Ben Gibbard
Ben Gibbard
Benjamin "Ben" Gibbard is an American singer, songwriter and guitarist. He is best known as the lead vocalist and guitarist of the indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie, with which he has recorded eight studio albums, and as one half of the electronica duo the Postal Service. Gibbard released his debut solo album, Former Lives, in 2012, and a collaborative studio album, One Fast Move or I'm Gone, with Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt's Jay Farrar...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionRock Singer
Date of Birth11 April 1976
CityBremerton, WA
CountryUnited States of America
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.
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.
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.
And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
An ex-girlfriend once got upset when I told her that music is the most important thing in my life. It's more important than anyone else could ever be. I don't want to be overly dramatic and say it's the only thing that gets me up and keeps me going. But people in your life come and go. As you go through your life, you make friendships, you break friendships, you have relationships. Music is the one thing I've always been able to rely on.
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.
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...
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.
Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting.
I had no idea it was such a big deal. We were touring in Japan beforehand and people kept telling us they were flying from Japan to be at Coachella.
It's our hope that this project serves as a model to both labels and bands as a way to grant the directors the type and amount of freedom we've enjoyed in the creation of the music itself.
The luxury of having a larger budget wasn't about spending $100,000 mixing with fancy Hit Factory mixers to get radio songs. But we knew if something wasn't right, we could afford to go back in the studio.
We've been handed this opportunity where we can make a real dent in popular music that we never would have had before. I think we all believe in what we're doing to such an extent that I want to take that risk. If this doesn't work out, that's fine, but at least we tried it.