Out digitally today, Songs for Pierre Chuvin is a brand-new album from the Mountain Goats and the first entirely recorded on John Darnielle’s infamous and indestructible boombox since 2002’s All Hail West Texas. The album is available for download or streaming on Bandcamp now, with more digital services to follow next Friday, April 17. In addition, Songs for Pierre Chuvin will be dubbed to 1,000 hand-numbered cassettes for its physical release on June 19; pre-order your copy now in the Merge store! UPDATE: Due to incredible demand, the first and second editions of the cassette are sold out. A third and FINAL edition of 2,000 will be up for sale on Bandcamp starting Saturday, April 11, at 3pm ET/12pm PT.

From the desk of John Darnielle:

SO THIS TAPE STARTED while the entire band was decamped at an undisclosed location working on the next Mountain Goats album, and I had brought books with me to read, and one of them was Pierre Chuvin’s A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, which I was reading as research material for another thing I’m working on; and it’s been a long time since I sat around playing music and thinking about antiquity, but I used to do it all the time, and several of you know that because the old tapes are all littered with stories about Ajax and Agamemnon and the cult of Cybele, stories which, when I was learning them, got me so fired up that as soon as I got out of class I’d drive home in my yellow 1969 Superbeetle and write songs about them. 

At our undisclosed location, one morning, immersed day and night in our work but also beginning to get the feeling that the increasingly febrile pitch of the newsfeed would continue to rise until it reached registers not seen in a while, I had a thought—what if the next Mountain Goats album was just songs about these pagans? And I wrote down the title “Aulon Raid.”

I GOT HOME about seven days later and the world was a very different place by then, and I took my old boombox down from the shelf where it sits flanked by brass deities from a former period of my life, and I got a wild idea to stand it on its end to reduce the unpleasant clicking that made it unusable—the hum & grind are one thing, basically ambient noise that adds to the pleasure of the sound if you’re into it, but the clicking I’m talking about developed sometime in the early 2000s and is not a conscriptable effect, it renders the Panasonic unusable.

Unless you stand it on its end, I learned, by accident, one day during the early weeks of the new days.

AS THESE DAYS WERE DEVELOPING, I realized, as I’d feared a week before, that the work schedule my band and I had planned for spring probably wouldn’t be panning out. The four members of the band split up our touring income equally, nightly pay & sales of merchandise; before we split up that income, we pay several people from gross receipts: Brandon, our soundman and tour manager of over a decade; Trudy, who works the merch table with style and flair; and Avel, who manages the stage no matter how unmanageable I become. I can’t do what I do without these people and I take great pleasure in trying to make their job a fun place to work. All seven of us rely on the Mountain Goats for our paycheck.

The boombox and I knew we had to do something. Back in the early nineties, when I’d first met Peter Hughes, I wanted to make a tape to be on his label, Sonic Enemy. It was Christmas break and I was on a hot streak, so I decided to try to make a full tape over the course of the break. That tape became Transmissions to Horace, which consisted entirely of work done on a daily basis during that span. I haven’t tried anything like that in a while.

I WROTE A SONG EVERY DAY for the next ten days while reading A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, starting with “Aulon Raid” and working in exactly the style I used to work in: read until something jumps out at me; play guitar and ad-lib out loud until I get a phrase I like; write the lyrics, get the song together, record immediately. Those original lyrics, exactly as written on the cardstock I save from comic books I buy, with corrections and everything, will be randomly inserted into orders; each is one of a kind, an original first draft of the lyrics to the first all-boombox Mountain Goats album since All Hail West Texas. It seems unlikely that I will ever again offer original drafts of lyrics for sale or otherwise, but pandemics call for wild measures.

I dedicate this tape to everybody who’s waited a long time for the wheels to sound their joyous grind: may they grind us into a safe future where we gather once again in rooms to sing songs about pagan priests & hidden shelters, and where we see each other face to face.

Hail the Panasonic! Hail the inscrutable engines of chance! Hail Cybele!

The Mountain Goats have rescheduled their spring tour for autumn; a full list of shows can be found below. For more updates, follow John Darnielle and company on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

The Mountain Goats on tour:
May 29 El Paso, TX - Lowbrow Palace*
May 30 Oklahoma City, OK - Tower Theatre*
May 31 Dallas, TX - Kessler Theater*
Jun 04 Bethlehem, PA - Musikfest Cafe at the ArtsQuest*
Jun 05 Woodstock, NY - Levon Helm Studios (SOLD OUT)*
Jun 06 Holyoke, MA - Gateway City Arts Center (SOLD OUT)*
Jun 08 New York, NY - City Winery (SOLD OUT)*
Jun 09 New York, NY - City Winery (SOLD OUT)*
Aug 28 Asheville, NC - The Orange Peel
Aug 30 Atlanta, GA - Variety Playhouse
Aug 31 Birmingham, AL - Saturn
Sep 02 Austin, TX - Mohawk (SOLD OUT)
Sep 03 Austin, TX - Mohawk
Sep 04 San Antonio, TX - Paper Tiger
Sep 06 Santa Fe, NM - Meow Wolf
Sep 07 Santa Fe, NM - Meow Wolf
Sep 09 Denver, CO - Bluebird Theater (SOLD OUT)
Sep 10 Denver, CO - Bluebird Theater (SOLD OUT)
Sep 12 Fort Collins, CO - Washington's
Sep 14 Milwaukee, WI - Pabst Theater
Sep 15 Evanston, IL - SPACE (SOLD OUT)
Sep 16 Evanston, IL - SPACE (SOLD OUT)
Sep 17 Detroit, MI - Royal Oak Music Theater (VENUE CHANGE)
* John Darnielle solo