A biography for John Darniellehasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“People think of me as a nice person because, I think, I have grown into a nice person.”
“My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.”
“I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.”
“'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.”
“I want to make sure people know I don't think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.”
“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.”
“It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.”
“To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.”
“It’s hard to describe, this feeling of seeing your kids spending time together like adults, meeting up again after being out there in the world like free agents. There’s something giddy and unreal about it. I knew that boy when he was afraid of strangers. I knew them both before they knew how to talk.”
“When I'm writing a song, I'm just making stuff up as I go along.”
“Younger songwriters will ask me, 'What did you do?' And it's like, 'Well, I worked a day job, and I didn't stake anything. I didn't quit my day job. I didn't have any hopes at all. I just did the thing that I believed in, and I waited a long time.'”
“Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death.”
“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.”
“I was a huge comic book fan. It's weird because the era of 'Marvel' I was into turns out to be very important in the long run, but it's not the one that anybody romanticizes.”
“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.”
“That's what I used to enjoy so much: Bringing a record home, having it arrive in the mailbox. Having the whole experience of hearing it as you're holding it and looking at it and reading the liner notes, if they're anything.”
“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.”
“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.”
“To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.”