The Story John Darnielle Lived to Tell

Showtime is approaching now. Darnielle asks if he can tuck behind me en route to the actual dressing room, since leaving this office will mean cutting briefly through his crowd. He slips into a collared shirt and a sport coat, and he and drummer Jon Wurster huddle briefly with Douglas, the multi-instrumentalist. They make a joke about Creedence Clearwater Revival, playing over the house soundsystem. They’re headed for the stage when Darnielle demands they stop. “We forgot the perfume!,” he says, turning around and pulling a small glass bottle from a little blue bag. “This one’s called ‘Almond Suede.” Different than yesterday!”

Wurster and Douglas extend their wrists. He marches over to me, dabs my wrist once, and beams: “OK, I’m ready.”

Sometime in 1994, a user on a mailing list about the music scene in California’s Inland Empire said something nice about the Mountain Goats.

No one quite remembers the compliment, but it was Lalitree Chavanothai, a sophomore at Grinnell College, an hour outside of Des Moines. Back in California, Darnielle was having a bad day, so he emailed her to say thanks. They became pen pals. A year later, he flew to Chicago while Chavanothai drove the four hours east so they could meet.

“He was a guy with a lot of energy,” she tells me one day, laughing at what we both accept as a massive understatement. “He sent me a photo, but I didn’t super know what he looked like. But literally the first weekend we were hanging out, we were walking around a thrift store, and someone recognized him.”

Chavanothai had grown up in a succession of small towns in northern Iowa. She found indie rock through a TBS show called Night Tracks, then latched onto the likes of PostModern and 120 Minutes on MTV. The guy at the local record store recognized that she had strange tastes for the place—Uncle Tupelo, They Might Be Giants, Morrissey—and started slipping her recommendations, like a Joy Division bootleg from Italy. When she arrived at Grinnell in 1993, she learned that her roommate was into the same stuff. They signed up to DJ at the local radio station. On her show one day, she played a little Casio keyboard oddity, “Going to Malibu,” from a five-song 7” by a California songwriter with a peculiar—“unique,” she calls it—voice. That was, of course, Darnielle.