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Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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And then I played some music, old music, and it sounded awful, and I loved it, I loved it so much. -- John Darnielle
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Metal has its own code of cool, but it's not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it. -- John Darnielle
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Who doesn't want to rise above the obstacles in his pathway? Who wouldn't want to go down in flames? -- John Darnielle
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People say friends don't destroy one another - what do they know about friends? -- John Darnielle
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My strongest hope is for a cameo as a band playing in a club visited by the detectives on 'Law & Order: SVU' during the course of an investigation, maybe during sound check, or something, so they can force us to stop playing while they question the sound guy. -- John Darnielle
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Here and there, alone, reflecting, I'd bump up against what felt like a buffer zone between me and some vast reserve of grief, but its reinforcements were sturdy enough and its construction solid enough to prevent me from really ever smelling its air, feeling its wind on my face. -- John Darnielle
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To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories. -- John Darnielle
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It's in the nature of the landscape to change, and it's in the nature of people to help the process along... -- John Darnielle
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Readings are more like weaving a tapestry. Possibly people are getting a cathartic release - but music is physical. Music pummels you. It's got a beat; it's loud. Whereas this is more cerebral. -- John Darnielle
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Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen. -- John Darnielle
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I pretty much just focus on making the records - unless I'm self-releasing them; then I do my own thing. But at some point, you have to stop worrying about chains of distribution, or it takes out of your time to write. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it's discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I'm at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature of survival strategy - you build yourself little worlds to enjoy. -- John Darnielle
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It's just being who you want to be, even if you are a poor kid making loud music
about being unhappy! -- John Darnielle
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I expected him to leave then, because it always seems to me like nothing ever happens, but something did happen: he began to back up. -- John Darnielle
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think I was inspired by a commercial for an old board game called Stay Alive. -- John Darnielle
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I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour. -- John Darnielle
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Younger songwriters will ask me, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, I worked a day job, and I didn't stake anything. I didn't quit my day job. I didn't have any hopes at all. I just did the thing that I believed in, and I waited a long time.' -- John Darnielle
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Forever is a question you start asking when you look at the ceiling. It becomes a word you hear in the same way that people who associate sound with color might hear a flat sky-blue. The open sky through which forgotten satellites travel. Forever. -- John Darnielle
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My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I wrote 'Lakeside View Apartment Suites' with Roman in my arms. He was about a month old. I was playing left-handed and finally handed him over. On the demo of it, you can hear him crying in the next room. -- John Darnielle
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I think the self is complicated, that at various times we are all various people, and wrestling actually does a lot with that. You have things like heel turns where a person goes from being a good guy to a bad guy. -- John Darnielle
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Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art. -- John Darnielle
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One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self. -- John Darnielle
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I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think. -- John Darnielle
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The more established you are, the less likely you are to do something ridiculous, which is one reason I'm proud to put out a wrestling album. If you stop and you go, 'Well, what if people don't like it?,' if you're already established in what you do, that'll strike fear into your heart. -- John Darnielle
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Good things never last, bad things never die. -- John Darnielle
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People want you to play the songs they know. I try not to reflect too much, and I don't really like to focus too much on myself. -- John Darnielle
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I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could. -- John Darnielle
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You get this really cool groove when you're playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone's sort of feeling each other's space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true, and everyone's sort of sitting in their own pocket. It's kind of jazz-like. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I'll go into my office or whatever. But that goes from format to format. -- John Darnielle
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I didn't feel like I'd really won anything, but I had come through the day no worse off than I'd come into it, which, as I have been telling myself for many years now, is a victory whether it feels like one or not. -- John Darnielle
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As an idea occurs to me, I'll either follow it or not, but I'm more instinctive than master-planner about stuff. -- John Darnielle
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This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when you hear them. -- John Darnielle
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Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,
Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent. -- John Darnielle
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But people underestimate just how starved everybody is for some magic pathway back into childhood. -- John Darnielle
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I just started writing stuff to kill time on summer evenings. This is why I'm always telling people who ask me what they need to do to succeed to give up, do something else. -- John Darnielle
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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 here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it. -- John Darnielle
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You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too. -- John Darnielle
