So I love unicorns, and the thermals can crash at my place anytime, but my heart belongs to one and only one musician, and this man is John Darnielle.

No music creates such unabashed boyish glea in my heart as JD does, with his winnowing vocals and incredibly enthused style. I’ve never seen him not excited to just be playing music and singing songs, and even if he wasn’t - in my estimation - the greatest living lyricist alive (and yeah, bob dylan is still alive), that alone would make him my favorite artist. He is the kind of guy who has handled fame reasonably well, but would still be making music if he had to work his day job as a night nurse like he did in the early nineties. There’s one more thing that tells me he’s a kickass guy. But does johnny stop there? No. He continues to fucking rock by having the following: An appreciation for more music than I can shake a stick at, a larger vocabulary than anyone I know, a hilarious blog, a pattern of producing huge amounts of good music in a short amount of time, vegetarianism, a video of him talking about sophocles, an appreciation for when it is useful to utilize lofi production, and when it is not, the brilliance to be able to impliment both of them to absolute perfection (well okay even I have trouble listening to most of Hot Garden Stomp, but I’m young), and a down-right affinity for looking goofy in pictures.

Goddamn if he isn’t the only renesance man I know of. Anyways so obviously for my favorite videos, there were a lot of runner up Mountain Goats vids and well, you’ve probably guessed that I’m going to post them here.

Number three Mountain goats video that almost made it but not quite sort of:

Actually not a Mountain Goats video! This Aesop Rock video Coffee ft has three things I can get behind to begin with: Zombies, John Darnielle as a zombie, and zombie John Darnielle making a reference to one of his best songs (Going to Georgia). Aside from that, it’s an alright Aesop Rock song, he manages to be judgemental without being particularly preachy via not taking himself seriously. A couple of things that disqualified this song are the fact that Bavitz seems to have gotten fat, and that john darnielle doesn’t appear until the end of the video.

Video #2 isn’t actually a music video, but as a TMG fan and a Ancient Greek fan, I had to list it. John Darnielle was interviewed for this series and talked about Oedipus at Colonus, which was an album that i’ve actually heard (my professor played it for me).  I really like the idea of interviewing people like John Darnielle for such things, because they have very well formed opinions.

Video #1. Okay so there’s a party; john darnielle, peter hughes, and john wurster (drummer) are all brought in from being kidnapped and forced to play their (arguably ) most popular song. Can you imagine what the casting must of been like?