John Darnielle Quotes
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I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
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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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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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Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.
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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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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 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'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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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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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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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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When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.
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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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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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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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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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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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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.