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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, 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.

-Ben Gibbard

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If There Is One

Ben Gibbard

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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, 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.

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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.

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.

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

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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.

There Were Two Recording Studios In Bellingham. One Was Really Expensive, A "nice Studio." We Were At The Point Where We Were Young And Irreverent. We Would Scoff At The Idea Of A Nice Studio. "why Would You Want To Go To A Nice Studio? Oh Wow, They Have Really Expensive Gear. Ooh, That's Really Fancy. Well We've Got An Eight-track. We've Got It Going On Here." 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.

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.

Between Every Record, We All Split Off In Our Own World And We All End Up Listening To Usually Pretty Different Music On Our Own. We Come Together Not Really Knowing What The Other People Having Been Really Listening To And What's Been Influencing Them.

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

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.

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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.

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