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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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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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 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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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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I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
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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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Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.
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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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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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My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
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My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.
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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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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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I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.