An Evening with the Mountain Goats

There are Mountain Goats albums that emerge from historical deep dives, vividly rendered autobiography, liturgical exploration, and modern anthropological study. Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan came from a dream. In May 2023, John Darnielle took to his phone in the middle of the night to document a title from somewhere in his subconscious. Because this is the Mountain Goats—a band known for avoiding the easy route, always challenging themselves to push a step beyond—Darnielle not only decided to complete this mysterious project but also to deliver it as a full-on musical that stands as the most conceptually detailed and musically elaborate project in the band’s ever-expanding catalog.

“I loved musicals when I was a kid,” Darnielle explains, “but I hadn’t really indulged in them that much until the last 7 years or so. And then we did Jenny From Thebes, which I called a ‘fake musical’ a lot… But this one actually is going for it.”

Produced by the Mountain Goats’ multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas, who also co-wrote several songs, the record is embracing, inviting, and overflowing with melody and orchestration that extends far beyond the boundaries of their past work. “My approach is more arrangement-based,” Douglas says of his role. “I’m trying to sculpt the shape of the songs with the layering of instruments that are suiting the song best… I am sometimes a bit of a maximalist with that stuff. Sometimes more is more!”

Drawing on the cryptic phrasing of its title, Through This Fire Across From Peter Balkan tells the story of a small crew shipwrecked on a desert island, where three surviving members—an unnamed narrator, Captain Peter Balkan, and Adam—are plagued by diminishing resources and apocalyptic visions. “The first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to,” Darnielle sings early in the album. “The next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night.”

These are tales of survival and desolation, brutality and tenderness, hard-earned wisdom and heaps of compassion, novelistic detail and shouted, wordless choruses that transcend language. In other words, these are Mountain Goats songs, further deepening a singular body of work now spanning over three decades. To match the conceptual heft of the narrative, the band’s core members—John Darnielle, Matt Douglas, and drummer Jon Wurster—are accompanied by bassist Cameron Ralston and crucial appearances from Replacements legend Tommy Stinson, harpist Mikaela Davis, and musical theater royalty Lin-Manuel Miranda, a longtime friend whose background vocals lend the songs an additional dramatic punch.

For all the new ground the Mountain Goats cover, they still play to their strengths. There are belt-along anthems like “Armies of the Lord,” whose stately slow-build seems designed to get hearts racing during their famed live show. There’s poignant storytelling like the hushed “Peru,” whose pastoral imagery offers a rare moment of respite amid the destruction. For the diehards, there are also crucial references to the band’s back catalog: The boombox-era deep cut “Lady From Shanghai” gets a belated sequel that will make you reconsider the stakes of its previous entry (and admire just how virtuosic this band has become).

As the story evolves from its opening overture—the first instrumental track to ever appear on a Mountain Goats album—the band guides us through the journey’s humble beginnings and the ensuing chaos, disappearances, and acceptance of fate. Occasionally, the writing feels as formalist and poetic as Darnielle, a National Book Award-nominated novelist, has ever achieved: “Lightly row but this much I know/The first thing you learn will be the first thing to go,” he sings in the brisk, catchy “Cold at Night.” In “The Lady From Shanghai 2,” the band sets a sophisticated groove that makes the ambition of its narrator feel precarious, possibly doomed from the beginning. “When I was a young man I sought out the sky,” he sings uneasily. Even within the record’s tight, chronological frame, Darnielle leaves space for interpretation, questions that linger after the narrative is over.

“That’s something that I like,” he says. “Details that, generally speaking, only I will know about. So you try to let the music evoke that very personal thing without it being a confessional song.”

Working at Dreamland Recording Studios in Hudson, New York, the Mountain Goats have crafted a record that matches the emotional vulnerability of their previous career peaks while filling up a larger space than ever. The performances are so compelling that it may take a few listens to notice the surprising textures they weave in—synth, pedal steel, fretless bass—and the bold new chapter it marks in the band’s evolution. As he was writing, Darnielle envisioned a stage set with a few key props—parts of the ship, pieces of kelp—as each character delivered their songs in the forms of soliloquies. In the closing “Broken to Begin With,” one such character surveys his surroundings, not to lament his own bad fortune but to honor the fact that, even for a moment, this environment managed to shelter him at all. This may be like a bleak story to tell, a common thread of Mountain Goats concept albums all the way back to 2002’s breakthrough Tallahassee. But it speaks to a vision shared by the narrator and, increasingly, the restlessly creative trio presenting his tale: “Nothing’s ever promised to anyone,” Darnielle sings in “Fishing Boat.” “Everything you get is a gift.”