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.
BEN GIBBARDI think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.
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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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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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Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It’s a language aside from the language they have with strangers.
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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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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 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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I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late ’50s, early ’60s kind of world.
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A lot of the material is about the inevitable disappointment people feel as they move through life, and things don’t feel the way they expect. No experience will ever match up to the idealized version in your mind.
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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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I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
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Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There’s something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
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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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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.
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I don’t spend my time perusing message boards to find out what people think about me or if people think my songs are good or if people love that lyric or this or that. I just want to be happy with it myself – and if other people like it, that’s great.
BEN GIBBARD