Mountain Goats

There are a lot of people--authors, musicians, actors, directors--you might suspect are awesome. You hold a fondness for them. You have a feeling they may share some of your ideological leanings.

And then they go and make a public statement that settles it one way (like supporting Roman Polanski. ugh) or the other. Like John Darnielle being an out feminist.


Paste: How does your feminism inform your songwriting, not to mention your reading of the Bible?

Darnielle: My feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There’s a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you’re doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal. But as a songwriter, I’m actually really happy to be asked that. For years, I’ve written narrators who aren’t gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that’s different, obviously. But I’ve always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man’s thing. I think so many rock songs you assume by default it’s a man’s thing. That’s a weakness of narrative. And when I was younger, my early songs employed this trope that is popular to this day with indie singer-songwriters, where a guy is gonna hurt himself or do something drastic and appalling in order to show the object of his affection how intense his love for her is.

LOVE IT. Too many people are probably would-be feminists, but don't want to use the label, for whatever reason, and that's always a slight bummer.

Anyway, Darnielle nails what's always vaguely bothered me about the lack of women in independent/punk/hardcore music. It's supposedly a more progressive environment (or you hope it is, but in my own experience, that's mostly a lot of wishful thinking), but you're still left with a mostly male-narrated, male vision of love, relationships, and all the rest of the world. It's just nice to hear that someone's being thoughtful about this stuff. Feminism AND the craft of writing. One more reason to like the Mountain Goats!

Is it reductionist/essentialist and weird to want to listen to women singing? Or to want to hear songs that are more "feminine?" Maybe/probably. But I go back and forth on this, because of all the talk about the value of giving voice to your experiences; the power of shared experiences blah blah blah.