The studio's a collaborative environment. I just try to let people bring their own ideas to the songs and see what happens.
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."
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 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.
There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
Labor for a lot of people has a negative connotation. But not for me. I always want to be working.
There are so many ways to respond to music besides feeling like someone's communicating with you. It gives me a charge.
When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Gender relations are a sad story of men talking trash about women all over the world.
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 don't write my own publicity materials, I just read 'em and give 'em the OK.
I'm not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.
Giving up and doing something else (nursing, for me) was exactly what eventually led me to making music that other people wanted to hear.
I grew up around some people whose parents toured a lot: tough on the marriage, tough on the kids.
I'll keep making records until I don't have more ideas for records.
I do have a romantic interest in outlasting everybody else. There's a sort of sad machismo to singer-songwriters, I think.
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.
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 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!
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.
