When the Mountain Goats play in Portland, it always feels a little bit like a hometown show. Frontman John Darnielle spent just a year of his adult life here, in 1985, during the period that inspired the 2004 album We Shall All Be Healed , a semi-autobiographical chronicle of drug addiction, bad decisions, and the grief that follows. During the period that inspired that album, Darnielle says over Zoom, he was using both heroin and meth. But only did the former once in Portland—here he pauses to ask me if I have triggers around substance abuse (“I’m just making sure, because it gets intense sometimes”). He turned to meth for the rest of his year in Portland, in part because there was so much of it available.

“The songs that feel speedier, those are the Portland songs,” Darnielle says. “T

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