John Darnielle

“A song is fire. You react to it primally, instantly. You don't have to decide whether you like it, and you don't really have to sit down and think about it much after you're done listening to it. It really does run through you like wind.”

“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.”

“It's not my style to be thinking about what a record is while I'm making it: I just write songs.”

“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.”

“Metal has its own code of cool, but it's not really trying to be cool. And that was very refreshing to me, that metal is very much about expressing something that seems awesome to you even if, at the time, much of the world was going to mock and reject it.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.”

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

“Once you start talking to people, you find out there's a lot more wrestling fans than you think there are.”

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

“The wind comes across the plains not howling but singing. It's the difference between this wind and its big-city cousins: the full-throated wind of the plains has leeway to seek out the hidden registers of its voice. Where immigrant farmers planted windbreaks a hundred and fifty years ago. it keens in protest; where the young corn shoots up, it whispers as it passes, crossing field after field in its own time, following eastward trends but in no hurry to find open water. You can't usually see it in paintings, but it's an important part of the scenery.”

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“A band's first album's 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 think wrestling is the one that presents theater for people who want to see some theater but don't necessarily have to dress up or be quiet while they're watching.”