Ben Gibbard Quotes

You look back at a time you idealize now and you only remember the good stuff. You tell the stories about the hard stuff and just laugh about it now. You don't remember how difficult it was to be stranded in Austin after driving 52 hours from Seattle in a rainstorm and having nowhere to stay for five hours. 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. We always idealize the past because we don't feel the painful stuff the way we used to.

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.

Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

Keeping fans loyal is a delicate balance. Therein lies the challenge for any band that's more than a couple albums deep. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. I had this feeling at the time that that was not possible anymore, so the idea of becoming the biggest band in the country—it seemed laughable. I felt that having those sort of ambitions was foolish, because there was no way that was going to be possible. If you saw it that way, you were just deluding yourself.

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

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

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.

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.