John Darnielle is best known as the mastermind behind the The Mountain Goats, a band that built a following for both the emotionally raw music and the literary quality of its song's lyrics. And Darnielle himself earned a reputation as one of rock's great storytellers. So it makes some sense that the songwriter's latest project is working with a bigger canvas, his new novel, Wolf In White Van.

The book tells the story of a horribly disfigured man, Sean Phillips, who runs a role-playing mail game out of his home. And the story adds a structural twist: it's told backwards. In a conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Darnielle talks about the similarities between him and the book's main character, about Christian rock, and writing in reverse.

Update: Since the airing of this broadcast John Darnielle's Wolf in White Van has been nominated for the 2014 National Book Awards for Fiction

Interview Highlights

John Darnielle on the different skill sets used when writing a song versus a novel:

For one thing, [with] a song everything is performative. A song for me, is an expression of a momentary feeling. I flesh it out more than I used to. My earlier songs were really like, "Here’s the thought I have right now and the single image of the 'petals on a wet, black bough.'" I want to get that out and be done with. But with a novel, you follow it and it goes a lot of ways. With songs, you write them quickly, for me they are about expressing something getting it from inside to outside as quickly as possible and make it good. It’s very seldom I’ll come back to a song more than once.

O why he decided to tell the story of Sean backwards and why the character plays role-playing games:

This went through so many drafts. At first it was narrated by a bunch of different people. Sean only had one chapter. I got the idea of telling it backwards when I was dealing with all these narrators. But then I wanted to stay inside this one person and learn more about him.

I got this idea for him to administer this game from the mail. A couple of his players really do try to play the game in the real world, and tragedy ensues. So we've got the double story of what happens to his two players and working back to what originally happens to shawn. Along the way we are told, Sean, as a kid loved music. Because of the ringing in his ears, he’s lost much of his music. It’s different once you get the ringing in your ears, your relationship with music changes.

On the parallel between his characters losing their music and his own struggle with tinnitus:

In 2008 my right ear started ringing, and I lost my mind. It was the most depressed I had been in my life. And I knew I had done it to myself. Although there’s a lot of evidence that if you're going to get tinnitus, you're going to get it if you listen to loud music or not. But I was a musician and I just got into this extraordinarily depressed mindset that said, "well, you're not going to be able to hear music right so you're not going to be able to make music."

I could not sleep. And I couldn't function. I was doing this thing, pacing around the house crying, because that’s what I was doing all day everyday. and I sat down at the piano, and I played, and I noticed it overrode or washed out the ringing. I would hear textures that I never heard before, and would reach me at an extraordinary deep role.

On titling the book Wolf in White Van:

There was a singer songwriter named Larry Norman. He was very important in the Jesus Movement. A really radical movement in Christianity, come as you are. He was a very good songwriter, but he couldn't get any mainstream success because rock equals counterculture. I got the idea of telling the story backwards because backward masking in metal stuff. I was researching and found a site that was not Christian, that said reverse speech was a function of your subconscious.

One of the examples was one of Larry Norman’s songs called “666” where he was supposed to be saying “wolf in white van” if you played the record backwards. And with Sean I share this, I love it when the thing they're supposed to be saying -- why would the devil want to say that? What’s the function of having said that? It’s like if I say to you “paint on large wall” I haven’t said anything you can do with. And in the “666” song if you play it backwards he’s supposed to be saying “wolf in white van.”