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They were smoking cigarettes in the deliberate self-conscious way of smoking teenagers: -- John Darnielle
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No way of counting my blessings. No way for anyone to count that high. -- John Darnielle
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I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had 'The Sunset Tree.' It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest. -- John Darnielle
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My capacity for vanishing into whatever shadows happen to be around is a hard-won and precious skill. -- John Darnielle
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Most of 'All Hail West Texas' was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins of all the Xeroxed material. -- John Darnielle
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I get nostalgic about having lived in Ames, Iowa, even though being a vegetarian in Iowa is not fun. But I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world. -- John Darnielle
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I am heavy in his arms, and I feel safe there, but I am lost, and I need constantly to be shoring up the wall that holds my emotions at bay, or I will feel something too great to contain. -- John Darnielle
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The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you, and that you're standing in the doorway. -- John Darnielle
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Something I've learned being in this industry for so long is that if you want to work with somebody, call them up. Very few musicians have any illusions about genre boundaries. They are useful descriptive terms, but they don't really bind musicians. -- John Darnielle
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That's what pictures are for, after all: to stand in place of the things that weren't left behind, to bear witness to people and places and things that might otherwise go unnoticed. -- John Darnielle
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Some things are hard to explain to your parents. Some things are hard to explain, period, but your parents especially are never going to understand them. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it. -- John Darnielle
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I know there must be other navigable paths where either nothing happens, that night or later, or where, when the idea to just pull the curtain on most things and then on everything, just because crosses my mind, I let the moment pass, and I go to sleep like everyone else did on my street that night. -- John Darnielle
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I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better. -- John Darnielle
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You want the song to be at least at the same level of goodness throughout. Whereas with something you're doing live, a song dips and rises and that can actually be worked to the song's benefit. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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People like to say how much they like stuff, but with 'The Sunset Tree,' people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff's so humbling and amazing. -- John Darnielle
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I think 'The Sunset Tree' is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important. -- John Darnielle
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Sometimes I feel very young, and other times I feel like the side of a ship that's got a bunch of layers of mussels and barnacles on it. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I knew she wanted to ask what I was doing, but I had the advantage. Nobody liked to see me speak. -- John Darnielle
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I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway. -- John Darnielle
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Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear. -- John Darnielle
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I hope I get to watch porn with you, Abs?" he said, eyebrows up. "Am I hearing this right? I just want to make sure I understand what it is you imagine I'm thinking." She -- John Darnielle
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May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice. -- John Darnielle
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There are planets so far away from ours that no scientist will ever guess that they exits, let alone know the stories of their civilizations, their beginnings and ends. They're not being kept secret from us, but they're secret all the same. -- John Darnielle
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God is present in the sweeping gesture, but the devil is in the details. -- John Darnielle
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Anything that is within you is a gift. To be able to take possession of that and say, "Whatever it is, I am bigger than it," is to learn to cherish even the hard and painful things. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I grew up in Southern California, so the whole concept of a local music history is still kinda novel to me. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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You could hear, in the questions they asked and how they asked them, that there were right answers, things they wanted to hear. -- John Darnielle
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I'll tell you later" is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves. -- John Darnielle
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I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people's stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with me, I want to honor that. -- John Darnielle
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To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers. -- John Darnielle
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For me, fiction isn't very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it's a whole different thing - whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily. It can do emotional stuff. But they don't really compare - not for me. -- John Darnielle
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I was happy to know her in my small, formal, dependent way. And I felt a ravenous grief for nice boys who are too stupid to take care of themselves, and too dumb to remember to check the surrounding brush for snakes before settling down to sleep for the night. -- John Darnielle
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It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated. -- John Darnielle
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People bring you books, cheap paperbacks, when you're in the hospital: this was how I found out that I hate mystery novels. -- John Darnielle
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I couldn't name more than a couple of good drum'n'bass acts, and I have no idea what's big in the dance world right now. -- John Darnielle
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In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there's a real glee - a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it's just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that's very exciting. -- John Darnielle
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You learn to present dark things without including their ability to harm, treasuring them for what they are. -- John Darnielle
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Every place on earth has a frequency. It's not good or bad, it's just the way it is, and if you can attune yourself to that frequency, then you can find comfort in that. -- John Darnielle
