ART IS UNIVERSAL:

On a private floor at the Strand bookstore in Manhattan, surrounded by rare editions and elaborate first pressings, John Darnielle opens his cheap notebook plastered with images of Bob Marley. He's showing me drafts of the setlist for his solo performance the previous night, a wildly unpredictable airing of Mountain Goats deep cuts and fan favorites at a cozy venue in Brooklyn. In the same scribbly handwriting that once graced the covers of his cassette releases in the early 1990s are names of decades-old songs he had never played live before along with more recent rarities like "For the Krishnacore Bands," whose reference-heavy lyrics about the obscure punk microgenre require an introductory speech that runs nearly double the length of the song itself. "As you can see, I wrote that one down twice," Darnielle notes. "I was very excited about it."

That same sense of urgency has fueled Darnielle's music for more than 30 years. In the beginning, he recorded his songs into a boombox shortly after writing them, capturing the spark of creation on tape, his voice and acoustic guitar clipping in the microphone. This spontaneous energy offset the careful, literary observations that have come to cement him as one of his generation's greatest songwriters (and, increasingly, one of its most celebrated novelists, too).

During his early shows, Darnielle would translate his enthusiasm by screaming and shaking, exhausting himself on stage. "I now realize the vein-popping stuff was just me being nervous," he says. "I was expelling it, almost like a skunk." These days, Mountain Goats shows are a lot more relaxed, with the 56-year-old basking in the moments when the audience can carry the energy for him.

Darnielle bridges the gap between past and present on the latest Mountain Goats record, Jenny From Thebes, which acts as a sort of sequel to 2001's All Hail West Texas, a classic from his boombox era. The new album's title character, who first appeared on West Texas as a mysterious runaway, is now the focus of an elaborate song cycle that also stands as the band's most beautifully orchestrated record to date. Darnielle recorded the album with producer Trina Shoemaker, who's worked with Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, and the Chicks, and longtime accompanists Peter Hughes, Jon Wurster, and Matt Douglass, who have helped Darnielle's sound evolve with each new record. "I'm the worst musician in the Mountain Goats," he notes, before quickly clarifying: "But I'm the best songwriter in the Mountain Goats." [...]

What are some things that strike you as corny?

Any hint of self-pity. I don't want people in my songs to seem enamored of their own pain, or to think that they're special. And in that way, the characters are me: I'm not special and my pain isn't special.

People often use the word "compassion" when they talk about your songwriting. What does that mean to you?

There's this notion in Jewish thinking of healing the world. I'm almost always writing about situations that you as a person would prefer to avoid. And then I want [the characters] to heal. Because all your characters are eventually you anyway. There's no way you can write a character who doesn't somehow come from you. Nobody has that kind of vision. So I want them to learn something from their hard times and wind up someplace better. When you tell a story, you imagine yourself in it. And when you imagine yourself someplace, you hope you come out of it OK.

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