When I was 18, a friend played me the Mountain Goats’ just-released 2000 album The Coroner’s Gambit, a gloriously uneven collection of noisy lo-fi folk songs recorded, largely, on a boombox. As we chopped breakfast-scramble vegetables in his Olympia apartment, I fell in love with the “band”—or rather, the occasionally accompanied songwriting project of John Darnielle—and their brief vignettes that hinted at longer stories, complete mythologies: characters living lives of isolated despair, in claustrophobic partnerships, wandering disoriented through the airports and back alleys of the world. So I was shocked when, in 2004, the sharply produced, autobiographical We Shall All Be Healed came out via 4AD and propelled the group to a sort of indie stardom. Though I stopped being a fan when the sound changed, to this day I still believe there’s no one who views or writes about the world like Darnielle. He’s a truly singular oddball, and I’m so happy that now everyone knows it.

by Joshua James Amberson