Featured Conversation: Talking With John Darnielle

Published on Feb 8, 2025

[this interview has been edited for clarity and length]

Let’s start with an introduction.

I’m John Darnielle. I’m the singer from the Mountain Goats, and I write books.

So we’re doing something a little different today. Normally, I talk to people about their record collections, but you got rid of your collection, and we’re going to talk about that. So tell me about how long ago you got rid of your records?

Was at the beginning of last year, I think.

Oh, so recently. How big of a collection did you have?

I didn’t have a number on it. I kept them at my office, and I had more here at the house. There wasn’t really space, but it wasn’t a massive collection. Music’s my life, and I’ve been in a lot of places where, like, Oh, that’s a big record collection. I had, I think, a couple thousand.

That’s pretty big.

Well…

Yeah, I’ve seen people in Facebook groups with ten, twenty thousand records. They have an entire wing of their house dedicated to vinyl.

Well, that’s the thing. You have to at some point decide how much of your life you’re going to give to them.

How long were you collecting records for?

Oh, all my life. I mean, I don’t consider myself a collector. I wasn’t. I had some things that were pretty, pretty good, you know, like weird things like The Fifth Dimension and Robin Trower. I had War, the 70s band War, I had a big selection of their records, but I wasn’t a completist in any way. I would just get them when I would see them, or go on a spree about it. But I’d been getting records since I was a child. I mean, records were a massive part of my childhood. I had a little record player and both before and after the divorce - my parents divorced when I was five - but my father, at some point, as a supplementary gig or something I never fully got, I got a piece of the story from him before he died, at some point was selling records to record stores.

So, so before the chains of distribution were solidified, selling records was basically Fuller Brush salesman stuff, or Mary Kay, it was guys who would themselves receive a shipment of records from a distributor, who would then go to the record stores and go, so I’m selling this, this and this, do you want to buy these? And they would buy, they would keep their percentage, or whatever the markup was that they were selling the record for, right? My dad did this for a period of time when he lived in Indiana, so going around to stores, any store that stocked records. Records were sold in music stores, places where you bought sheet music or instruments, or department stores. And the chains of distribution were still being formed in the 70s, back then you can name the big distributors.

Some of the record labels had their own distributors, but there were also major ones, what we call one stops. This was a big system, right? But prior to that, it was sort of chaotic. It was kind of independent, and there was a lot of this going on. I had mentioned this because when I’m a child, that’s like, 10 years in my father’s past, and there’s a box of records in the garage that he doesn’t care about, that were things he was trying to sell at one point that he wound up with overstock, or whatever, in the garage and listened to them on a record player that was out there. It’s like one of them was Mary Hopkins’ version of Turn, Turn, Turn. Do you remember her? She was on Apple, on the Beatles label. And, oh, what was her other big song? “Those Were the Days.”

Oh, yes, I remember that song.

Yeah, Mary Hopkins. I think Paul McCartney signed her to Apple. And I didn’t love this song, but I would go out there and listen to these records and try and get a beat on them. And from then until this day, even though I no longer have my collection, I would just pick up what I could. Didn’t have the money to buy my own records, obviously, until adulthood, largely, but it was what I asked for every Christmas for the longest time, records and books, records and books.

How did you find being so into records influence your career in music?

I think what it gives you is a broad base of knowledge and of your own, a curiosity about your own tastes. That’s a complicated question, because I didn’t have any ambitions for success at all. I was just doing stuff. But, I mean, I do think also in the milieu of growing up in the 70s, being a front man for a music act of some kind felt like an idea whether you could sing or not. So the notion of being in a band predates me, being able to sing or write just I figured I would be the lead singer. That’s what I wanted to do. It was funny, like what I finally started doing. I was playing guitar, and my image of myself was always as a lead singer, holding the microphone like Steven Tyler style, right? But when I started doing it, I had a guitar and time on my hands, and lived in employee housing at this hospital and so, so I wound up being guitarist and singer, which for a year or two of doing is like, this isn’t what I had meant to be doing, you know, but, but it was just a hobby, the record collection, there was such a distance between the stuff I listened to what I was trying to do, because the terrain of weirdo acid wasn’t related to most of the stuff I would listen to, except for Syd Barrett, who I had been turned on to a year or two before. And even there, Barrett comes through the industry, and I was very outside of it.

What went into your decision to part with the collection?

