John Darnielle Quotes

'Trapped in the Closet' is pretty much forever. I've got a leash on this thing now. I'm going to walk it.

I love writing every song I can like a little mini movie. I like to have a character, or some characters, and really paint a picture with the song.

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

One thing George R. R. Martin does is surprising things to main characters. But he says so himself.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.

It doesn't bother me when people try to deconstruct my songs - because at least they're looking at the lyrics, and paying attention to the way the story is told.

It is a very serious consideration for a lyricist to step in there and suggest the meaning to a song. The music is speaking for itself.

I make hip-hop, but use Doom as a character to convey stories that a normal dude can't. You have writers that write about crazy characters, but that doesn't mean the writer himself is crazy.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

I look at albums like novels. If you write a really good scene or a really good moment, just because you wrote it, doesn't mean that it fits with the story that you're writing.

The craft, the writing of a song, is about creating a story, a life story, a world within three minutes, but that's the frame, if you like, the picture frame. That fascinates me.

The great thing about 'Fargo' is that it's a more objective style of filmmaking: the camera moves in very classical ways, and the most interesting things normally are the characters.

All the movies I've made are essentially character-driven movies about people that I'm interested in.

I learned so much from the writing on 'King of the Hill', which I thought was just magnificent. They would let real moments happen in this animated, one-dimensional world. I feel like I've been in school this whole time.

The blessing of being able to write music and let music speak for itself is you let the melodies and let the lyrics and the groove talk to people instead of me talking to people.

When I hear somebody like Hayes Carll write a song that's touching and poignant and sad and funny all at the same time, it motivates me to step my game up and try to figure out a way to get more different emotions into one line or one song.

I like to take fictitious characters and circumstances and wedge them into a real world.

I don't write a whole lot about one person that exists in reality; it's usually characteristics of different people that I combine into a character. I tend to think through and try and make characters behave in a natural way. I follow the character and think about what they would do, what decisions they would make.

I think I initially started inventing characters in my songs because I didn't want to write directly about myself. Also, as a kid, I loved all the character names in Beatles songs, like Eleanor Rigby and Lovely Rita and Mean Mr. Mustard and Maxwell and Rocky Raccoon.

Scripts that make characters a two-sentence description, I'm not interested in.

The point of songs in theater is that you're supposed to end up in a different place than where you started.

Most of my films have been very character driven.

Some of the songs on the radio are really outrageous. I listen to the lyric. If the lyric doesn't make sense, I don't like the song.

When I was little, my mum would take me to see the orchestra, tell me to close my eyes and think about the story the music was telling. I always spoke about colours. I'd talk about how purple the oboe was.