The Mountain Goats' 2011 album is called All Eternals Deck, which refers to an apocryphal tarot deck."The songs cluster around themes of hidden things and the dread that hidden things inspire," says singer/songwriter John Darnielle, "but also the excitement, the attraction, the magnetic draw that scary unknown hidden things exert." The band approached recording sessions for All Eternals Deck as commando raids on multiple studios with several producers. "We wanted to see how disparate seasons and moods and locations and producers would play out in the songs," explains Darnielle.