John Darnielle Quotes
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One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.
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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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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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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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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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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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Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.
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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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When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.
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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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I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
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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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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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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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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 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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I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.
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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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My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
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I don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically.
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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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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.