Ben Gibbard Quotes

Recently I read the stories I wrote in my early 20s, to put in a volume. And here is this brittle young woman, writing about marriage as, not the worst thing, but the most boring thing that could happen to a person. Now I think I was wrong. I like to be proven wrong.

I was really learning my craft as a jazz singer and working with some great players and all, really growing and feeling my wings.

I just really longed to do music that reflected me as an adult and music that I thought was for other adults.

I probably won't be able to hear it until five years from now anyway. That's when I always hear my own music. It takes five years to sit down with it after not hearing it for a couple of years.

The stuff that made me mad 20 years ago doesn't really make me mad any more.

Each time I've gone to the studio, the songs have got better and I've got more confident.

I loved the last album, and it was one hundred percent me. But this is like me two years later, who understands a little bit more about music and understands a little bit more about making an album. I wrote a lot more.

As you get older, you think about things differently from when you do in your twenties, when you think you'll live forever.

My views naturally have mellowed. Most of the critics have been more or less nice to me.

I had no allusions of radio success. I just loved being in studios. I was having fun and in that sense I now feel a lot like I did when I did that record.

That music and the lyrical aspects of Razorblade Romance is so personal to me that, now with me being grown up a bit and meeting new people and doing new things, it makes me look at the same things I was writing about back in the day through a different colored lens.

The early Stones were adolescent rockers. They were self-conscious in an obvious and unpretentious way. And they were committed to a musical style that needed no justification because it came so naturally to them. As they grew musically the mere repetition of old rock and blues tunes became increasingly less satisfying.

Many an article that I myself penned twenty years ago impresses me now as something quite foreign to myself.

I think there's a lot of naivete and hubris within our mix of personalities. That's probably our worst crime. I keep wondering what a 'mature' record means.

I used to just write about my own apathy, but that youthful, apathetic way of looking at things grew thin as I got older.

Understanding is not absolutely final. What's now right could be wrong later.

I'm just going to make the music I love to make, and I'm going to mature with my music.

Something that's interesting is how my perspective on different events can change over time even though the events themselves haven't changed. As I get older, I interpret something differently, or I can even interpret a person differently.

Every time you come out with an album or a song, you want to feel like you're growing a bit in what you are and giving people something that they can feel.

I have this theory about us. When we started writing our own songs, we were 17 years old. When you're 17, you write songs for other 17-year-olds. We stopped growing musically when we were 17. We still write songs for 17-year-olds.

When I listen to and play the songs from 'Narrow Stairs' now, that record feels like a record where we had established a style that arguably was more our own than it was in the beginning. Going into that record, I felt a lot more confident in my songwriting. It was a fairly prolific time for me.

Our music is becoming more mature.

When I was young, I would drive so fast. Now I see it a different way.

I feel like we're constantly getting better musically, and more of what's in my heart and head is coming through.

My music's matured so much, I don't have to create any barriers.