“I have always been very open and earnest about some things in my life, some things that are not directly in my life, but they’re twirling around me at the time.”

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.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

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.”

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

We 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.

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.

We 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.

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.

I don’t want to be overdramatic about it, but I’m starting to see a lot of my bad habits get the best of me.

I couldn’t wait to go on tour back then. I would be sitting at my day job or my apartment, just itching to go. There were so many adventures that were about to happen.

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.

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.

There’s a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

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.

Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We’ll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.

I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.

I want to speak directly to the audience, to say, ‘I’m like you – I’m frustrated, I’m not an expert, I don’t have a manual on parenting, I make mistakes, I’m selfish too.’

Our new watches are made entirely of double super gold. They are just a piece of gold that you can wear to the left, right, or directly on top of the other gold you own.

Country music should speak directly and simply about the highs and lows of life. Something that anyone can relate to.

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple.

There is nothing that makes its way more directly into the soul than beauty.

Nothing we can do outrages Nature directly. Our acts of destruction give her new vigour and feed her energy, but none of our wreckings can weaken her power.

The issues which today confront the nation are clearly defined and so fundamental as to directly involve the very survival of the Republic. Are we going to preserve the religious base to our origin.

Behold, directly overhead, a certain strange star was suddenly seen . . . Amazed, and as if astonished and stupified, I stood still