What is a song? This is not a semantic question but an aesthetic one. “My own ethos, my aim, anyway,” John Darnielle explains in This Year: 365 Songs Annotated—A Book of Days, “is for a lyric to allow the listener to indulge in the fantasy that the singer, or speaker, is making the whole thing up from scratch—pulling the words from the air.” Creating as one goes along, in other words, or, better yet, following the line as it unfurls. “My lyrics are more than me,” Darnielle goes on. “There are more interesting things going on in them than the circumstances of their creation; what’s most interesting about them, both to me and, I’d argue, empirically, is…their independence as songs.” Certainly, this is a quality I have long sought out as a listener and also in my own on-again, off-again songwriting practice, which I both do and do not consider through the lens of poetry.
Darnielle, of course, has been writing and recording songs for decades, mostly under the constantly mutating rubric of the Mountain Goats. Since the cassette-only release of its 1991 debut, Taboo VI: The Homecoming—recorded on a Panasonic boom box—this loose band has put out more than 30 albums and another 20 or so EPs. Darnielle is also the author of three novels, including Wolf in White Van, which was long-listed for a National Book Award in 2014. There’s a kind of delirious excess to this outpouring of production, as if creativity were a faucet that cannot be switched off. “Everything’s part of my creative process,” Darnielle insists. “Creative work is the tangible record of a process that exists before and outside of language and shape and chronological time; nothing is not the creative process, and this isn’t just true for me but is the birthright and legacy of everyone who lives.”
It’s too much to suggest that This Year bridges the gap between Darnielle’s writing and his music; indeed, one of the points here is that such a distinction is, for the most part, moot. Instead, let’s think of this collection as a scrapbook, a set of lyrics and accompanying reflections—not quite a book of days, despite its subtitle and arrangement, but something elusive all the same. I am drawn to these kinds of projects, I’ll admit, to the idea of narrative emerging from the randomness of daily life and the corollary notion of the lyric as a quasi-literary form. In saying that, I don’t mean to repeat the error of, say, Greil Marcus’s Dead Elvis, which makes the case for its subject’s significance by comparing him to “Melville and Lincoln and Faulkner,” when, in fact, he has nothing to do with them. For Marcus, the idea is to honor, or represent, Elvis by elevating him to some sort of cultural pantheon: deceased American originals, as far as I can figure out. Darnielle, however, recognizes from the outset that it’s the work that elevates us, if anything at all. “My misconception, for the first several years of the effort,” he acknowledges of This Year, “had been that I was writing a book, but in truth I was making a book: These are two different things. To make a book rather than write one is to assemble something whose external form masks its more flexible potential.”
And there we have the crux of it: how to find order, not amid disorder but rather out of something far more protean. Lyrics, after all, are both written and oral, or aural; we connect with them at the level of the ear. Their meaning derives not just from thought and observation, but also—and most essentially—in relation to rhythm and melody. Darnielle makes this explicit in his notes on “Need More Bandages,” released on the Mountain Goats’ 2022 album, Bleed Out. “This song,” he writes, “started with the chords and some wordless syllables—me in my room working through a progression without a clear concept of what I’m going to say.” Likewise “Heel Turn 2,” from 2015’s Beat the Champ, of which Darnielle recalls, “This is a book about lyrics, but the musical coda for the song, Gmaj7 articulations drifting out into space on a grand piano, came to me in a dream.”
That’s the thing about songs; the words can’t quite exist without the music, and vice versa. There is a necessary integration at their core. It’s this that often leaves plain lyrics wanting; they feel one-dimensional, incomplete when separate from the chords. After a while, I just want to put on the album. After a while, I just want to hear the song. And yet, what Darnielle is after in This Year—to follow each of the lyrics in the book with a brief prose gloss, less exegesis than reflection—is nothing less than to contextualize these words as part of an ongoing engagement.
An autobiography in lyrics, as it were.
It’s probably useful to acknowledge that, while I admire the Mountain Goats, I’m not a hardcore devotee. Instead, I’ve encountered Darnielle primarily as a writer, so it feels comfortable to meet him once more on the page. Like him, I’m compelled by the concept of work as process, which is where This Year becomes most resonant. A number of the lyrics remain incomplete or unrecorded; in that, they are like chapters, or installments, in an extended dream diary. Throughout the book, Darnielle cites his preference for the I-IV-V chord progression (the basic structural building block of blues and rock ’n’ roll). He discusses his impulse to write songs that have no chorus, not least because this confounds expectations of himself and his listeners alike. The result is, if not a proper daybook—yes, there are 365 songs, arranged by month, but the chronology is more impressionistic, in the way of memory—then a workbook or a journal. “This isn’t a memoir,” Darnielle writes, “unless it is.”
Something similar might be observed of the lyric, which is not a poem, unless it is. When I was first starting to sketch out songs, I used to call them poems, but this, I’ve come to understand, was just my doubt that they would measure up. Now, I regard them as distinct, neither poem nor story: entities unto themselves. Or, in Darnielle’s deft encapsulation: “Unreleased, unrecorded, performed once or twice a cappella, no instruments at all in its history—the Platonic ideal of a song, for me, so tenuous that it can barely be said to exist; momentary; self-contained.”•
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