As an idea occurs to me, I’ll either follow it or not, but I’m more instinctive than master-planner about stuff.

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 wrote ‘Lakeside View Apartment Suites’ with Roman in my arms. He was about a month old. I was playing left-handed and finally handed him over. On the demo of it, you can hear him...

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.

For me, fiction isn’t very cathartic. It can be a broad, long catharsis, but it’s a whole different thing – whereas music is physical. Essentially, it goes in through your ear. Fiction is cerebral, necessarily....

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...

Who knows the secrets of anybody’s heart.

My favorite movies are gory horror films. I love Faulkner. I wanted to see the most painful things possible.

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...

There’s the dual challenge of wanting to speak from an authentic place, and then being able to be honest about it. Even in the most mannered art, I think that’s what people value, is a...

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

To me, creative work is labor, like any other kind of labor. It’s got value, and it takes your time, and it’s useful to people, depending.

I’m finding things out about myself as a person – as a writer – as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of...

I used to break three or four strings a night, and the show would be over because I didn’t know how to change the strings.

For years, I’ve written narrators who aren’t gender-identified. When I do autobiographical stuff, that’s different, obviously. But I’ve always tried to keep my songs as potentially not a man’s thing.

My strongest hope is for a cameo as a band playing in a club visited by the detectives on ‘Law & Order: SVU’ during the course of an investigation, maybe during sound check, or something,...

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.

My songs tend to sprint toward some epiphany and then explode.

I think I read too much Arthur Conan Doyle when I was young and got this idea that a gentleman should know a lot about one thing and plenty about most everything else.

This is why improvisational music and comedy is so inspiring: You are seeing something being born, and that energy, there is no substitute for. These songs, most of them, are about a minute old when...

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

To me, everything is always new. People involved in my personal life make fun of me a lot for not being jaded.

If I go see a band, and they play, like, zero from any of their old albums, I’m very happy about that. I do not want to see the bands of my youth playing the...

I want to make sure people know I don’t think I have any magic powers. I just have a story that I share.

‘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...

Opera combines pretty basic theater and poetry, but the storyline itself is actually quite poetic and, after some digital research, taking that actual content and seeing it as undeniably poetic.

What you were supposed to hear when the record played backwards was the phrase wolf in white van. Nobody had a very firm idea of what that was supposed to mean, but they all agreed...

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

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...

Wrestlers give their bodies to their work. I don’t know if I like the word ‘crazy’ here. What I would say is there are people who have a different relationship to their bodies than most...

For me, moving is always a big opportunity. It’s just a enough of a shift in outlook that every time I move, it seems to open something up.

To me, the only good reason to be touring is if you still have something good to share instead of just revisiting past glories.

If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody’s going to pat you on the back – everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for...

I was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.

I always assumed people wanted to hear me tell stories, but then I had ‘The Sunset Tree.’ It turned out, my own stories were the ones that registered with people the hardest.

People like to say how much they like stuff, but with ‘The Sunset Tree,’ people shared stories about what it meant for them. And that stuff’s so humbling and amazing.

Dark, primitive magic. Swords Against Death.

One of the great things about wrestling is how it interrogates this silly idea that you have one authentic self.

I think there are some writers – like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he’s the type of writer...

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...

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

Touring is just not normal for me. My personality is to never ever talk to people if I can help it.

It’s like fiction – 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. You go through...

I watched ‘Fame,’ and I just love the choreography. It just gives me a place to be in another zone.

I am permanently a student of people who make great songs, but besides sort of learning by absorption, I just love listening to music, hearing what’s going on, hearing new things or new old things.

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 wish they’d conduct a national poll to find out who feels out of place and who doesn’t. Just to get the numbers, you know? To get a feel for how many of us there...

One or two people have named their children after characters in my songs. That’s pretty intense.

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.

You get this really cool groove when you’re playing just piano, bass, and drums where everyone’s sort of feeling each other’s space, which is the only way to put it, but it really is true,...