The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle Shares New Track Going Back To California
Friday, 18 March 2016
Written by Laura Johnson
The Mountain Goats' frontman, John Darnielle, has released a new song, Going Back To California, to raise funds for the Reproductive Justice League.
The song was recorded last year with Scott Solter and is about the plane crash that killed Ozzy Osbourne guitarist Randy Rhoads. It is taken from an album of songs that Darnielle recorded about Ozzy, which he says "will probably never see formal release".
Darnielle explained the reasons behind the release in a recent Tumblr post, which you can check out below:
Hey everybody, yesterday one of my teammates from the Reproductive Justice League emailed to see if I’d RT some stuff about the Bowl-a-Thon to raise awareness and funds. I can’t bowl this year I don’t think, my spring schedule is super hectic and I can’t keep track of where I’m supposed to be from one day to the next, but I wanted to help, so I told Twitter I’d finish this acapella tune I wrote last year and give it away for free if we could get the team up to four thousand dollars.
I didn’t get a chance to track the song today – the Mountain Goats, all four us us, were in the basement rehearsing from 10:30 ‘til 4:15, we have a tour coming up, gotta get up to speed. But I wrote to Scott Solter and I said, hey man, remember those songs about Ozzy and Black Sabbath we recorded last year, is it cool with you if I give one away? Because I have a whole crop of new songs now, the album of songs about Ozzy is probably gonna cobweb on my hard drive for a while. Scott said “sure” so here – link is in the song title, go ahead and click now – “Going Back to California”, a song about the plane crash that killed Randy Rhoads, which happened right in the middle of a tour.
I used Zippyshare to upload. I know nothing about this program except that a lot of people seem to use it to get songs out there, so there it is.
I’m very fond of these sad songs about Ozzy which will probably never see formal release, and am so happy to give this one a home in the world – I hope you enjoy it; the other song, the acapella-harmonies one, I hope to track on Saturday, but I am a dad to two kids, Saturday mornings can be hard times to get work done so it might be next week. Meanwhile, enjoy!
Credits: guitar and vocals by John Darnielle
driven into tape by Scott Solter
(I uploaded it as a wav, by the way – it’s 80 MB. when I get another minute I’ll convert it to AAC or something and update this post with the link.)
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