John Darnielle Quotes
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Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.
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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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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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I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
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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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I am permanently a student of people who make great songs, but besides sort of learning by absorption, I just love listening to music, hearing what's going on, hearing new things or new old things.
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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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People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.
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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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My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
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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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It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
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I don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically.
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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 like to say how much they like stuff, but with 'The Sunset Tree,' people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff's so humbling and amazing.
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My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.
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I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.