The Mountain Goats Tallahassee on LP

Releasing music as The Mountain Goats in various permutations - first as a quintet, then as a duo, often by himself - the songs of default Californian John Darnielle generally dwell on one or a combination of five subjects: conflicts within relationships that lead to irreducible contradictions, food, water, the mythology of pre-Columbian Mexico, and animals that can talk. Since 1995, the general rule was for Mountain Goats albums to feature a mixture of home-recorded and studio songs, but that changed in 2002 with the release of All Hail West Texas, and also saw Darnielle signing to 4AD.

During their tenure for 4AD, the Mountain Goats recorded six fine albums which firmly established the group as a genuine cult phenomenon and confirmed John Darnielle's status as one of the finest lyricists of his - or any other - generation. The first fruit of this new partnership was Tallahassee - a complex song-cycle about an entirely fictional relationship - recorded in November 2002 in upstate New York with producer Tony Doogan (Mogwai, Belle & Sebastian) and released to acclaim a few months later. Tallahassee was also the first Mountain Goats album with an official single which came in the form of "See America Right."