John Darnielle’s 3 decade spanning folk music project, The Mountain Goats, has mined nearly every emotion and subject for their song topics. He wrote a song about off-camera side characters from the movie scarface, A high school death metal band and most recently a whole album about the 80’s goth music scene. The Mountain Goats catalog has so thoroughly covered many aspects of humanity and its emotions that one fan made a flowchart directing you to a mountain goats song for whatever your mood. “I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats”. Is not only the name of that chart, but also a common phrase used by fans. In essence, if someone says, “I only listen to the Mountain Goats”, they are saying “Why would I need other music? This does everything I need.” While I don’t really only listen to the Mountain Goats, John’s music is among the most influential art to my personality and has consistently been my most reliable friend in times of despair.
My obsession with his personal music led me to want to understand him as a person too Tho do this I exhaustively watched every interview, live performance, and podcast with him on Youtube. I learned that the child abuse and drug abuse described in his music were directly inspired by his personal hardships. I also learned that he is as much of an endless fountain of wisdom, intelligence, and empathy off stage as he is on-stage. Through my diligent research, I’ve fallen in-love with the artists as much as i have with his art.
This long-winded explanation is the only way I know how to comprehensively describe my excitement for the concept of the I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats podcast. Each episode, fiction podcaster extraordinaire, Joseph Fink, sits down with John Darnielle himself to discuss each subsequent song on the Mountain Goats album, “All Hail West Texas”. Approximately half-way through each episode, Joseph and John invite a guest on to add another angle to the conversation. To cap off the show, a different musical artist covers the song in question.
On paper, putting a microphone in front of John and letting him ramble about his art for 40 minutes a week is exactly what I’ve longed for. The problem in practice is that the show’s conversations are too surface level. Good conversations require room to breathe and time to let it meander to unexpected destinations. Instead of this, the conversation swings from vine to vine so fast that I had difficulty remembering certain segments, even directly after listening to the episodes. The breakneck pace of topic shifting also masks the fact that the hosts barely talk about the music that they are supposed to.
When I was trying to rack my brain about what happened on episode 2, “Fall of the Star High School Running Back”, I became suspicious of how little of the episode was actually Mountain Goats related. To test my theory, I devised four categories of topics and noted the timestamps of the category’s airtime. The four categories are 1) Announcements/Bookkeeping (which is essentially the intro and outro), 2) Mountain Goats/Episode’s song related discussion, 3) airtime of the original and cover of the song, and 4) discussion unrelated to the Mountain Goats.
My results confirmed my suspicion. In a 39 minute episode, 4 minutes and 15 seconds were of memo/bookkeeping, 7 minutes and 8 seconds featured music, 14 minutes and 25 minutes were unrelated to the Mountain Goats 9 (In this episode the guest and John found it pertinent to lightly comment on gentrification in Durham, North Carolina), and only 13 minutes and 12 seconds of the 39 minute podcast featured a discussion of the Mountain Goats and the song. That means that only 34% of the shows airtime is what the show reports to be about.
To be fair, I like the musical component of the show; weekly covers are a truly unique hook to keep Mountain Goats fans coming back for every episode. The flaw in this segment is that the concept only works as a supplement the host’s discussion of the song. If only 34% of the episode is about the music, then the music itself feels out of place. Also the housekeeping elements of the show are necessary, so I’m not suggesting those be removed. But I am saying that 37% of a podcast about the Mountain Goats not being about the Mountain Goats is not what the podcast promised. In another format, I love the idea of John Darnielle talking about gentrification, religion, or anything else non-Mountain Goats related, but the show’s shallow fast paced editing style doesn’t allow for any of these topics to be fully explored, and it not what the show advertises itself to be. The podcast’s title indicates that the show is by a super-fan, for super-fans, but the content shows that I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats doesn’t know who it’s for.
Written in Sociology Research Methods by Taylor Kalsey
Listened to during work
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