I don’t think Chris realized he was in a band until 2001. He all of a sudden woke up one day and realized he was in a band. He thought he was just recording my solo project. Three albums later, we’re in Baltimore trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.
BEN GIBBARDI’d like the songs to be more storytelling, but also have the turns of phrase within them that would hopefully distance my writing from the pack.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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.
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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 like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of ‘Plans’ came out of samples and vocal lines.
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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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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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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 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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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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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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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’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 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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I’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
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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.
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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.
BEN GIBBARD