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.
BEN GIBBARDYou 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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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Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There’s something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.
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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 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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Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We’ll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.
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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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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.
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Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.
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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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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.
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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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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 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 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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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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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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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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As a songwriter, I’m not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
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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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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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An ex-girlfriend once got upset when I told her that music is the most important thing in my life. It’s more important than anyone else could ever be.
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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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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.
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