I’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.
BEN GIBBARDWe always idealize the past because we don’t feel the painful stuff the way we used to.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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.”
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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.
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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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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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As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
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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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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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We always idealize the past because we don’t feel the painful stuff the way we used to.
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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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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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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.
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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 don’t think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.
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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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To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.
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