Howdy folks!

I’ll keep this short this time around since I’m already running behind.

From November, I loved a supersized magazine feature (Grayson Haver Currin on John Darnielle), a very short memoir (Tom Piazza on John Prine), and a wonderful scene report on Hallogallo in Chicago by Leor Galil.

Find some time, click through, and read!

At Length with John Darnielle

Grayson Haver Currin’s profile of Mountain Goat’s singer and songwriter John Darnielle is an epic. Clocking in around 14,000 words, it’ll require ample time to sit down and read it, but it represents one of the most complete accountings of what makes Darnielle one of a kind. Additionally, this is some of the first insight into The Mountain Goats in the post-Peter Hughes era.

Darnielle has released a new studio album, a new live album, a remaster of a beloved classic, and a new book detailing 366 of his songs and all of this sets up Currin to dig into any and all of Darnielle’s history. By stitching together scenes from the most recent Mountain Goats tour, details from the past, and Darnielle’s musings on a number of topics, Currin emphasizes what has made Darnielle’s career so impactful.

At his absolute and frequent best, Darnielle links enough key details within a few lines for you to picture a whole vivid world—of disaster, of love, of pro wrestlers pulling pieces of steel out of their skivvies to gouge a competitor in the face—and offers the kind of lyrical slogans that become mantras, tattoos, credos that can keep you warm, maybe even alive.

Scene Report

“What happens when a teen rock scene grows up?” by Leor Galil in the Chicago Reader is exactly the type of local, scene-level reporting that I love and wish there was more of.

The subject here is the Hallogallo scene in Chicago - Horsegirl, Friko, and Lifeguard among its most well-known acts. This piece isn’t just a compendium of bands and connections (although it does helpfully do that), it also documents all the things that make the scene work. If you were looking for a guide on how to make your own local scene, you could take a lot of inspiration from this piece.

“Chicago has the most exciting young scene in the midwest right now, by far,” says Good Flying Birds bandleader Kellen Baker. “The biggest volume of people doing not just really amazing music but all the extracurricular things that make a scene work, like photography, zines, booking shows—it’s all happening there in a bigger way than it is anywhere else.”

Book of the Month: Living in the Present with John Prine by Tom Piazza

Tom Piazza’s short remembrance of John Prine is unique. It was intended to be Prine’s memoir, but Piazza and Prine started the process in February 2020 and were only able to complete a few interviews before Prine’s death during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Instead of getting a full picture of Prine’s biography, we get a loving snapshot (in fewer than 200 pages) of Piazza’s brief, but meaningful, friendship with Prine. Their friendship lasted just the last two years of Prine’s life, but this is a case where the end can tell the whole story. Prine and Piazza indulged in many of Prine’s favorite things - old cars, old diners, old stories, and making music together - and through these interactions you can understand why Prine is so beloved.

The book alternates between Piazza’s personal stories and the few transcriptions of Prine’s final interviews so there is still a bit of traditional memoir. Piazza also conducted one of the final interviews with John’s brother Dave before his passing. What it lacks in detail, the book makes up for in feeling. Besides Prine’s music, I don’t think there’s anything other there that captures his spirit as well as this book.

Bonus Links

• Niko Stratis, whose excellent The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman was featured earlier this year, writes about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” for her newsletter. It feels like a bonus scene from the bookk.

• An excerpt from Elizabeth Nelson’s excellent liner notes for the deluxe edition of The Replacements Let It Be, recently recently by Rhino.

Thank you for reading! See you next month! On time!

Justin Anderson-Weber