The About Page

Everybody, hopefully, has a musical artist or band that they love so much that the most exciting thing for them to do is to tell other people about it. (I know it’s not true, it’s just that it would be great if it was.) The Mountain Goats are that band for me. Two years ago, I decided that I wanted to write about them, and I’ve been working ever since on a project that I was going to call Never Forget What It Felt Like: A Mountain Goats Companion. I had originally thought of it as a book manuscript, because I was used to that model (I’m an English professor and I’ve written four books). But I’ve recently realized that it makes a lot more sense for me to publish it digitally myself (song embeds, photos, immediate publication, personal control, no ridiculous book prices, no ridiculous book culture). So that’s the major reason why this newsletter exists: to give me a way of publishing a writing project that I’m really worked up about, a writing project that will now be able to grow and expand over time. It’s going to have, at first, two parts. The first, “Thirty Years of the Mountain Goats,” is an album-by-album chronology of the Mountain Goats’ career. The second, “Twenty Songs to Start With,” is a series of essays on twenty of the Mountain Goats’ greatest songs. I’ll post free articles for at least a couple of months and then I’ll start putting out content for paid subscribers only, along with more free stuff. There will be, at that point, a lot of bonus content for paid subscribers, including personal chord transcriptions, links to great live performances of songs, and excerpts from Darnielle’s essays and interviews. Subscribe if you like it!