John Darnielle Quotes

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.

There's no such thing as mental illness.

We're all mentally ill and we're all haunted by something, and some people manage to find a way to ride it out so that they don't wind up needing extra help. So I think that "mental illness," as a term, is garbage. Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something.

People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.

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.

Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.

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

The only people who are afraid of file sharing are the people whose albums are so dull presentation-wise that nobody cares about owning the actual finished product, and the people who have so little connection to their listeners that said listeners have no reason to care whether the artists they like are getting reimbursed for their efforts.

I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.

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.

Normal adult shopping is something I will never actually do, because it's no more possible for me to go shopping like normal adults do than it is for a man with no legs to wake up one day and walk. I can't miss shopping like you'd miss things you once had. I miss it in a different way. I miss it like you would miss a train.

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling.

I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.

I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.

At 23, you can completely, literally reinvent yourself if you want to.

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.

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.

I crave music that'll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.

It's good to be young, but let's not kid ourselves/ It's better to pass on through those years and come out the other side/ With our hearts still beating/ Having stared down demons/ Come back breathing.

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.

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.

The process of touring is always so weird to me.

Once you've made the album, that's over, you move along.

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

People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.

When you know where somebody is, you know the most important thing about them.

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.

As an artist, you always have to be growing.

You don't just want to do what you already know people like.

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."

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

Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.

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.

I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.

[Robert] Aikman would write horror stories that weren't gore, they weren't slashers, and they weren't monster stories either. He called them ghost stories. The main thing about them was the vibe. It was really disquieting. He wanted to sketch the scene so that you could see it and know the characters and get a feel for the motion - and then ask yourself why and not get a final answer. Leave something that itches. I loved that!

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

While 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.

When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.

I think The Sunset Tree is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

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 always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.

My family, before the divorce, moved several times, and after that we moved a whole bunch more times, and so I don't have an anchor to a single place. Probably as a result of that, I'm a little more attenuated to when people do feel close identification to place, whether they say it out aloud or not. I think that there's a sort of local patriotism that is deeper than national patriotism.

For me, moving is always a big opportunity. Its just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

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.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

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.

It's a cliché 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.

Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.

May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.

There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.

Good things never last, bad things never die.