John Darnielle gathers decades of songwriting into ‘This Year: 365 Songs Annotated,’ a hardcover collection pairing lyrics with first-person commentary. Illustrated by John Keogh, the book presents 365 songs with reflections on their origins, influences, and the people who shaped them.
Spanning Darnielle’s earliest boom-box recordings through the evolution of The Mountain Goats into a full band, the collection documents a creative life in motion. Each annotation offers context — where the song came from, who it was written for, and what was happening at the time. Family, friends, collaborators, and literary heroes all surface in the margins.
Readers will find insight into songs like “This Year,” “No Children,” “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton,” and “Up the Wolves,” alongside commentary on the writers who influenced him, including Flannery O’Connor, Jorge Luis Borges, and Stephen King. The result is part lyric archive, part memoir, part craft study.
‘This Year’ stands as a detailed literary record of one of indie music’s most prolific voices — not just a compilation of songs, but an examination of how they came to exist and why they continue to resonate.