ and ‘The Last Place I Saw You Alive’ - Darnielle is now content to explore a variety of moods and tempos, including the groovy, unhurried drum fills and cascading piano of the song currently in question, seeing what different modes of approach these might offer to his common lyrical themes. A rifle and a knife are themselves, of course, different modes of approach, with the latter offering the opportunity for more intimate and precise engagement. Both have their place in Darnielle’s imaginative landscape, but I’m reminded of the hushed reverence with which the narrator of the first composition I wrote about here, ‘Soudoire Valley Song,’ summarises the pleasures of a freshly sharpened flint - ‘Catch something, kill something; new blade cuts real keen’ - and how much the Mountain Goats have always been interested in technologies, forms of expression, and feelings which go all the way back.

Working with an expansive range of producers and collaborators has become an important part of Darnielle’s evolutionary process too, as the Mountain Goats figured out to what extent they might care, or dare, to set their sights on the mainstream. From legendary Muscle Shoals organist Spooner Oldham on Dark in Here, to the more jagged edges of Bleed Out as shaped by Bully’s Alicia Bognanno, to Trina Shoemaker, known for her work with Sheryl Crow, and Go-Gos singer Kathy Valentine on Jenny From Thebes, and most recently, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Replacements bassist Tommy Stinson on Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan, the past five years have seen Darnielle’s music pushed in a variety of directions. The band continues to re-calibrate the productive tension between the harder and softer sides of their work, playing the singer’s more abrasive tendencies off against more elaborate arrangements and production choices.

That process arguably started well before Getting Into Knives, but on opening this document, I nearly started writing without listening to the album at all. I don’t need to refamiliarise myself with that record, I thought: that’s the new stuff. A cursory look at any calendar would reveal that this isn’t true - nearly six years, and a global pandemic, separate the recording of this set of songs from the present day. If nothing else, the video for ‘Get Famous,’ with its Ruth Bader Ginsburg bobblehead, seems to belong to a historical universe very separate from our own. But while we’re talking about spiritual paths, I also can’t deny my own sense that 2020 was the beginning of the path I’m still on today. As I write this - in my office in North Shields with the fogged-up window with a crack in the glass from a kid’s BB-gun pellet, looking out at the back alley in the grey February afternoon light while a scrawny calico cat I have grown to love pads along the red-brick walls at the end of my neighbours’ backyards - I feel in some inscrutable way that I am the same person you see in the picture below this paragraph.

Taken in a park in South Birmingham by my wife, during those strange few months where we shared a small attic room in Miles’s house and waited to hear when we and everyone in the world would be able to safely move on with our lives again, it belongs to its own, now quite distant context. The tightwhite T-shirt and jacket I’m wearing no longer fit me all that comfortably, I have a few more grey hairs around my temples, and my beard has got bigger and stragglier since - but it’s me all right. I can draw a clear thread from the time this image was captured to the life I lead today - though you could argue that started a few months earlier, in January 2020, in a third-storey room in Jamaica, Queens (the hotel didn’t know why I wanted a room on the second storey, and understandably ignored my request). This was where I was interviewed by an online panel on a video-conferencing software I’ve never used since for a job at my current employer, Northumbria University, the day I was due to fly back to Birmingham after a Christmas spent with my then-partner’s family.

I now have the picture saved on my computer under the title ‘headshot’ to use on the rare occasions when I’m asked for one by a publication or event, and it sits underneath my name on my faculty homepage: yes sir, that’s me, I’m him. And when I look through the rest of my files from that year, titles start to appear which are also familiar: ‘Songs for Pierre Chuvin article’; ‘The Mountain Goats Get Famous’; ‘The Feeling of Being in Motion Again.’ The first two of these became posts on Medium, when I started to think: ‘Someone should really write something substantial about the Mountain Goats, and if not me, then who?’

The answer, eventually, as I might have predicted, turned out to be ‘John Darnielle’: or one answer, anyway. In the opening pages of This Year, the author asserts of this collection of annotated lyrics: ‘The shape they trace, together, resembles me.’ You might say the same about this series of essays, as it relates to my life - a resemblance, rather than an exhaustive accounting. I’m struck, too, by another comment which I’d quoted in that third, unpublished 2020 essay which eventually, through a drawn-out process, mutated into this project: ‘When I remember myself as a junkie, I do not think of myself as some poor person waiting to be saved […] I think of a shitty person you don’t want to know, a person who will steal your shit … People think of me as a nice person because I think I have grown into a nice person.’