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When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off. -- John Darnielle
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One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense. -- John Darnielle
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Well,' he said, 'we think you probably do.' When I imagine this scene as part of a movie, the minute of silence after my father says this is extended for an hour or so, and then the credits roll. -- John Darnielle
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Silos are the great hidden constant of the industrialised world. -- John Darnielle
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Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world. -- John Darnielle
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I was a huge comic book fan. It's weird because the era of 'Marvel' I was into turns out to be very important in the long run, but it's not the one that anybody romanticizes. -- John Darnielle
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I don't celebrate milestones and I don't do anniversary editions. It's not my style to reflect on accomplishments. -- John Darnielle
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In a movie version of this scene the driver wheels his glance abruptly to the window where a misshapen man stands watching it all unfold, and fixes me with a threatening look. That didn't happen. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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There is something fierce and starved about first ideas. -- John Darnielle
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For years, I've written narrators who aren't gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that's different, obviously. But I've always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man's thing. -- John Darnielle
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I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that. -- John Darnielle
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The age of empire had entered into the first gasps of its terminal phase. -- John Darnielle
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'Heel Turn 2' is about a person who's in a match, and he's playing as though the match were real. But it is real! If you're standing in the middle of a ring, and you're playing the villain, and everyone is booing and throwing things at you, that's real. -- John Darnielle
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I let the barren-void melody of his voice lilt its way through the inattentive chambers of my brain. -- John Darnielle
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I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously. -- John Darnielle
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The best ones - Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It's not a thing he's selling here. It's real. He knows it's real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right? Wrestling is real. Those characters are real. -- John Darnielle
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The better I get at writing songs, the harder it seems to be to relate to people. But when I get on stage, I'm extremely happy. -- John Darnielle
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My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode. -- John Darnielle
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Everyone in my orbit would have a terrible day: the arbiter of days has decreed it. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you. -- John Darnielle
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I had a funny feeling that day, all day: something about how much I liked my life and where I was with it. -- John Darnielle
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I will go where I will go
And I will jettison all dead weight
And I will use these words for kindling
And I will sleep by the garden gate. -- John Darnielle
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My parents' room is an uncataloged planet, a night sky presence unknown to scientists but feared by the secret faithful who trade rumors of its mystery. -- John Darnielle
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I was little the first time I heard the term "ghost town"; I fell immediately in love. -- John Darnielle
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A book is a journey: It's a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader's experience of a book is going to be different. -- John Darnielle
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It had a soundtrack. All screams. -- John Darnielle
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At my high school, there were always kids carrying acoustic guitars around, which is why I named my band the Mountain Goats. I didn't want to seem like one of those guys who brought his guitar to the party whether you asked him to or not. -- John Darnielle
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Metal isn't necessarily aggressive. There's metal that's contemplative, there's metal that's sad, and there's metal that's exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express. -- John Darnielle
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I don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically. -- John Darnielle
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I know the Bible pretty well. I'm not one of those guys who can immediately start quoting every book, but usually I know where to look to find certain themes. -- John Darnielle
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The way the vocal folds work is that they can get inflamed and in pain, but actual tears in the folds are somewhat rare. I've never torn anything. Been too strained plenty of times. -- John Darnielle
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Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill. -- John Darnielle
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Not everybody wants to get out and see the world. Nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you just want to figure out how to fit yourself into the world you already know. -- John Darnielle
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Not everybody relates to pain, but if you can watch other people playacting it, you can absorb some of that vibe. It's like watching horror movies - you want to have the experience, but in a safe environment. -- John Darnielle
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I think I am a religious person just by nature. I think I sort of view everything through the lens of some inner undying thing in people that drives them to act as they do or to feel ashamed of not acting in some other way. -- John Darnielle
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I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much. -- John Darnielle
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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 Darnielle
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It makes me envious of anybody who can say truly that they don't care what anybody thinks of what they do, because I care a lot about the people who like my stuff. -- John Darnielle
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Just Tits over and over. During tests it sounded like a forest at night in the classroom. Voices rising singly or several at a time from the focused quiet. Tits. Tits. Titssss. -- John Darnielle
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My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn't yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly -- John Darnielle
