The Mountain Goats’ frontman has a crush on Wichita. Now the band will play here.

John Darnielle, the frontman and guitarist for The Mountain Goats, has never brought his folk/rock music act to Wichita despite a career that has spanned 30 years.

Nevertheless, Darnielle says, he has a crush on Wichita.

That might sound like an opportunistic musician trying to sell a few tickets before The Mountain Goats make their Wichita debut this weekend, but Darnielle says his crush on Wichita is genuine.

“I guarantee you, you’ll be hard pressed to find somebody who’s more excited to play Wichita than me,” Darnielle said during a recent phone interview.

Darnielle, in addition to fronting The Mountain Goats, is also a New York Times bestselling author, and that career brought him to Wichita last February for a reading for his most recent novel, “Devil House,” at the Advanced Learning Library.

“I spent extra days there because I really liked it,” Darnielle said.

“There are cities in the U.S. I have big crushes on. Pittsburgh is one and Wichita is another. I told my manager ‘I’m coming back here.’”

True to his word, Darnielle will return to Wichita for a show at Wave this Sunday, although it will be a slightly abbreviated version of The Mountain Goats.

The four-piece band are doing a series of duo shows while they tour in support of their most recent album “Bleed Out.” That means the crowd will get Darnielle along with multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas.

But Darnielle points out that despite there being two fewer members of the band, the crowd might find they get a little bit more.

“The band show is extraordinarily energetic,” Darnielle said.

“But the duo show stretches a little more. When you have a drummer, the drummer is the driver. When you don’t, you can stretch out into some pretty interesting and deep spaces. I love to see where the songs go when we take away the other players and just let the two instruments explore.”

Changing the dynamic of The Mountain Goats is nothing new for Darnielle. He recorded his first album under The Mountain Goats moniker in 1991 and the list of musicians he’s played with since is extensive.

Musical acts with similar longevity are often case studies in bands that broke big out of the gate and used their initial success to keep working. The Mountain Goats however are a rare example of band that slowly built towards the success they’re having today, little by little.

“It was never about success in the beginning. It was about playing our songs for each other and having fun,” Darnielle said.

“My goal was not to become a working musician, I was a nurse when I started doing this. The first 7-8 years I was just honing my craft and having no real ambitions aside from having a good time. The only goal I had was to make good records, and that remains the case.”

After a decade of putting out low-fi albums, Darnielle’s project started to gain some traction outside of the California music scene he was entrenched in and The Mountain Goats were soon playing venues across the country.

“Over time, what I learned is, if you’re focused on your craft instead of your career, eventually you find the audience that is looking for what you do,” Darnielle said.

The audience this weekend, for the first time in the band’s history, will be in Wichita.