John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats joins Fresh Air to talk about his new novel, Wolf in White Van, his dark adolescence, and the best part of his job:
“I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night and I like to hear as many people’s stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that. … But if you’re hearing a bunch of [stories], it gets very intense. It’s a lot.
I feel a duty. … I really think there’s a lot of music you can use to heal and save yourself. It’s not like I have some magic power and I reached inside somebody and said, “Oh, you didn’t know this about yourself until I wrote this song.” That’s not true. What I did is I made a thing, and somebody who needed to find something found mine and chose to meet me out on that ground.
It’s this area of communication that is unique to music, I think. That’s a choice that the listener makes to share that part of themselves with the artist who hopefully shared part of himself. … It’s very intense to have those sorts of conversations, have people sharing stuff that may be a secret, but I try to be worthy of it. It’s an honor. I’ve worked a lot of jobs — this is the best one.”