John Darnielle
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
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.
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.
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.
Good things never last, bad things never die.Collection: Lasts
One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.Collection: Way
There are only two stories: either you go forward or you die.Collection: Two
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.Collection: Heart
When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Thinking
You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Able
Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.Collection: Stupid
People talk about songwriting or comedy as creative expression, but life is creative expression. Table-making, even nursing, is extraordinarily creative.Collection: Nursing
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.Collection: Art
I am at a place in my life where the more like a cave I can make my surroundings, the happier I am.Collection: Caves
You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.Collection: Giving
I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.Collection: Best Work
When all my friends insisted that they were feeling jaded, it struck me as an affected pose. To me, everything is always new.Collection: Feelings
May we all emerge from winter with our strength renewed and any unwanted pieces left under the ice.Collection: Winter
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.Collection: Comfort
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.Collection: Unhappy
Everybody experiences reality in a way that's only true for them.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Men
[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!Collection: Character
I make up stories that take place in real space with real people. If I could convert this into a technique for experimental novels, I might really be onto something.Collection: Real
[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.Collection: Writing
It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.Collection: Evil
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Real
A novel is a performance you have to plan.Collection: Novel
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. It's really a way of strangers communicating through this third thing, which is a body of work. But really, I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Jobs
I'm kind of a hermit. Left to my own devices, I won't submerge myself in anything further afield than the driveway.Collection: Kind
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.Collection: Want
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.Collection: Play
What's scary is the unknown, the stuff you can't put your finger on.Collection: Scary
Over the past 40 years, the tradition of Southern progressivism has been somewhat successfully erased by right-wing revisionist historians.Collection: Past
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.Collection: Divorce
The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they're not!Collection: Strong
My work is more important than I am. I'm just some guy.Collection: Guy
I always want to try and see what the appeal is in anything. It's the healthiest and most honest approach.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Cities In The World