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.
BEN GIBBARDWe 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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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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And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
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I’m a war of head versus heart, it’s always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say.
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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.
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I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
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Between every record, we all split off in our own world and we all end up listening to usually pretty different music on our own. We come together not really knowing what the other people having been really listening to and what’s been influencing them.
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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.
BEN GIBBARD