Ben Gibbard Quotes

If you write songs long enough, you run out of material that's original to yourself.

I study what's happening in music. I want to sound different than everybody else.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

But KISS inspired me personally to pick up a guitar and go for it.

The great songs just come out. If it comes quick, just leave it that way.

When you find great songs, and somehow you get a spark in a little way, it can become brand new.

No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music.

I think its so cool that you can pick up the guitar and create something that didn't exist 5 minutes ago. You can write something that no ones ever heard before. You have music at your fingertips.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

Any good music must be an innovation.

The day I run out of ideas is the day I stop making records.

What is nice about country music today is that most artists are not trying to do something everybody else is doing. They really are trying to develop their own uniqueness.

Rock was my thing. It influences me and moves me, and it's music that gives me ideas or wings to fly and to make films.

I could write a dozen different songs with the same three or four chords, but they'd all be entirely different.

It's either you finna create your own wave, you finna sound like me or you finna sound like G Herbo, you finna sound like Chance The Rapper, you finna sound like Juice Wrld. You ain't gonna get too far 'cause you sound like somebody. So, create your own lane and do your own style.

Composers are very individual creatures.

I'd always envisioned 'The Big Beat' leading off 'The Tale of the Tape' with the biggest drumbeat the rock world had ever heard. I knew I had something good… but I had no idea just how good.

You can't help but have ideas when you're inspired musically.

I try to imagine what the greatest song I could ever write would sound like, and then try to do it.

I've always had good songs, it's the great songs that are difficult to find.

To be able to take music and do something as profoundly original as what we did with the Allman Brothers, you've got to put some time into it.

Music is all about creativity.

The only reason to write a new song is because you're tired of the old ones.