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I wish they'd conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn't. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there are. -- John Darnielle
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The more I learn about stuff the more conscious I become of grave gaps in my knowledge. -- John Darnielle
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I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists. -- John Darnielle
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Songs are often character studies. -- John Darnielle
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The process of touring is always so weird to me. Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along. -- John Darnielle
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Maybe every other band in the world has more brains and deeper meaning, but only Black Sabbath sounds like exactly what my friends and I might have done if we'd had the equipment. -- John Darnielle
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When you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you. -- John Darnielle
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I used to assume no one would care, but I do think now I've written songs that are useful to people having dark hours. -- John Darnielle
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I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That's kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I'm not about to go around telling people how they should or shouldn't think. My feminism is for me. -- John Darnielle
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Life is hard, you're tired, and there's disease. The strategy that works for children is to be delighted by the things that delight you. -- John Darnielle
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I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you. -- John Darnielle
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It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs. -- John Darnielle
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I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection. -- John Darnielle
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Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right? -- John Darnielle
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There's this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that. -- John Darnielle
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Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are. -- John Darnielle
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Wrestling's a form of expression, and it expresses vastness. -- John Darnielle
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I imagined a quiet future in an imaginary world where nothing ever really happened but everything seemed charged with life. -- John Darnielle
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And I started to say "fine," and I meant to say "fine," but I ended up saying that I felt my life was filled like a big jug to the brim with almost indescribable joy, so much that I hardly knew how to handle it. -- John Darnielle
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I don't even want to be rich I just want to be alone. -- John Darnielle
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There's the dual challenge of wanting to speak from an authentic place, and then being able to be honest about it. Even in the most mannered art, I think that's what people value, is a voice that comes from a real place. -- John Darnielle
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I crave music that'll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there. -- John Darnielle
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Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don't feel everybody can connect to. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, 'Well, here's what I've been doing.' And that would be it. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative. -- John Darnielle
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The moment where you know the thing you want is ridiculous and pompous and a terrible thing to want anyway. The direction in which you're headed is not the direction you want to go, yet you're going to head that way a while longer cause that's just the kind of person you are. -- John Darnielle
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I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there. -- John Darnielle
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When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are -- John Darnielle
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I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am. -- John Darnielle
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To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded. -- John Darnielle
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I think youth will always be connected to the strongest music at the time because ... I don't want to use the word 'tribal,' but there was this sort of familial affiliation that people would feel with the music they were listening to. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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A song is fire. You react to it primally, instantly. You don't have to decide whether you like it, and you don't really have to sit down and think about it much after you're done listening to it. It really does run through you like wind. -- John Darnielle
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I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was. -- John Darnielle
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I don't write my own publicity materials, I just read 'em and give 'em the OK. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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I still can't manage to keep a journal, and people have been telling me to since the fourth grade. -- John Darnielle
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The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens. -- John Darnielle
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From a very young age, I was the kind of kid you can just put anywhere and I'd still find stuff to be stoked about. -- John Darnielle
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I take the knife and stab myself in the neck. I bleed out on top of the fortune-teller's grave and then I'm dead and that's my game. I am OK and I'll be OK but this is the end and this is my story. CH. -- John Darnielle
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I'm sort of a cavedweller: I miss my house, my yard, my kitchen, my wife. The trees. When I get home, I like to get down into my office neighborhood as soon as I can. -- John Darnielle
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Working efficiently while a movie played was second nature to her by now, more comfortable than silence. -- John Darnielle
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The reality of having a kid involves day-to-day practicality - not broader philosophical outlooks. -- John Darnielle
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I am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea - I put other things aside. -- John Darnielle
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I come from Chino, so all your threats are empty. -- John Darnielle
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A band's first album's usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it. -- John Darnielle
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I still get really excited looking at stuff that I've seen every day for 20 years. -- John Darnielle
