John Darnielle Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.
-
One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.
-
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.
-
I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.
-
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.
-
It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.
-
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.
-
My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.
-
My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.
-
I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.
-
People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.
-
I don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically.
-
My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.
-
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.
-
I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.