The Mountain Goats in solo and duo performance at Pomona College. In this film by Rian Johnson (Brick, the Brothers Bloom), John Darnielle performs The Life of the World to Come album on piano and guitar. Shot in the same building where, as an eight-year-old piano student and new transplant to Claremont, he performed Bach minuets for the state examiner, THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME film takes the songs from the album and restores them to their raw original states: skin, blood, and bone.
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT: “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.”
