Mountain Goat

A joyfully eccentric loner who blazed his own bizarre trail.

Jonathan Richman is the ultimate unconventional path-finder — he invented proto-punk with the Modern Lovers, then deliberately walked away from it to play gentle, childlike acoustic songs about ice cream trucks and Pablo Picasso, indifferent to commercial expectations. He's famously self-sufficient and contrarian, refusing to use amplification, shunning the music industry's norms, and happily performing in tiny venues on his own idiosyncratic terms for decades. His entire career is a monument to doing things your own peculiar way, thriving in creative territory where no one else would dare to go.