This Year: 365 Songs Annotated

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. (Dec.)