John Darnielle, the musician and novelist best known as the founder, lead singer, lyricist and at times sole member of the band the Mountain Goats, has a “catholic Catholic imagination,” and it is on full display in his new book, This Year: 365 Songs Annotated: A Book of Days.
I use a small-c catholic because he draws inspiration from everyone from Euripides to Auden, Dickinson to Didion, Liza Minnelli to Christopher Guest (on successive pages he connects his songs to Bowser and Toad from the video game Super Mario Bros. and to Wordsworth’s “The Prelude”). But a big-c Catholic is also appropriate, because he is (formerly) a “fifty-two-Sundays-a-year practicing Catholic” who still identifies with the faith.
As the subtitle indicates, Darnielle collects lyrics from, and brief reflections on, 365 different Mountain Goats songs, organized around the days of the calendar. Catholicism saturates his lyrics, which include references to saints, heretics, the rosary and the Bible (there is an entire album, “The Life of the World to Come,” where each song title is a Bible verse).
The songs themselves often grapple with classic Catholic themes of sin, guilt, hope and salvation, but Darnielle’s complicated feelings toward Catholicism are also a thread running through the reflections he writes about them. He talks about being “baptized Catholic and attend[ing] parochial school until my parents divorced,” and then leaving the church and becoming “a very tiresome atheist for several years” before finding his way back to a more complicated and nuanced relationship to faith and to Catholicism.
The longest entry in the book, on April 1, is essentially a short spiritual autobiography in which he writes about his experiences with both Catholicism and Hinduism. At one point, reflecting on liturgical music, he writes, “Any current or former Catholic—there are no former Catholics; I should know, I am one—knows the songs that now reached my searching heart and made it ache: ‘Here I Am, Lord,’ ‘On Eagle’s Wings,’ ‘Lord of the Dance.’” He is well aware of the ways that Catholicism has shaped his imagination; in the July 16 entry, on the song “Heretic Pride,” he writes, “Every good Catholic has pinups of the martyred saints on the dorm room wall of his mind, and no matter how many years ago you stopped going to church, you probably never left the Church.”
The presence and persistence of the church in his life comes up in just about every month of this book. He writes in the Dec. 1 reflection, on the song “Grave Digger”: “The rhymes here are nothing special, but the story is my favorite kind of mystery: one where you can’t say exactly where the mystery is, but you sense its presence. Yes, I’m Catholic, why do you ask?”
In a March entry, writing about a period of his life from over 20 years ago, he says:
What’s happening in my personal life when I write this song is that I’m thinking about God a lot…. I keep noticing the small-c church I seem to carry around inside me, and I like it, I’m finding God in a lot of places. I’m finding God in His absence, I’m finding the shapes God leaves on surfaces once He’s touched them with His presence, which is, of course, on every surface, even the hard, hurting surfaces.
Darnielle writes, “I struggled, and struggle, to believe” and “I know now that the Church is for the wrecks and that it’s the wrecks who make the Church.” Like Flannery O’Connor before him, Darnielle latches onto these sorts of wrecks and centers them in his work. Many of his best, and most beloved songs, deal with people on the margins, struggling with addiction, abuse, alienation and mortality.
Like O’Connor, the Mountain Goats won’t appeal to everyone, but the people who do like them usually like them in an intense, emotional, passionate way. The writer John Green captured this dynamic in the ode he wrote to the band in his 2023 bestselling essay collection, The Anthropocene Reviewed:
The Mountain Goats have shaped the way I think and listen so profoundly that I don’t know who I would be without them, only that I wouldn’t be me. I don’t want to overstate it, but there are moments in Mountain Goats songs that are almost scriptural to me, in the sense that they give me a guide to the life I want to live and the person I wish to be when I grow up.
To the uninitiated, this can sound hyperbolic, but it makes perfect sense to me. There are over a dozen Mountain Goats songs that I think of as being pretty much perfect. When This Year arrived in the mail, I immediately flipped to my birthday (and my family members’ birthdays) to see if any of these songs fell on these dates (they didn’t) and then to the index—to see which dates they did get. But as it turns out, this scattershot approach to This Year is the wrong approach to take.
This Year is designed to be read sequentially, beginning on Jan. 1. The entries build on each other, and Darnielle (with a few minor exceptions) moves chronologically through his career as a songwriter. So the January entries are all among the earliest songs he recorded and chronicle his development as a lyricist and musician, while the final month of December covers his most recent albums.
While I appreciated the insights the early entries give into his developing craft, I was initially not entirely on board with the format, since the book opens with a couple of months’ worth of reflections on songs I don’t really listen to, some of which I had never heard at all. Even the most obsessive Mountain Goats fan will find entries here that they are unfamiliar with, since a few of them document unreleased, or even unrecorded, songs.
But all of these early entries set the stage for mid-career masterpieces like “All Hail West Texas,” “Tallahassee” and “The Sunset Tree.” The month of June is almost entirely devoted to songs off this last album, which chronicles Darnielle’s abusive childhood and is widely considered the band’s best work. When I first looked up two of the most well-known tracks (“Up the Wolves” and “This Year”), I was disappointed that the entries weren’t more robust, but when they’re read in the context of all the other posts about this album, it is easier to see why Darnielle didn’t write more for each; the short pieces fit in the broader tapestry of the June reflections.
In this sense, the entries mirror the way Mountain Goats albums work. There are singles and stand-alone hits, but almost every song works best as part of an album, where the tracks speak to one another and build on one another, sonically and thematically.
Darnielle is a brilliant lyricist, but he is also a masterful storyteller. He’s written three novels—Wolf in White Van (2014), Universal Harvester (2017) and Devil House (2022)—and many of his albums function like short story cycles: “Tallahassee” is an album of songs about a deteriorating marriage; “Beat the Champ” is full of songs tied to the world of professional wrestling; and “Jenny From Thebes” tells the story of a character who appears in a number of earlier Mountain Goats songs (Darnielle describes it as a “fake musical”). There are also albums themed around role-playing games, goth culture, pulp action movies and the previously mentioned Bible verses.
It is possible, even probable, that some of these themes will seem to hold no interest for a potential listener (or reader), but one of Darnielle’s gifts is the ability to craft songs and narratives that appeal even to an initially indifferent audience. For instance, I have no particular affinity for goth culture, but “Goths” is one of their albums I revisit most often, and a song like “Unicorn Tolerance” still gets to me every time:
Dig through the graveyard
rub the bones against my face
it gets real nice around the graveyard
once you’ve acquired the tasteAnd when the clouds do clear away
get a momentary chance to see
the thing I’ve been trying to beat to death
the soft creature that I used to be
the better animal I used to be
There are Mountain Goats songs I have listened to so often that they feel inextricable from my own memories; and when I read these lyrics, I can hear Darnielle’s voice and the accompanying music that plays under them. One of the joys of reading through This Year is coming upon the entries this way, but there is an equal joy in finding a song I didn’t know before—and then pulling it up online and immediately realizing that I’m going to listen to it repeatedly until it, too, becomes part of me.
This article appears in February 2026.
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