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Welcome back to I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats,

the show about what it means to be an artist,

to be a fan, and to be both of those things at once.

I'm Joseph Fink.

I created the podcast's Welcome to Night Fail and Alice isn't Dead, and I also write books.

This summer I flew down to Durham North Carolina to talk with one of my artistic heroes, John Darniel, singer and songwriter of the band, The Mountain Goats.

This season we are going song by song through his 2002 album All Hail West Texas, an

album that the cover promises is about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a lock treatment facility for adolescent boys.

Today we will talk about the second song on the album, Fall of the Star High School running back,

as well as deciding what music to put into your body, mandatory minimum

sentences, and what the desert does to artists.

Each episode will also have a new cover of the song under discussion, today's cover is by local Durham band Lomlands.

We'll talk to Kim from Lomlands a little later on.

For now, we are sitting cross-legged on a mattress in John's basement.

Behind me are a row of old touring guitars in their cases.

On the shelf are boxes with masters of his old albums.

Scattered between us are notebooks full of handwritten lyrics. A water pipe near the microphones occasionally rumbles loudly.

Picking what comes after death metal band was a hard choice. And sequence is really important to me. It's like something I really, I labor a lot, but I don't put together a bunch of different ones to listen to as a rule because you wind up so deep in the weeds doing that that then you go oh these are so

...