John Darnielle Quotes
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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.
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Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy.
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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.
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Songs are often character studies.
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I think, taking too long to work on a record, you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour, and I write, and I write.
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The best ones - Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It's not a thing he's selling here. It's real. He knows it's real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right? Wrestling is real. Those characters are real.
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I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.
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That's what I used to enjoy so much: Bringing a record home, having it arrive in the mailbox. Having the whole experience of hearing it as you're holding it and looking at it and reading the liner notes, if they're anything.
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Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.
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As an idea occurs to me, I'll either follow it or not, but I'm more instinctive than master-planner about stuff.
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I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that.
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I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.
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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.
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I got a promo of 'Nichts Muss' in what would have been 2002 or 2003 and fell totally in love with it after listening to it on an airplane that took me to Australia via Taipei and Kuala Lumpur.
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I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.
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'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.
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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.
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Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.
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A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?
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More and more, I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice. In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his style to really expressionistic places. It's a real pleasure for me to hear people pushing their craft.
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When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.
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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.
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Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.
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One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.