After recently wrapping up an Australian tour in May, The Mountain Goats have returned home to put the finishing touches on their 15th studio record Transcendental Youth, due out September 28. In the lead-up to the album’s release, The Mountain Goats have kept their new material pretty close to the chest, with the exception of new song The Diaz Brothers, which the band played live back in January (you can check out the clip below).
Rather than let a presser do the talking, The Mountain Goats’ founder and only constant member, John Darnielle, has posted a blog about the how and why Transcendental Youth came about.
“We stopped in Minneapolis, because who doesn’t love Minneapolis, and we played a show and Brandon and me shared a room like we always do, and at one point Brandon went out into the hall to talk on the phone to his family and I had an idea for a song so I started working on it, and the narrator turned out to be a person who felt lost and alone and only partially able to keep it together. He was living alone in the Pacific Northwest, and he was fighting the urge to just stop fighting at all, and I recognized his voice because, one, I used to work with a lot of people who spent long seasons in that guy’s shoes, and two, I have also been that guy.”
“I cannot wait for everybody to hear what we’ve done this time. It is kind of a family effort for us: the four of us who spend half the year in a tour van together are the four who went into the studio to play & record songs whose choruses grew from things scrawled in notebooks in the back of the van and occasional demos recorded in hotel rooms between tour stops. We will be touring this fall until we run out of places to go or the winged serpent returns, whichever comes first.”
To read the entire heartfelt and earnest post by Darnielle, click here.
To read a less heartfelt but amusing post about Darnielle and Transcendental Youth written by The Daily Show correspondent John Hodgman, click here (it’s worth it for a few chuckles).
Transcendental Youth by The Mountain Goats is due for Australian release on Friday, September 28, 2012 via Merge Records/Remote Control Records.
The Mountain Goats – Transcendental Youth – Track Listing:
1. Amy aka Spent Gladiator 1
2. Lakeside View Apartments Suite
3. Cry for Judas
4. Harlem Roulette
5. White Cedar
6. Until I Am Whole
7. Night Light
8. The Diaz Brothers
9. Counterfeit Florida Plates
10. In Memory of Satan
11. Spent Gladiator 2
12. Transcendental Youth
Watch: The Mountain Goats – The Diaz Brothers
