John Darnielle
North Carolina was on the vanguard of being for [ trans rights ], and that's why we're seeing this push back. The conservatives noticed that there had been a lot of progress and they tried to tamp it down.Collection: Rights
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. And I send them to the guys, and we start planning our studio ventures.Collection: Writing
As 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.Collection: Song
Young people like to feel self-righteous, like they're on the right side of things.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Disappointment
People say friends don't destroy one another. What do they know about friends?Collection: People
The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.Collection: Song
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.Collection: Teenager
What's funny is that people think, "Well there has to be something more than wrestling, because wrestling has such an absurd quality to it." But if you tell a love story, people don't ask what else is in there. They say, "Oh, it's just a love story." All stories have many levels, but these ones show their hand and say, "You might want to look a little deeper."Collection: Wrestling
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.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Wise
There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.Collection: Ideas
Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.Collection: People
There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.Collection: Giving
When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.Collection: Book
The possibility of disaster remains horrific to me. Like when you know everything's about to go wrong in a way that's not controllable or knowable.Collection: Way
I worked the AV counter at the Roland Heights public library in the '80s. My best story from the library was the time a couple asked for a recommendation, and I recommended Raising Arizona and they absolutely hated it. They came back hungry for blood. I was on my lunch break and my boss came out and said, "Hey kid, you need to come talk to these people. They totally hate Arizona." And he said, "Arizona's a dog; nobody gets that movie."Collection: Dog
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.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Summer
Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Thinking
I don't write my own publicity materials, I just read 'em and give 'em the OK.Collection: Writing
I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.Collection: Goal
Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear.Collection: Giving Up
I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.Collection: Kids
I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.Collection: Ideas
I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.Collection: Thinking
This is the funny thing about me. People think John just comes up with all the ideas. I'm honored. People think I have a big old brain, but actually I am the sum of the people I work with.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Song
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!Collection: Writing
I 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.Collection: Book
When you know where somebody is, you know the most important thing about them.Collection: Important
In the present political situation, it's an interesting phenomenon to look at: what is the appeal of an autocratic leader? Why do people want somebody who yells at them? For most of us, that's so hard to understand. Who wants that? I think there are a lot of people for whom that fulfills some kind of need.Collection: Thinking
I don't understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.Collection: Should
I always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much. 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. 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.Collection: Couple
I like a lot of hardcore, but it's just a genre about which I don't have much to say. It's kind of a thing where, unless you're active in the hardcore community, what could you have to say of value about it? It resists criticism because it's not just a style but an entrance into several different worlds of ideas- political, philosophical, societal. The music is really only part of the whole scene. In that sense, the music doesn't change much because it shouldn't: It needs to be there as a signal that you're entering into a certain discursive mode, maybe.Collection: Philosophical
You're not really going to know what a place is like 'til you've lived there a few years - you sort of just have to go with your gut.Collection: Guts
What I like is horror movies, including '80s slasher movies that politically I have all kinds of problems with. Which is an interesting balance, because I have this leftist puritan strain that, well, if you like something that goes against your politics, maybe you should train yourself not to like it. But I know that I like horror movies and that's what I watch when I get a moment.Collection: Interesting
I 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.Collection: Jobs
I did a lot of music criticism. I don't think much of it was any good. I think I wanted to show off a lot when I was younger. Now I just want people to enjoy the story. If it were possible to publish anonymously, that would be awesome.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Media
Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.Collection: Years
Our [former] governor [Pat McCrory] was supposed to be a moderate, but he found himself beholden to people who have much more draconian ideas. I think he assumed this stuff flew under the radar.Collection: Thinking
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."Collection: Children
There are real teachers out there; I don't pretend to have their mantle.Collection: Teacher
There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.Collection: Prayer
I'm so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.Collection: Rocks
I was 14 or 15 when I discovered poetry, and I pretty much stopped writing prose until Master of Reality.Collection: Writing
I wrote short stories when I was a teenager, but they weren't any good and I kinda knew it.Collection: Teenager