Dear John Darnielle,
Hi, it's me, Jason Diamond. I'm a fan. I go to your shows and awkwardly scream along to just about every single song. I hounded your publicist (Hi, friendly publicist!) to get me your newest album, The Life of the World to Come, for the sole purpose of being able to say I knew all the lyrics before anybody else did, and I promise I'm not going to turn into Kathy Bates in Misery or anything like that, but I have a simple request for you and I am hoping you will consider it: Make a fucking metal album already.
Okay, I didn't mean for that to sound like it's coming from an angry place, because it's not, it's simply a desperate man asking one of his favorite songwriters to do him a teeny-weenie favor. One that deep down, I think you wanna do. I read your scantly-updated blog, and you talk about metal. You write songs about metal fans, and seriously, J.D. (mind if I call you that?), that “Satanic Messiah” EP, I think you really fucked with my head a little bit on that one. Same thing with Heretic Pride; great fucking album, but serious metal name. I thought one of those was going to be The Mountain Goats metal album, but alas, nada.
So it's come to this. Your fans surely do not mourn the metal-less Life of the World to Come because it's a beautiful, heartbreakingly sad piece of work, but I am taking measures via a petition to get you to record a metal album, and I already have thirteen signatures!
That's right. One is from my family's rabbi, one is from the guy who serves me coffee. [One is from his Editor.] Also, I have created a Facebook group called “Ten Billion Strong to get The Mountain Goats to make a metal album” of which I am the only member, but I feel that this will change very quickly. I feel that with all the overwhelming public support I am going to muster up, you will have no choice but to make the heavy metal album of my dreams.
Thanks,
Jason Diamond
