“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.”

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

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.”

We never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.

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.

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.

We 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.

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.

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.

I couldn’t wait to go on tour back then. I would be sitting at my day job or my apartment, just itching to go. There were so many adventures that were about to happen.

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.

We were not goofing around anymore. We all threw everything we had into this in a way where we all found ourselves really far from home, and we were stuck with each other.

There’s a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.

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.

Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We’ll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.

I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.

The late ’90s were a really bad time for people trying to be rock stars, you know what I mean? It seemed like everyone was a one-hit wonder on the radio.

Just don’t keep me in the dark about things. Otherwise, why am I with you?

If I could keep today’s happiness I wouldn’t worry about tomorrow.

Whatever has “wit enough to keep it sweet” defies corruption and outlasts all time; but the wit must be of that outward and visible order which needs no introduction or demonstration at our hands.

I’ve seen many films, and many beautiful films. And I try to keep a certain level of quality of my films. I don’t do commercials,

Ours is an upbeat, a hurried, hasty beat. It keeps pressing us to go farther, to include everything so that we can savor everything, so that we can know everything.

If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can’t keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.