As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
BEN GIBBARDWe 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
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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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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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I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of ‘Plans’ came out of samples and vocal lines.
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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.
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There are the people that are like, “I want it to sound like the last one.” You 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.
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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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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.”
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Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones.
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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.
BEN GIBBARD