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.
BEN GIBBARDI don’t think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.
More Ben Gibbard Quotes
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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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I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
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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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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 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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And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
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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 that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late ’50s, early ’60s kind of world.
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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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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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Anything was better than going to work. All those early tours before we made any money were more like vacations. I don’t think it was until 2001 that we pulled our heads out of the sand and were like, “What are we doing?”
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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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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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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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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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