Mountain Goats Do Record Store Day DVD

Check out the live video clip, below.

By Fred Mills

Well, you could certainly call this going above and beyond the call of duty. Most bands do a special 7" single or a vinyl edition of an already existing album in order to support Record Store Day (this year, April 20 at fine indie retailers across the country). Which is great! But the Mountain Goats are apparently going all out by issuing a live DVD.

According to the band's label, 4AD, 1500 copies of the film will be made available on DVD, titled The Life of the World to Come: A film by Rian Johnson and a song-by-song performance of the album of the same name.  As 4AD notes, "Shot with minimal cameras and with no allowance for retakes, John Darnielle plays through the whole album, switching between piano and guitar, resequencing the album's running order in the process while joined by a special guest for two songs."

Filmmaker Johnson's previous credits include 2008's The Brothers Bloom and 2005's Brick, and he also did the Mountain Goats' 2006 video for "Woke Up New."

The DVD will come with a "custom-designed" 12 page book featuring liner notes from Darnielle, who comments on the film below:

"Rian and I met when he shot the 'Woke Up New' video at his Little Italy apartment; I'd spotted a credit to a band called "the Hospital Bombers Experience" in the end-credits to his film Brick and recognized a reference to a song of mine, and I looked him up, and we hit it off. He's been listening to my stuff since very early on, and I think he really gets the kind of axis I try to ride when I write: a kind of meeting point between a primitive formal style & a naked, raw feel. So when I listened to the demos to this album, I thought, I'd like to play them that way, too, and have that playing captured somehow. And then there was a line "I saw some old friends as I came to the city gate" in a song that didn't end up on the final album, which made me think of going back home to Claremont and working with friends, and playing the songs in the building where I took the state exam for young pianists when I was eight years old, not long after we'd moved to Claremont from Milpitas. So I wrote to Rian & sent him the album & we bumped ideas back and forth until we settled on the idea of a single live performance with a few cameras in a private space and we got really excited about it, and in early August I went out there and we did this thing that I think captures a face of the songs that I'm unlikely to catch elsewhere: before anybody else has heard them outside of the people making the record, almost all of them being played in a non-studio-or-living-room space for the first time ever, no re-dos for mistakes, only a few cameras on us & circling us as we sing and play."

There will also be national film screenings starting later this month, while concurrently the Mountain Goats will be touring (the tour kicked off Saturday, in fact).

Screenings:

26th March New Brunwick, NJ - New Jersey Film Fest
26th March Bloomington, IN - Bishop Bar
27th March New Brunswick, NJ - New Jersey Film Fest
27th March Brookline, MA - The Coolidge Corner Theatre
1st April Bellingham, WA - Pickford Film Center
1st April Asheville, NC - Fine Arts Theatre (Presented by Harvest Records)
2nd April Tucson, AZ - The Screening Room
3rd April Washington DC -- The Black Cat - the Backstage
10th April Athens, GA - Aux Festival at Athens Cine
16th April San Francisco, CA - ATA Theatre
17th April Seattle, WA - Northwest Film Forum

Tour Dates:

13th March St. Augustine, Harvest of Hope Festival, US
14th March Orlando, The Social, US
8th April Auckland, The King's Arms Tavern, NZ
9th April Wellington, San Francisco Bath House, NZ
11th April Brisbane, The Zoo, AUS
13th April Sydney, Manning Bar, AUS
14th April Melbourne, The Corner Hotel, AUS
16th April Adelaide, Fowler's Live, AUS
18th April Perth, The Rosemount, AUS
31st May Sasquatch Music Festival, US
8th September Leeds, Brudenell Social Club, UK
9th September London, KOKO, UK
10th September End of the Road Festival, UK