I don’t spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself – and if other people like it, that’s great.
BEN GIBBARDWe had friends who had a hit single on the radio and sold 500,000 records, and then they couldn’t get arrested a year later.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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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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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’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.
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As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
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The second ‘Postal Service’ album is threatening to become the ‘Chinese Democracy’ of indie rock. It will come out eventually, or maybe it won’t.
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And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
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There were two recording studios in Bellingham. One was really expensive, a “nice studio.” We were at the point where we were young and irreverent.
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At 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.
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An ex-girlfriend once got upset when I told her that music is the most important thing in my life. It’s more important than anyone else could ever be.
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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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The late ’90s were a really bad time for people trying to be rock stars, you know what I mean? It seemed like everyone was a one-hit wonder on the radio.
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I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of ‘Plans’ came out of samples and vocal lines.
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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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A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don’t feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind.
BEN GIBBARD