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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.

John Darnielle

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John Darnielle
Age: 57
Born: 1967
Born: March 16
Composer
Musician
Singer-Songwriter
Bloomington
Indiana
Brain
Think
Actually
Thinking
Funny
People
Bigs
Comes
Ideas
Honored
Thing
John
Work

More quotes by 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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It's hard to stay positive when there's a lot of evil in the world.
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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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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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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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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I seem to get the best work when I'm angry and depressed and alienated.
John Darnielle
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Conservative forces in the South have a lot of power - almost dynastic - dating back many years.
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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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.
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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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 grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.
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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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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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!
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 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.
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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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