John Darnielle quotes:

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.

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.

I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.

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.

My feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There's a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you're doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal.

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.

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.

It's like fiction - 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. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

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.

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.

To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My father would tell me if I wasn't writing in meter verse, it wasn't poetry.

One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That's pretty intense.

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 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.

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.

People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.

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.

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.

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.

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

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.

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.

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.

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 don't have a favorite drink. I don't do favorites of anything, practically.

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.

Sometimes I do 'So Desperate' solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.

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.

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.

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

You can get really good reads on your dreams if you think of every character in them as actually being you.

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.

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

Wrestling's a form of expression, and it expresses vastness.

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.

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.

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 you're born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.

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.

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."

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.

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.

I write for a lot of places, so I'm on a lot of promo lists.

Do every stupid thing that makes you feel alive.

Your intelligence doesn't override your desire to destroy yourself.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Cat Stevens record isn't just Cat Stevens' ideas. It's Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'd played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.

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.

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.

I don't sit down and say I'm going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

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.

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.

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.

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 always worry that I'm a dilettante: I know something about lots of things but don't have exhaustive knowledge of much.

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.

My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.

To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.

Back in the '90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

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.

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.

I still can't manage to keep a journal, and people have been telling me to since the fourth grade.

People think of me as a nice person because, I think, I have grown into a nice person.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.

Good things never last, bad things never die.

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.

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.

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.

One way you can get really close to God is to sin as hard as you can.

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.

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.

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.

You should avoid seeing too much of yourself anywhere: in the outside world, in others, in the imagined worlds that give you shelter.

The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.

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.

People say friends don't destroy one another - what do they know about friends?

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you.

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.

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

People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.

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

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.

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

Back in the 90s, if you did mail order in music, you could make a good living doing it if you could hustle.

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 understand being idle; I don't have an idle setting. I probably should develop one.

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

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.

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

When I became conscious of being a person, when I was very small, I knew that I was from Indiana, but I had never seen Indiana. I was born there, but we moved when I was, like, a year old. I always had a sense of a place that was far away from where I was. I would research it and find out about it and I remember on Christmas morning I used to always call Indiana to find out what the weather was like; to see if it was snowing or not.

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.

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.

It's an important moment as a reader, I think, when you can forget the question of whether you need to know what happened. Some people really want hard explanations. I'm the other way. I like mysteries. I don't want to frustrate people. I don't want people to feel like they got no answers, but I want to approach the mystery and sit with it.

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.

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."

What's scary is the unknown, the stuff you can't put your finger on.

[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.

[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!