Rock Hall Live: The Mountain Goats

7 PM Doors / 8 PM Show
GA $45 / $75 With Museum Admission
Rock Hall Live returns this summer with must-see performances. Don't miss The Mountain Goats live on the lakefront Saturday, August 15th.
The Mountain Goats are John Darnielle, Jon Wurster, and Matt Douglas. They have been making music together for several years and have released over 20 full-length albums since their debut effort in 1994.
As the story evolves from its opening overture—the first instrumental track to ever appear on a Mountain Goats album—the band guides us through the journey’s humble beginnings and the ensuing chaos, disappearances, and acceptance of fate. Occasionally, the writing feels as formalist and poetic as Darnielle, a National Book Award-nominated novelist, has ever achieved: “Lightly row but this much I know/The first thing you learn will be the first thing to go,”he sings in the brisk, catchy “Cold at Night.” In “The Lady From Shanghai 2,” the band sets a sophisticated groove that makes the ambition of its narrator feel precarious, possibly doomed from the beginning. “When I was a young man I sought out the sky,” he sings uneasily. Even within the record’s tight, chronological frame, Darnielle leaves space for interpretation, questions that linger after the narrative is over. “That’s something that I like,” he says. “Details that, generally speaking, only I will know about. So you try to let the music evoke that very personal thing without it being a confessional song.”
Working at Dreamland Recording Studios in Hudson, New York, the Mountain Goats have crafted a record that matches the emotional vulnerability of their previous career peaks while filling up a larger space than ever. The performances are so compelling that it may take a few listens to notice the surprising textures they weave in—synth, pedal steel, fretless bass—and the bold new chapter it marks in the band’s evolution. As he was writing, Darnielle envisioned a stage set with a few key props—parts of the ship, pieces of kelp—as each character delivered their songs in the forms of soliloquies. In the closing “Broken to Begin With,” one such character surveys his surroundings, not to lament his own bad fortune but to honor the fact that, even for a moment, this environment managed to shelter him at all. This may be like a bleak story to tell, a common thread of Mountain Goats concept albums all the way back to 2002’s breakthrough Tallahassee. But it speaks to a vision shared by the narrator and, increasingly, the restlessly creative trio presenting his tale: “Nothing’s ever promised to anyone,” Darnielle sings in “Fishing Boat.” “Everything you get is a gift.”