I’ve covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don’t think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.
BEN GIBBARDAt this point in my life, I find myself obsessed with alternate paths I could’ve taken. I don’t think about this with a sense of regret, but with a sense of wonder.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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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.
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You remember that stuff and laugh about it now. You don’t feel it the way you did back then when you were so scared and nervous and tired and hungry.
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We always idealize the past because we don’t feel the painful stuff the way we used to.
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When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record.
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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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For me, a song doesn’t really take flight until it has a lyric on it. …Without a lyric that I’m happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn’t have any resonance.
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I was literally just going and applying for jobs, and I couldn’t get a job, and I was getting more and more broke, and you find yourself groveling for jobs you don’t even want.
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We wanted to be like R.E.M., but the reality is that 15 years after R.E.M. was putting out those records, the playing field had changed drastically as well.
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We were not goofing around anymore. We all threw everything we had into this in a way where we all found ourselves really far from home, and we were stuck with each other.
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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.
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Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There’s something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
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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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The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you’re listening to the song because they’re so seamless and clever.
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I don’t think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.
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