John Darnielle Of Mountain Goats Does Interview About Actual Goats

It's finally happened. John Darnielle, the man behind The Mountain Goats and potential one-day candidate for the position of U.S. Poet Laureate, gave an interview to Modern Farmer where they discussed actual goats. It's just as awesome as you'd expect it to be.

On Why He Chose The Name "The Mountain Goats":

It's from this Screamin' Jay Hawkins song called "Big Yellow Coat," which is one of those old blues numbers where the singer exaggerates everything about himself to a comic degree. He has this yellow coat that he's describing: 'Fifty million bulldogs, twenty mountain goats, all gathered 'round at sundown, to see my yellow coat.' There's something in the elocution of mountain goats, the way rhythmically the words came out, it sounded really cool.

Also, this is back when I'm like 23 and I'm living alone in a tiny apartment. And I start looking around in books and find out these are creatures that can climb rock walls almost vertically. I've been to Crete [Greece] and seen the Cretan ones, and they can climb these walls and they can cling to the walls like they're spiders. But also, every year, many of them die from misjudging a gap that they think they can jump, and then down they plunge. And I thought, 'Well this is hubris.' I'm the the master of climbing and jumping and I can do whatever I want, but I really can't do whatever I want.

Also, if you look at North American mountain goats, they're giant, splendid creatures. There's something really spiritual about the way they look. It's really deep. You can look at them for a long time.

On His Black Sabbath Book (And Why Metal Favors Goat Imagery):

 Heavy metal takes that tradition from Satanist and I wanna say, maybe, Kabbalistic traditions. The goat in mythology, initially, is sacrificed. You have the old Biblical sacrifice. The community murders a goat in expiation for some wrong or another. So if you're going up against that ideology, than you would champion the thing that got killed for no reason, which is why Satanism and anti-Christian people - which a lot of heavy metal is anti-Christian - would say, 'Hey, we're pro-goat.' And I side with the metal people, [who say] animal sacrifice is nonsense.

Also there's so much about goats - and this is stuff people who do mythology and Jungian stuff could talk about this better than me - but the nature of goat eyes is very different from other creature's eyes. There's something both identifiable and alien about it. They're not directly in front of their head or on the side. They're sorta this weird angle, so they look like they're both predator and prey.

Check out the whole interview over at Modern Farmer.