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When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new. -- John Darnielle
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It isn't really much of a mystery, this occasional need I have to comfort my father. I did something terrible to his son once. -- John Darnielle
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I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids. -- John Darnielle
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Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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Cool parents, I thought, are the ones who know nothing. It made me feel a little sad for mine, but I didn't say any of this. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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If I go see a band, and they play, like, zero from any of their old albums, I'm very happy about that. I do not want to see the bands of my youth playing the songs of my youth. I hate that. -- John Darnielle
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I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records. -- John Darnielle
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Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them. -- John Darnielle
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They don't know they have expectations, but I show them by counterexample what their expectations were. -- John Darnielle
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You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter. -- John Darnielle
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I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it. -- John Darnielle
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When you punish a person for dreaming his dream
Don't expect him to thank or forgive you. -- John Darnielle
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I watched 'Fame,' and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone. -- John Darnielle
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I just started going to shows. I don't know how submerged I am: I feel guilty that I don't get out more, but I really like being inside the house. -- John Darnielle
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Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song. -- John Darnielle
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I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die. -- John Darnielle
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A farmhouse has a way of feeling both timeless and impermanent without ever committing to either side. -- John Darnielle
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My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy. -- John Darnielle
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It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other. -- John Darnielle
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My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry. -- John Darnielle
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There are new monsters now. -- John Darnielle
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I think, taking too long to work on a record, you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it's just this manic phase where I'm by myself and or on tour, and I write, and I write. -- John Darnielle
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I don't like to say, "Oh, I don't like this kind of music." I like to listen to it and try to see what people who like it get out of it. -- John Darnielle
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I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, "I will never let that happen to you." -- John Darnielle
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I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach. -- John Darnielle
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Take 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 Darnielle
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People think of me as a nice person because, I think, I have grown into a nice person. -- John Darnielle
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Either inventing internal worlds or having no world at all to inhabit, -- John Darnielle
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I didn't have a whole lot of friends anyway, so I didn't feel abandoned so much as reminded. -- John Darnielle
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It's hard to overstate how deep the need can get for things to make sense. -- John Darnielle
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There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge. -- John Darnielle
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Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic. -- John Darnielle
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I think wrestling is the one that presents theater for people who want to see some theater but don't necessarily have to dress up or be quiet while they're watching. -- John Darnielle
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Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle. -- John Darnielle
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At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to. -- John Darnielle
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That's what I used to enjoy so much: Bringing a record home, having it arrive in the mailbox. Having the whole experience of hearing it as you're holding it and looking at it and reading the liner notes, if they're anything. -- John Darnielle
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Who knows the secrets of anybody's heart. -- John Darnielle
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My son, who sees me almost every day of his life, will look at me and go, "I know that dude! I like that dude!" It's incredibly affirming. -- John Darnielle
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It is hard to leave home, and sometimes it takes a long time. * -- John Darnielle
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For reasons that seem obvious to me, I don't believe in happy endings or even in endings at all, but I am as susceptible to moments of indulgent fantasy as anybody else. -- John Darnielle
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I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out. -- John Darnielle
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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. -- John Darnielle
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Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive. -- John Darnielle
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One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can. -- John Darnielle
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As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don't just want to do what you already know people like. -- John Darnielle
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People trying to help you when you're past help are raw and helpless. Nobody wins: you get nothing; they feel worse. -- John Darnielle
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When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along. -- John Darnielle
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It's not that nobody ever gets away: that's not true. It's that you carry it with you. It doesn't matter that the days roll on like hills too low to give names to; they might be of use later, so you keep them. You replay them to keep their memory alive. It feels worthwhile because it is. -- John Darnielle