I’m not really a goal-oriented guy. I started doing the Mountain Goats just for the sheer hell of it.
Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music “got bad” is infantile. The same is true with your life.
I don’t celebrate milestones and I don’t do anniversary editions. It’s not my style to reflect on accomplishments.
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 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.
I think taking too long to work on a record you sort of lose some of the feeling, so I write as fast as I can; it’s just this manic phase where I’m by myself and or on tour and I write and I write. And I send them to the guys, and we start planning our studio ventures.
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.
The fact that somebody’s telling you a story about people who didn’t exist doesn’t make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind.
Kayfabe is kind of a code. To break kayfabe is to let people know that the punch was not real and that the match was scripted.
Not everybody relates to pain, but if you can watch other people playacting it, you can absorb some of that vibe. It’s like watching horror movies – you want to have the experience, but in a safe environment.
In wrestling, people just throw each other around, possibly actually bleed, and are still friends in the locker room afterwards. But there’s a real glee – a feeling goes up in the arena, especially on non-TV days. If it’s just people in a room and somebody starts to bleed, that’s very exciting.
I start writing, pull whatever images happen to occur to me and make up a story, instead of starting with details that are real and I know of and going from there.
There’s this idea that there was a point in our childhood when we were in some way better than we are now and we should try to hang on to that.
I’m so disconnected from an indie-rock community that I am the hermit people used to guess I was.
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.
If you get into a fight and somebody punches you, you get two feelings. One: That really hurts. Two: That relief in the realness of, like, Wow, this is what it is. It’s not an intellectual process.
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 am a person of high energy. That, and I sit down and I write when I get an idea – I put other things aside.
As an artist, you always have to be growing. You don’t just want to do what you already know people like.
Literature is a mystical place for me. It’s not dry. It’s where miracles happen.
Human beings are selfish by nature. Everything that happens to a child, you immediately grab your own child and say, “I will never let that happen to you.”