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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.

Ben Gibbard

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Ben Gibbard
Age: 48
Born: 1976
Born: August 11
Composer
Film Actor
Guitarist
Singer
Singer-Songwriter
Bremerton
Washington
Benjamin Gibbard
Poetry
Lyrics
Words
Poems
Song
Obsession
Write
Sentences
Writing
Changing
Never
Complete
Would
Songs
Short
Pretentious

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.
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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 think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
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I've always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He's a great vocalist.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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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I'm not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
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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.
Ben Gibbard