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.
BEN GIBBARDFor 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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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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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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I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real. And I want life in every word to the extent that it’s absurd.
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I’ve always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He’s a great vocalist.
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I feel like on those older records there are a lot of attempts at clever turns of phrase.
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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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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 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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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