black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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.

Ben Gibbard

Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can’t stand us, and people who absolutely can’t live without us. I’d rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.
BEN GIBBARD

Feelings Opposites People
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Clever Distance Song
You spend hours alone, only with your thoughts, and you torture yourself. It’s a tendency of many writers to temper the self-destructive act of writing with other self-destructive acts. I certainly was one of those people for a long time.
BEN GIBBARD

Long Self Writing
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Directly Earnest Itself Twirling
I kind of dropped a lot of bad habits about three years ago and became kind of accidentally straight-edge. I don’t have Xs on my hands, but I guess if I wanted to go back to calling myself straight-edge, I could.
BEN GIBBARD

Habit Kind Running
The Photo Album is the weakest record. For the first time in our careers, we found ourselves with an economic incentive to be on the road and to be making albums.
BEN GIBBARD

Cutting Home Real
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Cool Listening Mean Photograph Remember Year
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Distance Hopefully Song Storytelling
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Descriptive Life Literal Now Undeniable
I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
BEN GIBBARD

Baseball Gun Player
I just rediscovered my guitar.
BEN GIBBARD

Guitar Life Rediscover
Bands who are in their early 20s today, they are living in their own time and they have a series of parameters they have to work around.
BEN GIBBARD

Advice Giving Real
I don’t want to be overly dramatic and say it’s the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go.
BEN GIBBARD

Come Going Keep People
And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
BEN GIBBARD

Father Prayer Tiny
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Expensive Irreverent Nice Youth
I don’t think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.
BEN GIBBARD

Certainly Changed Think

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