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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.

Ben Gibbard

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.
BEN GIBBARD

Long Self Writing
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Listening People Together
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Needs Thinking Writing
Bands who are in their early 20s today, they are living in their own time and they have a series of parameters they have to work around.
BEN GIBBARD

Advice Giving Real
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Disappointment Moving People
I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late ’50s, early ’60s kind of world.
BEN GIBBARD

Kind Late World
And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
BEN GIBBARD

Father Prayer Tiny
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Ambition Country Mean
The Photo Album is the weakest record. For the first time in our careers, we found ourselves with an economic incentive to be on the road and to be making albums.
BEN GIBBARD

Cutting Home Real
I just rediscovered my guitar.
BEN GIBBARD

Guitar Life Rediscover
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.”
BEN GIBBARD

Firsts Kind Wall
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Land Mind Moving
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Back Hungry Laugh Nervous Remember Tired
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.”
BEN GIBBARD

Healthy People Thinking
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Explore Kind Record Trying
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Adventure Apartment Back Happen Tour
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

People Song Thinking
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Clever Distance Song
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

Song Wise Writing
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 GIBBARD

Expensive Irreverent Nice Youth
As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
BEN GIBBARD

Life Myself Songwriters Writing
When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record.
BEN GIBBARD

Airplane Song Writing
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Come Going Keep People
Anything was better than going to work. All those early tours before we made any money were more like vacations. I don’t think it was until 2001 that we pulled our heads out of the sand and were like, “What are we doing?”
BEN GIBBARD

Thinking Trying Vacation
To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.
BEN GIBBARD

God Knows Money Records
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.
BEN GIBBARD

Mtv Play Stay Thinking
I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
BEN GIBBARD

Narrative Sometimes Thinking

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 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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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