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 GIBBARDI 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.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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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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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’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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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 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 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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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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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 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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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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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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The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you’re listening to the song because they’re so seamless and clever.
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Liking interesting things doesn’t make you interesting.
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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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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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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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Between every record, we all split off in our own world and we all end up listening to usually pretty different music on our own. We come together not really knowing what the other people having been really listening to and what’s been influencing them.
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