It is a compendium of three decades’ worth of strange, startling, funny and often beautiful lyrics, each set accompanied by some sort of note or riff or explanation, each corresponding to a day of the year ... Thrilling ... It may sound as though This Year is of interest only to Mountain Goats obsessives...but Darnielle is good company for everyone. He is charmingly digressive, and his frame of reference is dizzyingly wide.
These entries unfold as essayistic meditations on the creative process, artistic influences, biography, and recurring themes—classical mythology, baseball, religion, divorce, and friendship. Together they sketch a loose history of the Mountain Goats, and though Darnielle resists calling this a memoir, an impressionistic self-portrait emerges.
The book offers a look into Darnielle’s inspiration and songwriting process, and the result is even more impressive than one might expect. An inspired project that’s far better than a typical lyrics collection.
