Aha Moment: John Darnielle and Black Sabbath

Twenty years ago, just as indie rock started to be called indie rock, John Darnielle formed one of its great bands: The Mountain Goats. The New Yorker called Darnielle “America’s best non-hip hop lyricist”; his songs are moody, literary, maybe a bit navel-gazey. But Darnielle’s biggest influence isn’t Leonard Cohen or Nick Drake. He was, and is, a metalhead.
He got hooked as a kid, listening to his babysitter’s record collection. In Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” he discovered “the power of these monolithic, iceberg-sized riffs that lodge in your brain. Black Sabbath tries not to hit you in your libido. They hit you in your fists, in your skull.”
Darnielle admits that his own music “stylistically couldn’t really be further from heavy metal,” with its emphasis on lyrics. But he says Black Sabbath inspired him to make his performances similarly visceral. “Even though I work with words,” he says, “I’m always wanting to get to that level of poetry where when you say something it’s actually a physical event … a single physical, bright, burning moment.”
Members of Black Sabbath are reuniting at Lollapalooza this summer.
(Originally aired: May 13, 2011)
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Video: Black Sabbath, “Iron Man”