This is a song about a bunch of friends of mine who really liked methamphetamine.
John Darnielle introducing Letter From Belgium, Harvester Performance Center on 2017-12-04
I had to leave tour and cancel a tour date to go say goodbye to my mother-in-law, who was dying, and I wrote this song for her later.
John Darnielle introducing Matthew 25:21, Tipitina's on 2012-01-21
This is a song about sitting alone in a room, waiting for something to happen; a subject that's most insufficiently addressed by pop music. You know, because not everybody, really, is going to find the one they love but everybody is going to spend some time alone in a room waiting for something to happen.
John Darnielle introducing Absolute Lithops Effect, Dan's Silverleaf on 2014-06-20
This is a song about how you remember your times that you spent in the thrall of the evil that lives inside of you. We identify these evils as external evils because it's a lot easier than suggesting that your dark times actually are a function of some... thing that's always in there, like the Blob. It's like, no matter how hard you freeze it, you know, it somehow thaws and comes out and ruins you for season after season.
But it's never permanent; it feels like it's going to be permanent, but it's not permanent. But it feels like it is. And you get away from it and you remember, 'Oh, that was- that was a dark demon running my house at that time.'
John Darnielle introducing In Memory of Satan, The Wexner Center on 2015-04-22
Hey, talking guys, I'm the main attraction.
John Darnielle, Urban Lounge on 2015-05-27
This is on We Shall All Be Healed. It's a song about wondering whether you're actually going to get healed.
John Darnielle introducing The Young Thousands, The Wexner Center on 2015-04-22
Every so often, when you travel through this world, you may see a person and you say, 'As sure as I'm standing here and by the holy name of the god that made me, I'm going to stab that person in the eye with a foreign object.'
John Darnielle introducing Foreign Object, The Wexner Center on 2015-04-22
This is a song about a couple of people who are going to get themselves a delightful little divorce. One of these days.
John Darnielle introducing Southwood Plantation Road, Grand Park on 2011-08-05
This is a song about lighting the saints on fire.
John Darnielle introducing Heretic Pride, Old Town School of Folk Music on 2018-05-29
This is a song about a couple of alcoholics in love. They're not really in love but we have to keep up appearances. As you do to safeguard the good things in the relationship that you once had, you have to occasionally destroy things in spectacular fashion.
John Darnielle introducing New Chevrolet in Flames, Old Town School of Folk Music on 2018-05-29
This is a Portland song. [Some audience members cheer.] Thank you. I almost died in Portland. I have a phenomenon that I know my fellow drug addicts can relate to, of having three days that I can't account for. I know they happened but I was not there consciously for them.
I remember- I'll tell you this whole story; not the whole story, that would take a long time. But I will tell you that I emerged as from a very deep, but unrestful sleep. I woke up with a hole in my jeans and a scab on my knee - well it wasn't a scab yet but it was forming - and unable to remember what day it was.
And I became convinced, in the way you do when you're not healthy, that if only I could remember the date, everything else would sort of collect itself and come completely into focus. And I went out - this is 1986 - I went out to the newspaper machine in front of my apartment building and I looked at the date and I tried to hold it in my head from the newspaper machine, up the stairs to the door, to the elevator, back down to the basement where I lived and back down to room number ten. But I could not do it. By the time I would get back, it would be gone. And sometime within the next couple of hours, I would go back up and this behaviour persisted, for how long, I don't know.
John Darnielle introducing Lakeside View Apartment Suites, Old Town School of Folk Music on 2018-05-27
This is another one of those cheerful songs about the third or fourth time that you wind up in the locked ward; you begin to feel a little hopeless and you try to find something to hope for.
John Darnielle introducing White Cedar, Bowery Ballroom on 2012-10-16
Do you have anything for Twin Human Highway Flares?
