Everybody has a language or code that they use with their wife or their girlfriend or boyfriend or what have you. It’s a language aside from the language they have with strangers.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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’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 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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I kind of dropped a lot of bad habits about three years ago and became kind of accidentally straight-edge. I don’t have Xs on my hands, but I guess if I wanted to go back to calling myself straight-edge, I could.
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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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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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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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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 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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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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Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.
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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 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.
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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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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’m not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
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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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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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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 think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.
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