You Are The Mountain

When the Mountain Goats got together in March 2020, it was to make not one album, but two. The idea was to again work with Matt Ross-Spang, the dashing Memphis wunderkind. Matt pitched we spend a week at Sam Phillips Recording, his home base in Memphis, followed by another at the storied Fame Recording Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a plan that dovetailed nicely with John’s notion of corralling these songs into two complementary batches: one light, one dark. The Memphis album Getting Into Knives, would be brighter, bolder, marked by rich and vibrant hues; the Muscle Shoals album Dark in Here, is quieter, smokier, but more deeply textured and intense.

One song about preparing to exact bloody revenge begets another song about the act of exacting bloody revenge and then more songs about the causes and the aftermath of being driven to exact bloody revenge, each delivered with the urgency and desperation deserving of their narrators and circumstances. John Darnielle & the Mountain Goats present Bleed Out, a brand new collection arriving on August 19th.

On the first of March, 2020, John Darnielle, Peter Hughes, Matt Douglas, and Jon Wurster, aka the Mountain Goats band, visited legendary studio Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis, TN. Darnielle armed his band with new songs and reunited with producer Matt Ross-Spang who engineered last year’s In League with Dragons. In the same room where the Cramps tracked their 1980 debut album, the Mountain Goats spent a week capturing the magic of a band at the top of its game. The result is Getting Into Knives, the perfect album for the millions of us who have spent many idle hours contemplating whether we ought to be honest with ourselves and just get massively into knives. Getting Into Knives includes guest performance on Hammond B-3 organ by Charles Hodges (of numerous Al Green records) and guest performance on guitar by Chris Boerner (of the Hiss Golden Messenger band).

It's telling that Do What You Want Be What You Are, Sony/Legacy's comprehensive, career-spanning Daryl Hall and John Oates box set, takes its title from a moderately successful mid-'70s single from the duo, written and recorded just as the group was hitting their creative stride. The slow Philly groove of "Do What You Want Be Who You Are" may have hearkened back to the duo's soul roots, side-stepping some of the outré pop experiments they had done just two years earlier on War Babies, but Hall & Oates took the title's sentiment to heart, blurring boundaries between rock, pop, and soul in a way that wasn't always easy to appreciate at the peak of their popularity in the '80s…