I kind of dropped a lot of bad habits about three years ago and became kind of accidentally straight-edge. I don’t have Xs on my hands, but I guess if I wanted to go back to calling myself straight-edge, I could.
BEN GIBBARDI don’t hear it now the way I did when I was 20. I think it is undeniable that the songs have become more instantaneously descriptive and literal.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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Every record we do there are always two camps. There’s the camp that’s like, “I love it. It sounds different than the last one.”
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I don’t think Chris realized he was in a band until 2001. He all of a sudden woke up one day and realized he was in a band. He thought he was just recording my solo project. Three albums later, we’re in Baltimore trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.
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I don’t hear it now the way I did when I was 20. I think it is undeniable that the songs have become more instantaneously descriptive and literal.
BEN GIBBARD -
And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
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To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.
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If there is one thing I think I have accomplished, it’s that I always thought of myself as a very literal songwriter, and as I look at some of those older records.
BEN GIBBARD -
As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
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We would scoff at the idea of a nice studio. “Why would you want to go to a nice studio? Oh wow, they have really expensive gear. Ooh, that’s really fancy. Well we’ve got an eight-track. We’ve got it going on here.”
BEN GIBBARD -
I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late ’50s, early ’60s kind of world.
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Anything was better than going to work. All those early tours before we made any money were more like vacations. I don’t think it was until 2001 that we pulled our heads out of the sand and were like, “What are we doing?”
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Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can’t stand us, and people who absolutely can’t live without us. I’d rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.
BEN GIBBARD -
I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare me.
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Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.
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I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.
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We were playing Chinese restaurants and basements and record stores and houses. We were crashing on floors and it was all new and exciting. It was like a vacation. It didn’t feel like work.
BEN GIBBARD






