I’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.
BEN GIBBARDYou 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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The story of our band is that we were this relentless touring band in those early years. We were leaving day jobs and going off on the road and having fun and seeing the country for the first time.
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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.
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Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I’ve spent away from my family and loved ones.
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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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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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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.
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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 overdramatic about it, but I’m starting to see a lot of my bad habits get the best of me.
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
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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’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
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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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Now that we have the resources, we’re like, “Oh wow, a nice studio is pretty nice! They do have nice outboards here. It’s actually a pretty good place.” It’s funny how much changes so quickly.
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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 can remember how I sang – a little more nasal-y back then. Listening to those old recordings is like seeing a photograph of yourself from 10 years ago. You’re wearing what you thought looked cool at the time. You had your hair styled the particular way you thought looked cool.
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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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I’ve covered Avril Lavigne. I like good pop songs, and I don’t think there should be any kind of preconceptions about where good pop songs come from.
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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 like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of ‘Plans’ came out of samples and vocal lines.
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The second ‘Postal Service’ album is threatening to become the ‘Chinese Democracy’ of indie rock. It will come out eventually, or maybe it won’t.
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I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
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