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.
BEN GIBBARDYou 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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I’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.
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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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I’d like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack.
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Now that we have the resources, we’re like, “Oh wow, a nice studio is pretty nice! They do have nice outboards here. It’s actually a pretty good place.” It’s funny how much changes so quickly.
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I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real. And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd.
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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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As you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I’ve always been able to rely on.
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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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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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Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We’ll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.
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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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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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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’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.
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