This Year

Collected and annotated lyrics from one of music's most visionary bards, John Darnielle.

A work of rapturous beauty, This Year- 365 songs annotated celebrates the creative life and the musical genius of John Darnielle through his most meaningful songs.

From his early days recording on a boom box, through the evolution of the Mountain Goats from a solo project to a full band, to his continued influence on indie music, This Year pairs the definitive texts of 365 John Darnielle songs with first-person commentaries on his life and music. These commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them- his family and friends; his wife, Lalitree Darnielle; his longtime collaborator, Peter Hughes; and even his literary heroes, among many others. Here are the origins of 'This Year', 'No Children', 'The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton', and 'Up the Wolves', as well as Darnielle's literary influences, including Flannery O'Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King.

This Year, spanning decades, becomes the definitive literary record of one of the greatest songwriters and musical creative forces of all time.


Praise for Devil House-

'Quietly, as if stealing in on cat's paws, John Darnielle has become, as a novelist, unignorable ... His third novel, Devil House, is terrific- confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense ... It's never quite the book you think it is. It's better.'
-Dwight Garner, The New York Times

'Masterful ... Often tense, lyrically dazzling, and iced with a thick layer of irreverent affinity for the fringes of pop culture, the result is top-notch storytelling ... Suspenseful, brilliant, and chaotically addicting, Devil House triumphs as a page-turning metafictional treatise on the power of narratives cloaked in the trappings of a certifiable true crime classic.'
-Zack Ruskin, San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for Universal Harvester-

'A captivating exploration of the vagaries of memory and inertia in middle America ... Universal Harvester serves as a stellar encore after the success of Darnielle's debut novel, Wolf in White Van ... Beneath the eerie gauze of this book, I felt an undercurrent of humanity and hope.'
-The Washington Post