I mean, the turntable was at the office with the records. But also, I would usually listen on headphones, and there’s a CD player there too. And I realized that I wasn’t listening to them anymore. It just wasn’t. I had them, and I liked them. When I would listen, they would give me pleasure, but, but also, you know, I’m, I’ll be 58 next month, and I have two children, right? And a few years ago, my father died. Now, he had an executor. He lived ove in England, so I went, he died, and then he was followed in death a year later by my stepmother. When she died, I went over to her funeral, and I looked around the house, and there was all this stuff. They weren’t big collectors. There was a library. There’s all this stuff but they had hired an executor to deal with this, and when I looked at it, I went, Wow, if they didn’t have this very particularly British system of having somebody who’s going to take care of all that, who’d already been paid in advance for years to do that, this would be a nightmare.

It would be overwhelming.

It was overwhelming enough. And I thought, Well, I’m not going to die anytime soon, right? God willing, But, but I don’t want my kids to have to look at stuff that’s not important to them and say this, you know? Now, the thing is, I’m selective about this. I have more books than I ever had records, and I get 10 new books every month. My book acquisition syndrome is profound, right? Maybe I will undergo some kind of a Potlatch kind of situation where I get rid of them all. But I’m willing to say you guys gotta figure out what to do with the books, but with the record I don’t know. If a child who has grown up in the year 2050, or whatever inherits a record collection, it’s almost certain to be a huge burden. A book collection will always have value. It’s books. Yeah, records are a format greatly beloved by our generation, and there are people in later generations who love them, obviously, you know, but it’s a specialist market. And I thought I just, you know, I’m sort of doing a little estate planning and thinking, You know what? What do I have that I don’t want my kids to have to deal with? And the records were first on the list, and the thing is, the racks they were on, I needed those to put books on. So this beautiful wooden rack for the records, and it’s now full of books.

How do you think the future of listening to music is going to unfold?

Well, I mean, vinyl doesn’t die because people like to listen to it. Because records are cooler, it’s cool to hold a record. People like it. When music has a physical artifact connected to it, you’re able to connect to it on more levels, right? CD booklets can do that. I like CDs a lot these days because I listen a lot. Me and my son have developed a relationship with CDs in the car, but the album is substantial. This was always one of my big defenses of it, like the weight and the heft of it and how it can fold out and be large in your hands, larger than a book. Actually, it’s a little imposing. It’s grand, in a way. And I think there’ll always be people who like that. You know, inside the industry.

But I mean the backlog, if you want to make a record, you have to book the press a year in advance. Whereas when there were enough pressing plants everywhere you could have a record out next month, it was just call them up. Say, I’ve got a quarter inch reel. It’s got four songs on it, and I want to press a seven inch. How quick can you get me? By two weeks they get it. You can’t do that anymore at all, There’s that, and also Record Store Day, because the major labels, what’s left of them, have noticed it. So many of the resources of vinyl pressing are dedicated to record store pressings for the major labels, because those are collectors market stuff. So the actual market for pressing vinyl to be sold and listened to now shares a lot of space with these specialist collector markets and stuff, but I don’t think that’s going to die out any more.

I’m into fountain pens right now. I would guess that most people don’t even know that fountain pens exist. You know, ballpoints are cheap and plentiful. I can go get 100 of them at Office Depot for probably 10 bucks or whatever. But there will always be the fountain pen hobby community. There’s people paying tens of thousands of dollars for a new fountain. Man, I will never be that person. But there’s cheaper ones and there’s more expensive ones than there’s crazy expensive ones. And that hobby community isn’t going anywhere, because they’re fun. And vinyl is fun, you know, in a way. I don’t think a format has ever been as fun as vinyl, as you know, like there’s that Peanuts cartoon of Schroeder and Charlie Brown, where he’s sitting and says, I love my record collection and he sits by a stereo. That is a bygone way of listening to music, but it is something you can still do. And people do find that it’s fun to do. I don’t think it will die out. It just becomes a specialist market like fountain pens.

Do you think there’s a difference between being a record collector and a record listener?

I mean, a record listener is a music listener. I don’t listen to records.

But you listen to music.

All the time. We were listening to Jethro Tull’s Bursting Out Live album when you called.

I listened to Jethro Tull two days ago for the first time in like, 40 years.

I will talk to you about Jethro Tull until your ears fall off, because I’m so fascinated by that. You say 40 years. When I was a kid, they were one of the bands who I was like, don’t know if your child was like this but for me, I both liked music, and I also would be selecting music based on whether it seemed to agree with what kind of person I expected to grow into. Which Tull kind of seemed like one of those bands, because they were serious, but, but not over serious, and their music was complex and all that stuff. But now I obsess over how they’re like, three quarters great, and one quarter stuff, where you go, was there no one around you to stop you from doing this. I want to say it’s more like seven eighths to one eighth really. It’s like I love them. But when you know in Thick as a Brick, where they say, “you know your love’s in the gutter, your sperm’s in the sink”, and he says it, you can hear him being excited to make you listen to that. It’s a bad lyric. It’s bad. You’re good at writing lyrics, but that’s bad.

