This Year
365 Songs Annotated
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- 23,99 €
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- 23,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
Collected and annotated lyrics from one of music's most visionary bards, John Darnielle.
A work of rapturous beauty, This Year: 365 songs annotated celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of John Darnielle through his most meaningful songs.
From his early days recording on a boom box, through the evolution of the Mountain Goats from a solo project to a full band, to his continued influence on indie music, This Year pairs the definitive texts of 365 John Darnielle songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. These commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his family and friends; his wife, Lalitree Darnielle; his longtime collaborator, Peter Hughes; and even his literary heroes, among many others. Here are the origins of 'This Year', 'No Children', 'The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton', and 'Up the Wolves', as well as Darnielle’s literary influences, including Flannery O’Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King.
This Year, spanning decades, becomes the definitive literary record of one of the greatest songwriters and musical creative forces of all time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and singer-songwriter Darnielle (Wolf in White Van) unpacks his 30-year career as founding member of the Mountain Goats in this illuminating compilation of song lyrics and background notes. Darnielle explains that many of his early songs "had their roots in a sequence of poems... before I got the bright idea to set some of them to music." Entries vary from detailing events and individuals depicted in the songs to broader overviews situating the author at inflection points in his life and work (after 1997, he writes, his love songs became less frequent as he got more interested in "knottier themes—death, struggle, alienation"). Intriguingly, a number of entries are based on songs never released or only performed live. Others provide intimate details on how songs took shape in the studio. "One thing music has over poetry is this freedom to improvise," Darnielle writes, noting how the phrase "moonless" in the song "Transcendental Youth" changed in the studio to "nameless dark," to better paint the picture of the song's gloomy subjects, "people in a dark room who have not had enough to eat." Darnielle's attention to structure, scene, and evocative phrasing is apparent in both his lyrics and his rich, self-aware explanations, which shed light on his creative process and evolving relationship to his work. This is catnip for the author's fans.
