John Darnielle Quotes

Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.

I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.

I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I dont feel everybody can connect to.

I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.

The fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.

I think listening to a lot of Lou Reed when I was a teenager is what encouraged me to just sing however felt good to me.

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.

In the present political situation, it's an interesting phenomenon to look at: what is the appeal of an autocratic leader? Why do people want somebody who yells at them? For most of us, that's so hard to understand. Who wants that? I think there are a lot of people for whom that fulfills some kind of need.

What I like is horror movies, including '80s slasher movies that politically I have all kinds of problems with. Which is an interesting balance, because I have this leftist puritan strain that, well, if you like something that goes against your politics, maybe you should train yourself not to like it. But I know that I like horror movies and that's what I watch when I get a moment.

Our [former] governor [Pat McCrory] was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.

There are real teachers out there; I don't pretend to have their mantle.

Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music "got bad" is infantile. The same is true with your life.

I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun.

A bands first albums usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.

It's impossible to be content all the time - you have to learn to be content in places where you're unhappy and owning your emotions, whatever they are.

People don't tend to notice, but in the past 10 years especially there's been a lot of growth in how I write songs and what goes into them. You can listen to Mountain Goats from 1991 to 2007 and never hear a seventh chord. In 2007 or 2008, I started working on the piano to grow as a songwriter. I started throwing major sevens in and sixes and more interesting stuff.

Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.

The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along.

I did a lot of music criticism. I don't think much of it was any good. I think I wanted to show off a lot when I was younger. Now I just want people to enjoy the story. If it were possible to publish anonymously, that would be awesome.

If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them. We go to countries like Germany, where I can't imagine that all of my fans are engaging with the lyrics first and foremost. I think they're catching a vibe, a feeling. I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back and telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

People will complain that they don't want to wait around for lightning to strike, but why not? If you invest yourself in chance, the potential for disappointment is pretty low.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

Men tend to dominate whatever public discourse they participate in, and another big part of feminism is to let women have their say. Men's voices can be welcome at the table, but there is a time and a place, and maybe it's now, for men to make a little less noise, make their needs less known, and listen to the needs of others.

This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you.

Books are like rocks. You hold one in your hand and look at it in various lights to get a sense of it, and then when you get a good angle, you throw it through a window to see what happens.

I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.

I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young, and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge.

My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.

If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It's not an intellectual process.

As important as politics are to me, the life and the spirit of people's emotions are much more important. People live real lives where they love and grieve and feel pain and joy and that is a whole separate sphere. All that political stuff, I believe in it strongly, but not as strongly as I believe that at some point you or someone is going to need a song to sit with and comfort them in a hard time.

There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them.

Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you're using words to express an angry feeling, you're already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.

People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?

It's easy to follow national politics and weigh in on social media, but if I'm tweeting stuff about Chatham County, no one cares.

It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.

[Dennis] Etchison would write stories that were just punch lines at the end. You wouldn't realize something horrific was happening until the last paragraph.

A novel is a performance you have to plan.

Good things never last, bad things never die.

I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.

There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.

Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.

I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years.