It's a clichรฉ to state that one should think like a child, but it's clear that kids know something that the world tries to make you unlearn later in life.
John DarnielleYou can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.
John DarnielleI 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.
John DarnielleI grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me.
John DarnielleAs 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.
John Darnielle