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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. It's An Accurate Depiction Of Who You Were And What You Looked And Sounded Like At That Point In Your Life. It Doesn't Necessarily Mean That It Aged In A Way That It Feels As Cool Or Sounds As Good To You, Or Says What You Thought It Said, 10 Years Later. That's Just The Nature Of Growing Older.

-Ben Gibbard

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I Can Remember How

Ben Gibbard

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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. It's An Accurate Depiction Of Who You Were And What You Looked And Sounded Like At That Point In Your Life. It Doesn't Necessarily Mean That It Aged In A Way That It Feels As Cool Or Sounds As Good To You, Or Says What You Thought It Said, 10 Years Later. That's Just The Nature Of Growing Older.

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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.

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.

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 Think Sometimes A Narrative Can Come Out Of A Single Word.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I Feel That We Are Currently Living In A World That Is Similar To Late '50s, Early '60s Kind Of World.

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, I Don't Hear It Now The Way I Did When I Was 20. I Think It Is Undeniable That The Songs Have Become More Instantaneously Descriptive And Literal. I'd Like The Songs To Be More Storytelling, But Also Have The Turns Of Phrase Within Them That Would Hopefully Distance My Writing From The Pack. I Feel Like On Those Older Records There Are A Lot Of Attempts At Clever Turns Of Phrase.

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.

When I Listen To Airplanes Record, It Takes Me Back. I Remember A Lot Of My Thought Processes When I Was 20 Or 21, Writing Those Songs And Recording That Record. 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. 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."

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. Ten Years Ago, Our Reality Was Spending A Lot More Time In Obscurity Before Anyone Really Knew Who We Were. I Don't Feel Like I Have Any Real Advice To Give Anybody Who Is Starting A Band Today. As Mike Watt Said, "you Know, Not Everyone Has The Ability To Be Born At The Same Time." 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.

I've Always Had A Soft Spot For Phil Collins. He's A Great Vocalist.

I Just Rediscovered My Guitar.

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.

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 Not Like A 90-mph Fastball Kind Of Guy, But I Can Hit 70 On Radar Gun.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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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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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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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?" I Don't Think Chris Realized He Was In A Band Until 2001. He All Of A Sudden Woke Up One Day And Realized He Was In A Band. He Thought He Was Just Recording My Solo Project. Three Albums Later, We're In Baltimore Trying To Figure Out What To Do With Ourselves.

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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. 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.

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.

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.

And It Came To Me Then That Every Plan Is A Tiny Prayer To Father 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.

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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