John Darnielle Quotes
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I used to break three or four strings a night, and the show would be over because I didn't know how to change the strings.
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A song is fire. You react to it primally, instantly. You don't have to decide whether you like it, and you don't really have to sit down and think about it much after you're done listening to it. It really does run through you like wind.
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I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy.
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If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.
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I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.
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I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
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Wrestlers give their bodies to their work. I don't know if I like the word 'crazy' here. What I would say is there are people who have a different relationship to their bodies than most people.
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Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to.
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When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.
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I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
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It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
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For me, moving is always a big opportunity. It's just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.
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To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It's got value, and it takes your time, and it's useful to people, depending.
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Sometimes I'll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I'll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story in it, I'll try and tease it out and figure out where the story is going.
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My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
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I've written a lot about southern California, but I don't use the same characters. Leave the people in the songs in the songs, is my philosophy.
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Life is entirely unthinkable without any of the creative arts, and they're all a continuum - the force in question is creativity, not its mode of expression.
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People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.
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You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that's what walking through New York on a June evening feels like - you feel like it's Friday, and you're 17 years old.
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Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.
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My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
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Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.
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I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.
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My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.