Hello! It doesn’t seem to be a song he talks too much about, but most intros are some variation of this:
This was the first love song I ever wrote for my wife, before she was my wife. - Old American Can Factory on 2005-07-02
Other than that, there is also this:
I wrote this right after the first- shortly after the first time I drove from here to Iowa. - The Canopy Club on 2005-10-12
And this one that’s more about the album really, but I think it ties in with that last one:
… About five years later I made a record called Tallahassee and people started saying, “Oh, he used to live in Tallahassee.” Tallahassee was sort of like, you know, Ferlinghetti has this phrase “Coney Island of the Mind”. It was like this place that I imagined like, “Oh, it’s so far away from me.” Looking at the California to Florida map, like it’s as far as you can really go. So you just stretch all the way across and run out of land. So, that’s what that was all about.
And Galesburg, to me, was a spot I saw for seven minutes, looking out of a train window. Well, you know, somebody had some clothes on a line, and a couple dogs were barking in a yard and I thought I could get off the train here and disappear forever in this town. It was one of those moments, right. It was one of those moments you get where like vast infinities and possibility’s open up for you for just a second, right. It’s not your Maslovian plateau moment it’s something else, it’s this moment when you realize there are a lot of selves inside of you and one of them is about to be left behind as the train heads on towards Iowa. - Kresge Recital Hall on 2014-05-02
If I find more in the future, I’ll be sure to post them for you!
Edit: There’s also this, which isn’t a banter but may still interest you!
There are two people in this song — or three, if you count the highway, which I generally do. They look a lot like me and the woman who would later become my wife, driving from Chicago to northern Iowa on a summer day. Only I don’t think that ever happened. I know we never had any ‘50s road movie conversations like the one that opens the song. We weren’t, at the point in time when this song would have had to’ve taken place for it to be true, using overnight bags. We had suitcases. And there wasn’t enough backstory between us for buildings to appear as “monument[s] of desperation.” But the picture I get in my head, or got in my head when I was writing it in a Grinnell apartment circa 1996, was of my girlfriend and I heading a little ways west and digging in for a long life together. I think it’s almost a symbolic scene for me in that way. On one tour we opened the set with it quite a few times, and I enjoyed it more and more each night. The characters in this song aren’t keeping secrets from you; anything they don’t tell you just isn’t any of your business. - My Five Favorite Mountain Goats Characters, John Darnielle
John: So, I listen to a lot of Jackson Browne. But if I could say - and who am I to criticize a songwriter who is my superior in every way - but, he doesn't really address people turning into wolves in their minds enough in these songs. So musically, this is kind of a Jackson Browne pastiche. Lyrically, it has more people turning into a wolf in their minds than most Jackson Browne songs do. To the best of my knowledge and I have most of the albums.
It's about how if you have a thing- [John laughs at audience members howling.] That's really funny!
Peter: You've created... a monster.
John: [Laughs.] So, this song is about - I mean, beyond what I've told you about it - it's about how you carry a vision of yourself that is hard, sometimes, to shake. And when I say hard, I'm soft-soaping the case because people who know what I'm talking about know that it's not hard, it's impossible.
John Darnielle introducing Never Quite Free, Bowery Ballroom on 2012-10-16
This is a song about letting the positive energy flow. This is a song about letting the rich, positive, loving energy between two people flow... right down the drain. And watching it go. And watching the scum rush in after it and saying, 'Hey, what do you know? There it went. We scrubbed it clean. I'll be damned. So will you.'
John Darnielle introducing No Children, Grand Park on 2011-08-05
This is a song about two people; they are in love. Aren't we all? So, they're in love. They're going to drive into a wall.
John Darnielle introducing Jenny, Mercury on 2003-09-27
This is a song that persons who have lived in houses where one or more members of the house get beat up, you know, by somebody can usually relate to. And it's a song about how you tend to start hinging your hopes on when you get to leave and it becomes- you know, if you can imagine Friday at quarter to five at work when you're gonna clock out. Okay, now imagine the boss has been beating you all day. So, it's like that feeling. It's kind of a Hawaiian feeling.
John Darnielle introducing The Day the Aliens Came/Hawaiian Feeling, Sixth & I Historic Synagogue on 2009-03-21