Top 25 Ben Gibbard Quotes

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.

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.

I always try to write the best song I can in the moment, and those songs are often going to end up on Death Cab for Cutie records. I don’t set out to write a solo song or write a band song. I just write, and where that songs ends up is kind of TBD.

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.

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

I just rediscovered my guitar.

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.

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.

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.

I love bummer songs.

I remember hoping there’d be 10 people at a show in 1998 when there was an incredible write-up in the local weekly. I don’t want to go back to that period of being obscure and having nobody know who I am, let alone have to struggle to get people to come to the show.

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.

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.

If you’re going through a difficult time, and there’s a piece of music that speaks to you – be it musically or lyrically or both – you are almost always able to access that music. You’re always able to sit down with it.

I’ve written a lot of songs in the last couple years, but writing a lot of songs doesn’t always mean writing good songs.

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.

People always talk about how time flies; it’s become sort of a colloquialism now. You don’t really understand it until you reach your late 30s and early 40s – and I’m sure time will move even faster as I get older.

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.

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

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

I think the narratives on ‘Trans,’ ‘Plans,’ and ‘Narrow Stairs’ moved away from the way I wrote on the first couple of records, which was a lot more impressionistic. I was writing those songs in my early 20s, so I thought I was being more clear than I actually was.

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.

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.

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