You always feel like your 18-year-old self in some sense. And that’s what walking through New York on a June evening feels like – you feel like it’s Friday, and you’re 17 years old.

People do all sorts of things impulsively and follow those impulses into strange places.

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...

You want the song to be at least at the same level of goodness throughout. Whereas with something you’re doing live, a song dips and rises and that can actually be worked to the song’s...

I don’t sit down and say I’m going to write a song about this or that. They are never mapped out.

When you’re born into a showbiz family, the deck is stacked against you.

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...

I’d played with Jon Wurster as a duo just for a lark.

I got a promo of ‘Nichts Muss’ in what would have been 2002 or 2003 and fell totally in love with it after listening to it on an airplane that took me to Australia via...

Sometimes I’ll write without the guitar or the piano, but most of the time I’ll be playing and just improvising some words. And when I get something that sounds good, a line with a story...

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.

People think of me as a nice person because, I think, I have grown into a nice person.

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...

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...

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.

Wrestling’s a form of expression, and it expresses vastness.

Metal isn’t necessarily aggressive. There’s metal that’s contemplative, there’s metal that’s sad, and there’s metal that’s exuberant. No genre is limited in what it can express.

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.

I hang out and sign records for an hour or two hours every night, and I like to hear as many people’s stories as I can, because if somebody wants to share their story with...

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...

A book is a journey: It’s a thing you agree to go on with somebody, and I think every reader’s experience of a book is going to be different.

Sometimes I do ‘So Desperate’ solo in the middle of the set. I really love to sing that song.

I try not to write songs in which men glamorize their own need for approval from women. That’s kinda a bogus way to go out. But I try to do this quietly. I’m not about...

Your creativity before it gets formed into words and songs is the actual substance. No one else can see it, right? Unless you give it the shape of a song or a painting or whatever.

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

Your intelligence doesn’t override your desire to destroy yourself.

More and more, I enjoy hearing people who are good at their instruments and who’ve found a distinctive voice. In death metal, a lot of guys are Eddie Van Halen disciples, but they take his...

It usually happens that I have multiple different projects going on at once, and one can be referencing the other.

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.

The best ones – Hulk Hogan believes in Hulkamania. It’s not a thing he’s selling here. It’s real. He knows it’s real because he goes to the Mall Of America and everybody goes insane, right?...

A Cat Stevens record isn’t just Cat Stevens’ ideas. It’s Cat Stevens and all the musicians who play with Cat Stevens, right?

Sometimes I feel very young, and other times I feel like the side of a ship that’s got a bunch of layers of mussels and barnacles on it.

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.

The inside of the Trace Italian, of course, does not exist. A player can get close enough to see it: it shines in the new deserts of Kansas, gleaming in the sun or starkly rising...

I think ‘The Sunset Tree’ is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.

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...

Most of ‘All Hail West Texas’ was written during orientation at a new job I had. I had basically worked this job before, I knew this stuff, so I was writing lyrics in the margins...

Sean at sixteen thought ‘Rexecutioner’s Dream’ was the greatest thing he’d ever heard, something so strange and different it seemed like a message from another realm. It had cover art, but the art was glued...

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

I pretty much just focus on making the records – unless I’m self-releasing them; then I do my own thing. But at some point, you have to stop worrying about chains of distribution, or it...

The more established you are, the less likely you are to do something ridiculous, which is one reason I’m proud to put out a wrestling album. If you stop and you go, ‘Well, what if...

Adulthood is interesting to adults. But I would never want to write about stuff I don’t feel everybody can connect to.

Songs are often character studies.

I write stuff down. I have a chalkboard in the kitchen where I will scrawl stuff down if I have a faint outline of an idea. And I’ll go into my office or whatever. But...

I think any real one-sheet for an album would say, ‘Well, here’s what I’ve been doing.’ And that would be it.

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...

Most of my interests in terms of writing are dark, so it’s discordant how much I try to lock into the vibe of wherever I’m at. Inhabiting the life of the imagination is the nature...

When you punish a person for dreaming his dreamDon’t expect him to thank or forgive you.

My father would tell me if I wasn’t writing in meter verse, it wasn’t poetry.

I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you’re somehow sneaking the things you need to...