Starting on March 16, 2020, in the confines of his Durham home, Darnielle wrote a song a day for ten days while reading the historian Pierre Chuvin’s A Chronicle of the Last Pagans. On the Mountain Goats Bandcamp site, he wrote that he worked, for those ten days, “in exactly the style I used to work in: read until something jumps out at me; play guitar and ad-lib out loud until I get a phrase I like; write the lyrics, get the song together, record immediately.” He recorded the songs on the same devices that he was using back in the early days: the Panasonic boombox, which miraculously overcame a fatal clicking noise when Darnielle stood it on its side, and the Marantz PMD-222.
2020: Songs for Pierre Chuvin
2020: Songs for Pierre Chuvin
2020: Songs for Pierre Chuvin
Starting on March 16, 2020, in the confines of his Durham home, Darnielle wrote a song a day for ten days while reading the historian Pierre Chuvin’s A Chronicle of the Last Pagans. On the Mountain Goats Bandcamp site, he wrote that he worked, for those ten days, “in exactly the style I used to work in: read until something jumps out at me; play guitar and ad-lib out loud until I get a phrase I like; write the lyrics, get the song together, record immediately.” He recorded the songs on the same devices that he was using back in the early days: the Panasonic boombox, which miraculously overcame a fatal clicking noise when Darnielle stood it on its side, and the Marantz PMD-222.