In an essay for the journal Riffs, Newcastle-based musician Tom Astley writes movingly about the experience of re-discovering an old cassette, a palimpsest he had once recorded over and at one point labelled ‘don’t remember making it’: ‘Maybe that was true then. It is true now. The tape is a ghost. A ghost of different versions of myself. The self that filled that tape with songs - those songs tracing a meandering, partial map across a surface of self … Another ‘I,’ lost to me now.’

Darnielle’s recording career, as I mentioned last time, began on just such re-recorded cassettes, and as much as he questioned, early on, the value of the monicker ‘lo-fi’ as applied to his music, the term has followed him. This has also been the case many other musicians whose work was first encountered as home-recordings with technical ‘mistakes’ left in, as what they were capable of and interested in doing evolved and changed. It’s not too drastic a leap from here to observe that ‘careers in lo-fi,’ paradoxical as that phrase might sound, often reveal narratives about change, growth and personal development, in more or less explicit ways, and as this project approaches its end, I’m weighing up a new venture in which to explore this concept further (and I’ll let you all know, of course, if it comes to fruition.)

There is a world of difference, for instance, between the Smog of ‘I Break Horses’ and the recent work of Bill Callahan, one of the few fellow-travellers to whom Darnielle has directly compared his own career: ‘microdose, change your clothes, do what you got to do’; ‘yes I am your lover lover lover man.’ The latest album by a one-time Mountain Goats collaborator, The Even More Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis - which I’ve just written about for my own piece in Riffs - explicitly takes stock of his hard-earned status as a ‘small but thriving cultural fixture’ through the steady process of his art-making, announcing that ‘the things that I did / Became the life that I had.’

Is it possible to live any other way? When I started this project, I had no idea how long it would take me, and looking at the person in the photograph above, familiar as he is to my current self, I still think: ‘who was he to believe he could write a memoir,’ in Mountain Goats songs or otherwise - an act of potentially staggering hubris. I don’t feel quite so sceptical towards the person writing these final pages, but it’s doing this, at least in part, which has shaped me into who I am today. Now Here We Are Thirty Years Later has taken me across the world; has made writing about music a central part of my working life, like I’d wanted since I was fourteen years old; it has put me in touch with many people who I now consider friends; and encouraged me to learn, and put into practice, more about audio production and making and performing music than I would have ever thought possible.

One of the last songs in This Year, ‘Great Pirates,’ begins with a line about ‘the morning when I stop looking back.’ Darnielle acknowledges the irony, in a book which ‘can’t help but to be looking back the whole time’ (pp. 530-1) - but the song itself is about looking forward, ‘testing the waves,’ setting your face to the wind. You could argue that’s what his whole career has been about. I used to feel some innate resistance when, in interviews, Darnielle would respond that the music he was most excited about, or proudest of, was the new stuff - part of me, I think, wanted to stick up for the stuff that already existed, to give it more credit than I felt it had gotten so far, to tell everybody how good the rest of it was. I’ve been doing that for five years now, but in doing so I’ve come to understand the underlying idea. Life is the new stuff: out there on the horizon all the time, a mark to aim for, a quarry to pursue. There is always possibility, opportunity, if you keep your eyes fixed on the next thing you can write, the next choice you can make: ‘just beyond your limits, find the new frontier.’ There will be feasting and dancing next year, if we make it through this one. We’ve made it through thirty, or thirty-five, or fifty-eight, already. There are brighter things than diamonds coming down the line.

Here is a poem from 2020 - not my best of that year, but one speaking from a very recognisable time and place, one of those periods of ‘incubation’ John Darnielle is fond of describing. I’ll see you next time, to reflect on all of this.

Pershore Road, 17th March 2020

Ghost signs don’t come much ghostlier than this:
I’m sitting at my desk, and looking up
on Google Earth a building which is just
two streets away, wondering gently if
walking two streets to look up at a sign
is ‘non-essential travel,’ and I can’t
identify which of the 1930s
terraced blocks the sign is sitting on.

‘The Birmingham and District Window-Cleaners
Association’ — blue on white, sans serif —
is what it says. A number I don’t phone.
I’ve never paid to have my windows cleaned;
I doubt this house has had them done in years.
Besides, the number isn’t meant for me —
it’s there for window-cleaners, which I’m not,
presumably in need of some assistance,

some solidarity long-since boxed-up
and moved out of this street, leaving behind
its still-bright image, empty promises.
At least, I think so — when I check online
there’s nothing for that phrase; only a cousin,
the same series of words, except a Union.
Remember those? The scanned book which comes up,
for which no one is likely getting paid,

This week, Richard is getting into the Northumbria UCU strike. Solidarity forever!