-
This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them.
John Darnielle -
At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.
John Darnielle
-
I still can't manage to keep a journal, and people have been telling me to since the fourth grade.
John Darnielle -
I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had 'The Sunset Tree.' It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest.
John Darnielle -
I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.
John Darnielle -
Metal has its own code of cool, but it's not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it.
John Darnielle -
Something I've learned being in this industry for so long is that if you want to work with somebody, call them up. Very few musicians have any illusions about genre boundaries. They are useful descriptive terms, but they don't really bind musicians.
John Darnielle -
Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.
John Darnielle
-
I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.
John Darnielle -
At my high school, there were always kids carrying acoustic guitars around, which is why I named my band the Mountain Goats. I didn't want to seem like one of those guys who brought his guitar to the party whether you asked him to or not.
John Darnielle -
I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, 'Well, here's what I've been doing.' And that would be it.
John Darnielle -
It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.
John Darnielle -
The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy.
John Darnielle -
I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.
John Darnielle
-
I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours.
John Darnielle -
The way the vocal folds work is that they can get inflamed and in pain, but actual tears in the folds are somewhat rare. I've never torn anything. Been too strained plenty of times.
John Darnielle -
For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing.
John Darnielle -
I wrote 'Lakeside View Apartment Suites' with Roman in my arms. He was about a month old. I was playing left-handed and finally handed him over. On the demo of it, you can hear him crying in the next room.
John Darnielle -
There's the dual challenge of wanting to speak from an authentic place, and then being able to be honest about it. Even in the most mannered art, I think that's what people value, is a voice that comes from a real place.
John Darnielle -
If I go see a band, and they play, like, zero from any of their old albums, I'm very happy about that. I do not want to see the bands of my youth playing the songs of my youth. I hate that.
John Darnielle
-
Wrestling's a form of expression, and it expresses vastness.
John Darnielle -
'Heel Turn 2' is about a person who's in a match, and he's playing as though the match were real. But it is real! If you're standing in the middle of a ring, and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real.
John Darnielle -
A band's first album's usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.
John Darnielle -
My strongest hope is for a cameo as a band playing in a club visited by the detectives on 'Law & Order: SVU' during the course of an investigation, maybe during sound check, or something, so they can force us to stop playing while they question the sound guy.
John Darnielle