The Mountain Goats have a new album out. I’ve been a fan of the Goats (just one guy, really: North Carolina-based indie troubadour John Darnielle) for a couple years, on the strength of two searing, literate albums my brother Nathan introduced me to: 2002’s Tallahassee and 2005’s The Sunset Tree.

Dylan likes those records a lot too. “No Children,” Tallahassee’s bitter centerpiece about a failing marriage, is a particular favorite when it’s on in the car. It’s a little disturbing when Dylan asks to hear it, since he doesn’t know the proper title. “Can you play ‘I-hope-you-die-I-hope-we-both-die’?” Parents of the Year, right here!

For some reason, when Darnielle’s not singing falsetto, his warm, nasal tenor reminds me a lot of Kermit the Frog. So he’ll be singing about addiction, divorce, abuse, and heartbreak, and you keep thinking he’s going to break into “The Rainbow Connection” at any time.

So the night of the album release, Darnielle was doing an in-store here in town at Easy Street Records, and I’d never heard him live. Besides, in-stores are great for the not-getting-any-younger music fan. The band comes on when they say they’re going to, you don’t have to sit through three sucky openers, nobody smokes or drinks, the set wraps up in 45 minutes and you can get to bed on time, possibly with a signed CD. So I went. (Mindy wanted to go until she found it was at 11 p.m. Mindy is the not-getting-any-younger-or-any-less-pregnant music fan.)

It was a good show. Darnielle was playing a lot of the new album, Get Lonely, live for the very first time, which was exciting. Especially the song where he didn’t know all the chords to the bridge.

But I told you all that so I could tell you this: after one song (I think it was “Song for Lonely Giants,” but I’m not some crazy fanboy who went and stole the setlist after the show) a girl in the crowd yelled to the stage that it reminded her of The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. (Darnielle is a chatty, witty stage presence and likes to talk between songs.) Having just blogged about Calvino, I perked up my ears, in the desperate, reflexive manner of the content-starved daily blogger. This could be a blog post.

“I’ve never read Calvino,” he said. “But I keep meaning to.” And started strumming the next song.

So there’s your scoop: John Darnielle hasn’t read Italo Calvino. Alert the media. I blogged about it anyway.