Do you still check out record stores while you’re on the road?

Oh yeah. If they have a used CD section, I go ham. Because, like I said, my older son and I listen to CDs all the time. So, yeah, I went to Peaches in New Orleans last time I was there, and a place in Indianapolis that I wish I could name check what’s he called?I have a T-shirt for them around here. It’s on this main drag in Indianapolis near the venue where we played. I really love going there. I apologize for not remembering your name. [Googles Indianapolis record stores] Indy CD and Vinyl. Yeah, they’re great. And it’s funny, I was thinking about it yesterday, because I found a CD by the Monochrome Set in the basement, and it had a sticker on it that said Reptilian. And I was like, I wonder where Reptilian is now. I love ephemeral things like that. I love, you know, remembering Boo Boo Records in San Luis Obispo where I bought Cabaret Voltaire’s Three Mantras EP, which was so hard to find, which then got stolen from me in a bus station two days later. I left it by the pinball machine, and I was playing pinball, and somebody literally just snaked it, and I had had it for two days, wouldn’t hear this music. Otherwise, I was bringing it home so that my friend Tom and I, who are obsessed with cabriolets, could hear this record that we knew existed, right? I found it at Boo Boo. I listened to it at my dad’s house. Took the Greyhound bus back to Claremont. Lost it in the bus station, because it got pilfered. And that’s an amazing pre digital age story to me, is like the music lived with me for a day or two. Well, I mean, now I could send a link to it, but for years thereafter I could not find a copy.

So did you give your records away? Did you sell them? How did you get rid of them?

This is another long story that I really like. In the 90s, I ordered records from a guy in Ohio named Keith Bergman. He had an online record store, and he did a metal, sort of a satirical metal site that was like The Onion, but with all metal stories. It was called Infernal Combustion. Okay, it was funny as hell. This is like the late 90s, and I ordered Ozzy’s The Ultimate Sin from him. He was in Ohio, and I got a used copy of it sent to my home in Iowa from him. We just knew it that way. And when Facebook became a thing, either he friended me or I friended him. I don’t know how it shook up, but we became pals back and forth on Facebook and followed each other’s lives and he’s a funny and great one of my favorite people. He’s a comedian and, and I know that he still buys and sells records. And we’ve been close in recent years, through family growth and struggle and and we know each other well. And, when I got the idea, when I realized I wanted to put books in the racks, I wrote to him. I texted him, I say, hey, Keith, are you still buying and selling records? And I’ll never forget. He said, Oh, buddy, I know that it’s always a journey to ask this question, and yes, I am.

He came to my office, loaded all my records into his van and I sent him back. And the thing is, I didn’t even take one. He just sends me money when he sells some. It’s like, oh, okay, that’s five of them. Then I get paid for that. And it felt weird because about that, I wasn’t thinking. I think many people, when they sell their collections anyway, now want cash on the value. Wasn’t about that for me. It was about the way that Marie Kondo people talk about. These are no longer serving the me that I am. They’re a part of my past and an important part of my past, and they always will be. But I would rather they be out there, thrilling and exciting people. I would rather it go to people who are getting into records and stuff and buying off Discogs., Like, I had the Big Black Headache 12 inch that comes in the black vinyl. Oh, man, an extraordinarily rare record. And again, seven inch, and the horrifying poster and all that stuff. And, well, when I get rid of those, then somebody who’s wanted that for years gets to have a copy. Whereas I was never going to play it again, I’ve heard it. I did my time with it and I enjoyed it when it was new. I bought it brand new when it came out. And all my records, any record, has a story like that. It’s something that somebody wanted to have. I want people who want to have them to have them. So This feels like an errand of middle age to me, understanding that, the stuff that thrilled and fed you, if it’s actual stuff, its mission going forward is to travel from you to the outside world where it can do that for somebody else. You know, it can’t do anything for me in the grave. The value is secondary to me.

You’re taking your joy and giving it to someone else to experience.

They make their own joy from it. It’s really making sense of your life and constructing something coherent. Because I think dying surrounded by stuff you can’t use and that the people who are going to have to deal with it won’t be happy to deal with. That’s no way to go out. I mean, I think really, the ideal way to go out would be empty handed, right? Yeah, I won’t be able to do that with my books, I don’t think, but we’ll see what happens.

John Darnielle is a father of two from Durham, North Carolina. He writes books and makes records.

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