You feel like you’ve assimilated into the culture when you’re something that we can joke about as a common point of reference. Hard Times wrote one of my favorite joke headlines of the last few years: “This Year” by the Mountain Goats No Longer Cutting It in 2020. The studious music nerd and sometime music critic left me with a solid writing tip and recommendations for unheralded Yes and War albums. I spent a weekend buried in classic films about men exacting brutal revenge - First Blood, Red Dawn, Death Wish, Assault on Precinct 13, Billy Jack - and spoke with Darnielle for almost an hour and a half about his new record, his thoughts on moral panics, and his latest novel, Devil House. The record’s preponderance of jilted, surly protagonists and depictions of fight scenes and shootouts offered ripe ground for a chat about surging American vigilantism and the mindset that nudges privileged people into acts of violence fueled by a (real or imagined) sense of victimhood. On this month’s Bleed Out, the Mountain Goats’ 21st album, Darnielle celebrates the action films he grew up on and his old habit of workshopping songs in front of the TV over lean, loud rock riffs - parting for now with the smoky, jazzy, acoustic jams of recent releases like last year’s Dark in Here. I wanted to know how the singer-songwriter who discusses matters of faith deftly and candidly in interviews and on albums like 2009’s The Life of the World to Come is weathering the growing nationalist sentiment percolating in the American evangelical-Christian community. I’ve been meaning to pick John Darnielle’s brain for a long time - not just because of the literary brilliance on display in the catalog of his flagship act (the Mountain Goats, a band equally liable to break your heart with songs about divorce and abuse as to make you chuckle through an ode to Mexican lucha libre wrestling or the arduous quests of tabletop role-playing games) or his storied internet presence, documented in his 2000s music blog, Last Plane to Jakarta, and, more recently, his lively Twitter account.

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