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 GIBBARDA 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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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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I just rediscovered my guitar.
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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.
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There were a lot of fences and walls existing in my life, literally and figuratively, and that was really not indicative of the kind of person that I’d always been. So, when I moved back to Seattle, the first thing I said was, “I will never live in fear again.”
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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.
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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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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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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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I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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Around that same time I started running. I never saw myself as the kind of person who would become a runner. It seemed unfathomable to me that I would ever run three miles, let alone 26.2.
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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.
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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.
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I’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.
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I’m starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There’s a darkness inside of me that I’m only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it’s starting to scare 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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