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The Mountain Goats on Reissuing ‘The Coroner’s Gambit’

The Mountain Goat’s John Darnielle ruminates on nostalgia, resurrection, and what reissuing ‘The Coroner’s Gambit’ means to him.

By Sam Tornow

2024
Folk Rock
Vinyl, LP
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For 24 years, The Coroner’s Gambit has been a thorn in The Mountain Goats’ dedicated fanbase’s side. Collectors of the prolific group likely had no trouble hunting down a majority of the discography – which numbers 22 studio albums alone – but this one has eluded them. Since 2000, The Coroner’s Gambit has sat untouched, with no new pressings, leaving prices to skyrocket.

John Darnielle, the group’s sole continuous member – and sometimes only member – never intended for things to be this way. When pressing the record, it was resources that limited numbers, not a marketing scheme to drum up interest in his band. So he continued making music, approximately an album a year, and plenty of tours in-between. Now, a year removed from 2023’s Jenny From Thebes, he and Merge Records have found time to repress it.

“This has been out of print for a long time,” says Darnielle. “People pay a lot of money for vinyl copies of it. And I don’t like the idea of somebody not being able to get one of these at a reasonable price. I didn’t foresee that when I was doing limited editions back then. The collector market is pretty bonkers now.”

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Honing a Voice

Although Darnielle’s decision to repress is tied to practicality, he’s since been fully invested and has found revisiting the record to be fruitful. 

The Coroner’s Gambit sits in an interesting place in The Mountain Goats’ discography. In response to a question on Tumblr, he noted that, “To me the songs start to get interesting around The Coroner’s Gambit, that’s sort of the dividing line for me.”

Following the record, The Mountain Goats went on a tear. The band released a string of acclaimed records. There was the humorous and human All Hail West Texas. Then came Tallahassee, a record chronicling an imaginary couple’s divorce. After that, Darnielle chronicled his memories of methamphetamine-addicted childhood friends on We Shall All Be Healed. Then there’s The Sunset Tree, which sees the songwriter grapple with his and his stepfather’s relationship. 

This collective of records form what could arguably be considered the band’s strongest run. And none of these albums would be as successful if it weren’t for the writing style Darnielle landed on during The Coroner’s Gambit. 

“I’m sort of establishing, for lack of a better word, a poetic voice,” says Darnielle. “I was finding the voice that I was going to be working in, which I had been doing for a few years at that point. When I go through the notebook that became The Coroner’s Gambit, the stuff that didn’t make the album is stuff where I’m not landing on a voice that I considered good or effective, but the stuff that did make the album is establishing what I would call a narrative voice or a poetic voice. That’s a moment in time for the Mountain Goats. Within a few years, I’d be headed off in a different direction.”

Personally, The Coroner’s Gambit also came out during a pivotal time in Darnielle’s life. Prior to the recording, he and his wife had moved to Grinell, Iowa. The two lived in a small house next to a set of train tracks for $275 a month. She had finished school and he had begun to question what role music would play in his life. At that time, there were four records under The Mountain Goats moniker. A big break hadn’t fully materialized.

“I’m always trying to discourage nostalgia, but at the same time engaging it sort of connects you to the sweet feeling of the distance that you travel,” says Darnielle. “The me who lived in cold Iowa… compared to the person who five or six years later made The Sunset Tree. There’s so many stations along the way. I can almost hear the record now as a listener.”

The Record as a Diary

For Darnielle, after 24 years, he can now approach the album with fresh ears. When comparing his life now to that of his life then, he likens it to reincarnation — he’s the same person, but he isn’t. With this new perspective, a few things stick out to him about the record. The most immediate is how aggressive it sounds. 

The Coroner’s Gambit is in The Mountain Goats’ “lo-fi era.” Darnielle recorded most of the songs with either a Panasonic RX-FT500 or a basic four-track recorder. The gear distorted the songs from what would otherwise be a standard singer-songwriter acoustic sound to something much more scuzzy and reminiscent of early DIY punk. This is most effective on the record’s driving opener, “Jaipur,” where the rough-around-the-edges tone energizes the song. It provides the opposite effect on the emotional 1-2 punch of “Shadow Song” and “There Will Be No Divorce,” where the lack of sheen adds to the biting intimacy. 

What also grabs Darnielle’s attention now is the window of time The Coroner’s Gambit allows him to step back into. During the recording process, Darnielle didn’t aim for perfection. The environmental sounds on each track are as much a part of the songs as his guitar. Since the recording took place at a hallmark point in his life, now Darnielle can revisit that era of his life in a way that would be impossible using studio wizardry. 

If you listen closely, you can hear the train on “Insurance Fraud #2,” a track about scorching the earth, and people, behind and running for a new life. During the recording process, the train had come by several times, forcing Darnielle to abandon takes. One time though, the train’s whistle matched harmonically with the key of the song, prompting him to leave it. Now, as he returns to the record, he hears his home, his memories, and the surroundings.

“I can literally hear the air of the house,” he says.“I’ve always struggled to keep a diary because when I read myself writing anything about myself, it sounds like I’m pretending to be interested. It’s like I don’t want to be talking about myself as a general rule, and at the same time, it’s good to have a record of where you were right, it’s good to look at it and go, ‘that’s who I was then.’ It’s healthy and satisfying, right? And the thing that’s nice with this is it’s an audio recording of that without me having to be saying, ‘here I am having a hard time today’ or something like that.”

While the band’s newer records are more polished, free of the limitations of the now infamous Panasonic boombox, that isn’t to say Darnielle casts off the recording style of that era. Instead, after revisiting The Coroner’s Gambit, he encourages other bands to embrace the artifacts and ambience so that they may one day return to their version of the $275-a-month home near the railroad tracks, where the future seems open, and a reset point has emerged. 

“One thing I recommend to other musicians [is this style of recording],” says Darnielle. “It is a document of a moment in my life. It’s this auditory memory for me of a house that no longer exists, of a person who existed in the house. I don’t think you can get those things from pictures or videos or diary entries or anything. It’s like there’s something about the sound that is special.”

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