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When the Mountain Goats play in Portland, it always feels a little bit like a hometown show. Frontman John Darnielle spent just a year of his adult life here, in 1985, during the period that inspired the 2004 album We Shall All Be Healed, a semi-autobiographical chronicle of drug addiction, bad decisions, and the grief that follows. During the period that inspired that album, Darnielle says over Zoom, he was using both heroin and meth. But only did the former once in Portland—here he pauses to ask me if I have triggers around substance abuse (“I’m just making sure, because it gets intense sometimes”). He turned to meth for the rest of his year in Portland, in part because there was so much of it available.
“The songs that feel speedier, those are the Portland songs,” Darnielle says. “The songs that feel junkier, those are the Southern California songs. ‘Slow West Vultures’ I consider a Portland song. ‘Your Belgian Things’ is kind of a day-after-Portland song.”
But Darnielle’s relationship with Portland goes back further than that: His father often spent summers in Portland, Medford or Ashland, and Darnielle would join him.
That means he remembers what Portland was like the summer Mount St. Helens erupted (“there was a foot of ash in the streets”) and the summer the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh bused members into downtown Portland (“you saw them for a couple of years because they had their orange sweats and stuff”).
The Mountain Goats’ newest album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan, released last month by Cadmean Dawn records, is described in promotional materials as a “full-on musical.” It tells the story of a shipwrecked crew of 16 men, only one of whom survived the disaster. The band will perform at Revolution Hall on Dec. 8 and 9. The latter date still has tickets available as of press time, but the former is sold out.
The newest album’s title came from a dream, and the story followed, Darnielle explains.
“I thought, well, you’d either want to have a throughline where that’s a character who does many things, or not explain it at all, and I didn’t want to—the latter is not my style,” he says.
In some ways, the idea of a Mountain Goats musical feels like a creative departure for Darnielle, who started his music career as a solo singer-songwriter, laying down the guitar and vocal tracks on a boom box cassette recorder. The new record is one of the most polished-sounding to date, with Lin-Manuel Miranda providing backing vocals on three tracks—a far cry from the days when the Mountain Goats were just Darnielle recording songs on his boom box in his bedroom and releasing them as cassettes. (In fairness, the Mountain Goats have been a full-fledged band for so long, though, that Peter Balkan is dedicated to Peter Hughes, the band’s former bassist, who left the band in 2024 after 28 years; drummer-guitarist Jon Wurster and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas both appear on the new record.)
But in some ways, the idea makes so much sense that one wonders why it took so long. Darnielle’s penchant for concept albums—both autobiographical and not—dates back decades. And his career as a novelist goes back almost as far, starting with 2008’s Master of Reality, the only book in the 33 1/3 series to describe a fictional character’s relationship with an album rather than offering long-form criticism.
“I also have long thought like the way that I write songs, they’re basically these personified monologues, where you infer dramatic situations of the speaker by what he chooses to share with you, right? I sort of already have been in that mode where there’s a character behind the speaker,” he says. “The character is always speaking from his situation, and you’re putting together what the situation is from what I write.”
Darnielle says his interest in musicals was rekindled in recent years because his older son loves them—he started playing records like the cast recording of 2011’s Godspell revival and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. He also started thinking about the way jazz musicians would draw from musicals to find music to improvise on, giving as an example John Coltrane’s version of “My Favorite Things.”
But it’s also a return to Darnielle’s youth, when he loved musicals, with his top three including The Fiddler on the Roof, Disney’s The Aristocats (“some of which has aged very badly, in that way where you hear it and go, ‘Oh my God, they were playing that to children’”) and The Music Man (“it’s one of those where you feel like the writer put so much of what had been on his mind for a while in it…and the tunes are just immortal”). His discovery of Fiddler, he says, happened on a trip to Portland, after a couple of aunts went to the movies without him and “I was grief stricken. I didn’t throw a tantrum, but I was really sad.” To make it up to him, the aunts went to Fred Meyer and bought a copy of the soundtrack—“not the original Broadway cast, but like a knock-off cast. I really learned that one really well.”
Darnielle’s relationship with Portland has gradually shifted since he started visiting the city as a touring musician.
“I was a pretty degraded person in my time there. I was lost. And I used to do these sort of grief walks,” Darnielle says, with stops such as his old apartment in Northeast Portland. And after a while, “I noticed that I had just developed an affection for the town. All that stuff was so far in the rear view.”
Darnielle also goes on regular runs through the city—“which is wild, because 19-year-old Portland me could not have foreseen a version of me that goes for a run”—and in more recent years, late night walks in defiance of misleading narratives about the city.
“I walk around Portland, and I go, ‘Fuck you, assholes. Portland is fine,’” Darnielle says. “Last time I was walking around super late at night all through downtown, just like a middle finger to the right wing. I’m a 58-year-old man. If anybody was going to get hurt walking around a downtown area at 3 am on a Saturday, it would be me. What did I do? I had a great walk.”
SEE IT: Mountain Goats at Revolution Hall, 1300 SE Stark St., 971-808-5094, revolutionhall.com. 8 pm Tuesday, Dec. 9. $60.95. 21+.
