Ben Gibbard Quotations

I don't want to be overdramatic about it, but I'm starting to see a lot of my bad habits get the best of me.

We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.

Living this life in the same sorta way that Kerouac lived, you get to hang out at shows and drink and you're able to not really face reality and adulthood the way most of my friends are.

When we moved to Seattle, everybody kind of disappeared into different corners of the city and it was a very difficult time for the band.

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. I've always been maybe an abuser of alliteration, but I've always loved it and I like how those words sound together.

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.

As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.

I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.

It's trippy to think we have an album that's 10 years old. It's even trippier to think we have a couple of albums older than that.

I'm not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun. I hit 70 one time on a radar guy at one of those pitch-and-throw kind of things. I have a pretty good arm for somebody who's not a baseball player.

It's like, how do you continue to make records that are representative of who you are that your fans will recognize as your band, while still trying to push things forward and present new sounds for people.

What we aspired to in 1998, we have wildly surpassed. And I know we all feel incredibly grateful and lucky this band has been able to have the life that it's had.

For 'Narrow Stairs', the majority of the songs I brought in were guitar songs - songs we could sit in a room and just play. I can honestly say I had more fun and felt more inspired on this record than anything that we had done in a long time.

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.

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.

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.

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.

I've always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He's a great vocalist.

To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didn't sign to Atlantic just for the money.

I was literally just going and applying for jobs, and I couldn't get a job, and I was getting more and more broke, and you find yourself groveling for jobs you don't even want.

Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We'll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.

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.

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.

I feel like there's a lot of beauty in the darkness of Narrow Stairs, but that's not really a place I'm ready to go to for a while. I'm interested in taking a different approach and having the next record be different in tone - I'm just not interested in making another dark, dark album.

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.

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.

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.

To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.

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.

I just rediscovered my guitar.

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.

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, 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.

I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.

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."

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.

If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.

Our band is very polarizing. There are people who absolutely can't stand us, and people who absolutely can't live without us. I'd rather spark those kind of polar-opposite feelings than have people be indifferent.

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.

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.

And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.

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. 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. As you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I've always been able to rely on.

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.

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...

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.

Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting.

I feel like this is more of an open, optimistic record, but there is a theme of mortality that floats through it. For me, I find myself being more obsessed with destinations and endings over the last couple years, even when something is going really well. I like the idea of having a love song about people dying rather than love songs about walking hand in hand down the sand.

For us, it comes down to word of mouth and slogging it out, and being a good live band.

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.

It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers' new television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot recreation of our video for 'Such Great Heights' made by the same filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that this was executed without our consultation or consent.

We've been handed this opportunity where we can make a real dent in popular music that we never would have had before. I think we all believe in what we're doing to such an extent that I want to take that risk. If this doesn't work out, that's fine, but at least we tried it.

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.

This is a shoeless town. I don't think I saw one pair of shoes all day. It's all flip flops down here.

It's our hope that this project serves as a model to both labels and bands as a way to grant the directors the type and amount of freedom we've enjoyed in the creation of the music itself.

I had no idea it was such a big deal. We were touring in Japan beforehand and people kept telling us they were flying from Japan to be at Coachella.

The luxury of having a larger budget wasn't about spending $100,000 mixing with fancy Hit Factory mixers to get radio songs. But we knew if something wasn't right, we could afford to go back in the studio.