[tweetmeme]The John Darnielle-led Mountain Goats this week announced their 16th studio album, a guitar-less record called Goths that, as its title suggests, celebrates the dark musical genre: “the friends whose bands never made it out of Fender’s Ballroom, the Gene Loves Jezebels of the world.”
In keeping with that theme, the record is preceded by first single “Andrew Eldritch is Moving Back to Leeds,” a somewhat bouncy, and rather un-gothlike, song about the lead singer of The Sisters of Mercy.
Darnielle explains:
“This song began its life on a 1973 Guild while I was at the beach a couple of summers back; I wrote the first verse and the chorus and then I put it away. In the darkness of my desk-drawer it gathered strength and plotted its return to the surface. I revisited it after I’d decided to not have any guitars on the next album, and finished writing it on the piano, which accounts for the mild McCartneyisms of the changes in the bridge, which are things I can’t really do on a guitar. In the lyric, I imagine one of my teenage heroes, Andrew Eldritch, returning to the town where the band worked and played when they were young. His friends give him a hard time about ending up back where he started, but not because they’re mad: it’s good to see an old friend wearing the marks of time on his hands and face like well-loved tattoos. So shall it be in these times: your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions, and Andrew Eldritch, whose music has reached spirits in every corner of the globe, will move back to Leeds.”
Goths is due out May 19 on Merge Records.
Check out the single below, and learn more about the record at the band’s official site.
