The Mountain Goats’ In League with Dragons was produced by Owen Pallett and engineered by Matt Ross-Spang (Margo Price, Jason Isbell, John Prine). It was recorded by the Mountain Goats—songwriter and guitarist Darnielle, drummer Jon Wurster, bassist Peter Hughes, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas—at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, TN. Robert Bailey contributed additional vocal arrangements and strings were performed by the Macedonian Radio Symphonic Orchestra. Today, The Mountain Goats have shared the single “Cadaver Sniffing Dog,” ahead of the album’s release, out April 26, via Merge Records.

From John Darnielle;

“This album began life as a rock opera about a besieged seaside community called River send ruled by a benevolent wizard, for which some five to seven songs were written.

When I’m focusing on a project, I always distract myself from the through-line with multiple byways, which are kind of like mini-games within the broader architecture of a long video game. As I worked on the Riversend stuff, weird noir visions started creeping in, probably under the influence of Leonardo Sciascia (a Sicilian author, he wrote mysteries) and Ross MacDonald’s The Zebra-Striped Hearse, which a friend from Port Washington gave me while I was in the thick of the writing. I thought these moods helped complicate the wizards and dragons a little, and, as I thought about my wizard, his health failing, the invasion by sea almost certain to wipe out half his people, I thought about what such a person might look like in the real world: watching a country show at a midwestern casino, or tryout pitching for an American League team years after having lit up the marquees.”

The Mountain Goats
In League With Dragons
Track list for

1. Done Bleeding
2. Younger
3. Passaic 1975
4. Clemency for the Wizard King
5. Possum by Night
6. In League with Dragons
7. Doc Gooden
8. Going Invisible 2
9. Waylon Jennings Live!
10. Cadaver Sniffing Dog
11. An Antidote for Strychnine
12. Sicilian Crest