When you punish a person for dreaming his dreamDon’t expect him to thank or forgive you.
And when the clouds do clear awayGet a momentary chance to seeThe thing I’ve been trying to beat to deathThe soft creature that I used to beThe better animal I used to be
It’s in the nature of the landscape to change, and it’s in the nature of people to help the process along…
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.
Their boots were black and shiny and your treasures gleamed like stars,Bones from deep down in the fertile crescent.
My grief sought out all parts of my body it hadn’t yet inhabited, and I felt like I might collapse in on myself right there, at last, spectacularly
To the left, just past the painting, on the other side of the hall, is the bathroom, the sort of open door that if cameras found it as they passed through the house in a horror movie would trigger a blast of synthesizers.
I thought about the guy in the truck, the focus in his expression, and I felt like I already knew enough of the story to tell it to somebody else maybe better than either of its major players could.
Your intelligence doesn’t override your desire to destroy yourself.
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.
I think ‘The Sunset Tree’ is really the album on which I really learned to trust other musicians, which is so important.
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 was writing poetry, and the Mountain Goats was an outgrowth of that.
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.
My father would tell me if I wasn’t writing in meter verse, it wasn’t poetry.