13 January 2026
Call me a sucker, but I bought (and am enjoying) John Darnielle’s book of lyrics he published recently called This Year.
The central figure, the constant, the songwriter, John is the brains behind a little band called The Mountain Goats—a man and a band who’ve been with me since college.
It all started with a song called “Going to Georgia.”
My good pal Nate Newland, who I’ve written about at length in other places (see a long-ago book called The Road Continues that’s no longer in print), he called me up one day to tell me about the song: “It’s unbelievable, Trav. It’s poetry. It’s powerful. And you need to listen to it now.”
The rest is history.
This Year is what John calls a “book of days”—a large book chockfull of his own insights and backstories for 365 songs from over thirty years of writing.
It’s a mammoth of a book and undertaking, one that sounds fun as hell to tackle. To look back. To remember.
And the way I see it, here’s what John’s doing: He’s placing lyrics that now live in a big way out in the world back within the context of where they were first born.
Which, again, sounds fun as hell. To write. And to read.
This Year is a unique project—and a curious one, too.
I don’t see Bob Dylan attempting something like this (though I would love to see him try).
It takes a certain kind of artist to make a book like This Year—to even fathom it. And I don’t think Bob is it.
Bob lives in the unknown somewhere alone by himself too much. In the mystery. His sources and contexts are a secret lifetime of listening to music and absorbing art: a mercurial process that’s hard to pin down and place in any real way.
And though I think John would probably say the very same thing for himself and his writing, the difference is that John can still see the value and the pleasure in an annotated book of one’s own lyrics.
Whereas Bob, I don’t think, would ever give a hoot. He’s always been too far gone. Always in the weeds of some next move.
“She’s got everything she needs,” he sings on Bringing It All Back Home. “She’s an artist. She don’t look back.”
Who that she is…
Well, Bob is never going to tell us that, is he?
Writing from Here 