A Quote by John Darnielle

People always talk about good time rock and roll, Chuck Berry or whatever, like this liberating force for feeling good. But what I need in my life is to be liberated into feeling bad. Not sad. I have plenty of sad. What I need is a place where I can spray anger in sparks like a gnarled piece of electrical cable. Just be mad at stuff and soak in the helplessness.
Berry's On Top is probably my favorite record of all time; it defines rock and roll. A lot of people have done Chuck Berry songs, but to get that feel is really hard. It's the rock and roll thing-the push-pull and the rhythm of it.
I don't like it when people on the street say "smile" or "cheer up." It's a real cheap line. I'm feeling good. I'm feeling real grateful for everything. It's a solid time in my life. When people say I look sad, they're wrong.
I get mad. I get sad. I have all those emotions. But I just like to keep them to myself. I don't think my fans need to be bothered with if I'm mad or sad about something. I should just be concerned that they are keeping up with my music or I'm making them happy with my show.
This is no condemnation of Chuck Berry, who I greatly admire. But Chuck Berry's music will not translate as well to orchestration because of its very three-chord rock 'n' roll nature. It is the music of the artists that are more pretentious, pompous or closer to the kind of big dramatic stylings that orchestras are good with.
Rock n' roll sounded like music from another planet. The first time around, we had people like Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis - all them people.
It's a beautiful idea to focus on how everything is temporary and always in flux. It may feel bad now, but it will feel good later, and vice versa. To write about those things brings this satisfying feeling as a creative person. There's a lot of music out there that's like, "I'm so mad! I'm sad! I'm into skulls and crossbones and the color black," and that's just meaningless and shallow. So much of metal is about that and it's hard to find metal that is substantial and meaningful in terms of its content.
The First Splendid Truth: To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
It's not that people like sad movies that make us feel like, "Oh, my god, what a bummer." We like emotionally moving experiences, where you feel like a slightly different person and you see the world a little different, after you finish. It lets you see your own life, in a different way, and it actually makes you feel really good. And even though there might be sad content making this happen, the feeling that you're left with is one that is quite good, quite hopeful, clarifying and uplifting.
We would not have rock and roll without Chuck Berry, and when I first heard Chuck Berry, I fell in love with that music, and when I saw him, I changed my whole career trajectory that I was on as a kid.
The main thing that I've learned, artistically, is that if I'm in pain and feeling the budding of anger - if I absolutely feel like I need to write a song about it, I'll either need to transform that anger into something positive, or I'll just need to throw the song away. Because eventually, I'm going to want to transcend that pain and that anger.
I don't have much time for the 'sad clown' thing. It's only associated with comedians because of the disparity between feeling like that and what we do for a living. I bet there are loads of sad bankers and sad dentists. We just don't notice because they aren't bringing that much joy to the world.
We like to think there is this core of human nature – that good people can't do bad things, and that good people will dominate over bad situations. Infact, when we look at the Stanford prison studies, that we put good people in an evil place, and we saw who won. Well, the sad message in this, is in this case is the evil place won over the good people.
I love life... Well yeah, and I'm sad, but at the same time I'm really happy that something could make me feel that sad. It's like, it makes me feel alive, you know? It makes me feel human. And the only way I could feel this sad now is if I felt somethin' really good before. So I have to take the bad with the good, so I guess what I'm feelin' is like a, beautiful sadness.
If you're feeling really sad, there is only one reason: it's because you're deleting all the reasons you could be feeling good. And if you're feeling good, it's because you're deleting all the bad things you could be focusing on.
Most people like the sad songs. Some of the oldest songs known to man are sad. Listening to a voice singing something sad is a really great way to help you to feel sad when you need to.
Anger is not a real feeling. Every time in my life I've ever been angry, it's because I was scared, or because I was sad and I didn't know it. Anger doesn't just come out of a vacuum.
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