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John Darnielle was born in Bloomington, Indiana, during one of the state's periodic locust infestations. His family drove out to California in a blue Chrysler convertible with John, as yet unable to walk or speak, riding in the back. He spent most of the next twenty-odd years in and around California, buying Gun Club albums and weird Hawaiian guitars from a couple of blind brothers who ran a music store in a strip mall in Norwalk. This sounds like it must be a lie but, surprisingly, it isn't.
California's position as Last State Before You Fall Off The Edge Of The World looms large in Darnielle's songs, which he presently writes in Iowa, entirely landlocked for the first time since his infancy. Releasing music as the Mountain Goats in various permutations -- first as a quintet, then as a duo, often by himself and presently with bassist and multi-instrumentalist Peter Hughes (Nothing Painted Blue, Diskothi-Q) -- since 1992, Darnielle's songs generally dwell on one or a combination of five subjects: conflicts within relationships that lead to irreducible contradictions, food, water, the mythology of pre-Columbian Mexico, and animals that can talk. This list changes every time you ask him about it but the talking animals are usually in there. His early tapes on the Shrimper label were aggressively low-tech presentations, recorded on a Panasonic FT-500, a dual-cassette with built-in condenser microphone. Lots of people insisted on calling the stuff made using the Panasonic "4-track recordings," and trying to convince people otherwise has proven utterly pointless.
Since 1995, the general rule has been for Mountain Goats albums to feature a mixture of home-recorded and studio songs. Early 2002 saw the release of "All Hail West Texas," the first all-boombox Mountain Goats album since 1994's "Zopilote Machine." In November of 2002, "Tallahassee" finds Darnielle and Hughes locked in Tarbox Road Studios in upstate New York with producer Tony Doogan (Mogwai, Belle and Sebastian, Mojave 3, The Delgados) using great big pieces of equipment to conjure paranoid visions of a couple permanently on the cusp of divorce. The characters that populate "Tallahassee" (referred to by fans as "the Alpha couple" owing to the presence of the word "Alpha" in the titles of most previous songs about these two) are two people who are fairly well convinced that they were once in love but who have now stayed drunk so long that they're not sure of much else beyond the mutually destructive urge that continues to hold their house (a two-story affair in Northern Florida) together. The songs are dark; some of them are funny in a guilt-soaked sort of way; most of them feature either radios, outdated modes of transportation, or howls of anguish disguised as requests for spare change.
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