![]() But when you’re young, you don’t do that. The eventual state of loving music should be an understanding that all music is expression. The whole mission in music is, if you have biases, to use them to get some better place and then to shed them. Things that are, I think, pretty telling biases of their own. And then I get to punk rock and stuff, and like everybody else you start rejecting, when you get into punk rock, you start to take in a lot of what I would call received thinking, shorter, faster, better, don’t be pretentious. So when I finally did see the movie in the seventh grade, I was like “Where is my favorite song?” You wouldn’t know anything about that if you were a fan of Rocky Horror, but the song “Superheroes” on the soundtrack album seems to occupy a very important place, but it was cut from the film. But I got the album and I would try to piece together the story from listening to it. And the thing is, I hadn’t seen the movie. So all you had to do was circulate a big enough petition among your friends to get this going. Sometimes there would be three Rocky Horror songs in the top ten, because the top ten was done by a petition. But the Rocky Horror Picture Show, owing to the efforts of the Rocky Horror fans, in Southern California would routinely get one or more songs on Doctor Demento’s weekly top ten. And there had been some other musicals- Bugsy Malone is an almost forgotten 1970s movie where children played these gangsters. When I was in the sixth grade, I discovered the Rocky Horror Picture Show via Doctor Demento. ![]() That and the Music Man, I was super into when I was four and five years old. This is the music that begins my music listening career. One of the first records I owned was a small label version of Fiddler on the Roof. John Darnielle: I’ve been listening to musicals my whole life. Do you want to tell me how sonically you distinguish this one from the others? Why not just lean into it?ĪD: You mentioned being influenced by Godspell! and I do think that this record has more of that kind of theatrical, musical feel to it. So it was a challenge for me, and since I have three novels under my belt, I was feeling my oats. But the task of telling a story that goes from point A to point B in a tellable knowable way, that’s more of an opera sensibility. It’s not that it’s a greater craft or anything. To actually tell a story, it feels very risky, you know, because there are a lot of people out there telling a lot of great stories on television and in movies, in books, and that requires of you, a sort of craft that don’t normally bring to making a record. It was a bunch of little interconnected stories and characters.īut a rock opera tells a story. People have pitched me to make it a musical before. People like the term “concept album.” It’s sort of like a bet hedging of the rock opera, right? Because why not just go all the way? All Hail West Texas is not a rock opera. For instance, the Mountain Goats added a second person and then seven years later, we added a third one.īut the “so-called” concept album. John Darnielle: You know, I make all my decisions to change very slowly. | j kellyĪquarium Drunkard: What made you decide to do a rock opera? All hail indeed, here’s the Mountain Goats interview. Demento, and was a total joy all the way through. He touched, with equal fervor, on Aeschylus and Dr. ![]() He is as articulate and well-read as rock stars come, talking mostly in full, well-arranged sentences, but also prone to peripheral observations that zing in from unexpected angles. It is a lot, as is talking to Darnielle himself. The album is also loosely based on the Greek tragedy Seven from Thebes and sonically overstuffed enough to keep your average Broadway pit orchestra challenged and happy. It builds a rock opera out of the story of Jenny from All Hail West Texas, continuing her trajectory from safe house proprietor to murderer on the loose. His latest album, Jenny from Thebes, draws on that love of theater, as well as a cast of characters first brought to life two decades ago. When we talked, he was planning to take his kids to Wicked. He’s been a fan since preschool, listening and relistening to original cast recordings of both traditional and non-traditional musicals-everything from the Music Man to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. The portrait of two songwriters from very different worlds likely surprised long-time fans of each, but it wouldn’t phase anyone who’s ever asked John Darnielle about musicals. At the end of September, a photo of John Darnielle and Lin-Manuel Miranda at NYC’s Drama Bookshop surfaced on Instagram.
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