I suspect by the time the Beatles were writing the White Album, they didn't go, "'I Wanna Hold Your Hand!' I wanna play that!" It's like if somebody asked you to put on the clothes you wore in high school. Well, no. No!
John DarnielleI don't really have any position to complain about my job. Yeah, every job has its moments like, "Ah, you know, it's Wednesday." But I'm blessed. I love my work.
John DarnielleWhile writing is a mystical process, it's also work. 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.
John DarnielleTake dance music: I like enough of it and its history to be able to say a word or two about this or that record, but I'm nobody's authority.
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 Darnielle