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 GIBBARDWe had cut ourselves free from the security of day-job life. The goals became primarily financial, at least for a while. That was the roughest time we had ever had as a band, because that was the first moment we realized that this was for real.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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I’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.
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More times than not, it’s a failed endeavor. You will fail more times than you succeed. But I think you need those failed endeavors.
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I can remember how I sang – a little more nasal-y back then. Listening to those old recordings is like seeing a photograph of yourself from 10 years ago. You’re wearing what you thought looked cool at the time. You had your hair styled the particular way you thought looked cool.
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Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones.
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I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla’s bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, “Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play.”
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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.
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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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Nada Surf and Harvey Danger are good bands. I think they’ve just stayed true to why they play music in the first place, it’s just because they love doing it and they love each other and that’s the impetus for doing it, not trying to keep singles on the radio and on MTV.
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I feel like there’s a lot of beauty in the darkness of ‘Narrow Stairs,’ but that’s not really a place I’m ready to go to for a while. I’m interested in taking a different approach and having the next record be different in tone – I’m just not interested in making another dark, dark album.
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I wonder what I was thinking when I was trying to say a particular thing. I hear some of the weird little nuances in the recording; I can hear what the room sounded like. I remember what it smelled like.
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I want to write songs with complete sentences. I almos have this obsession with short-changing words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. … Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs.
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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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As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
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You can’t please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.
BEN GIBBARD