John Darnielle Quotes - Page 6

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.

It's hard always to say what it is one likes about a place, for me. I feel it.

If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them. We go to countries like Germany, where I can't imagine that all of my fans are engaging with the lyrics first and foremost. I think they're catching a vibe, a feeling. 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 and telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.

I know it's a cliché to say I write for myself, but I write for myself.

I crave music that'll sort of hurtle me into space and release me up there.

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.

I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour.

Everybody is in various states of needing to transcend something. I believe in mental health care, but when we call people "crazy," we exclude them from our circle.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

You can get into anything if you are determined. I always thought that with music, too.

Anger is preverbal, so, by the time you're using words to express an angry feeling, you're already imposing loads of structure on that primal experience.

I think it's a misconception that metal's about anger, obviously.

If my songs are being listened to between any other songs, that is awesome, and I'm glad people are getting something out of them.

I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who've found a distinctive voice.

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

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

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.

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

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.