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
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.
I don't want to be overdramatic about it, but I'm starting to see a lot of my bad habits get the best of me.
Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We'll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.
The second 'Postal Service' album is threatening to become the 'Chinese Democracy' of indie rock. It will come out eventually, or maybe it won't.
I'm not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun. I hit 70 one time on a radar guy at one of those pitch-and-throw kind of things. I have a pretty good arm for somebody who's not a baseball player.
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.
I just rediscovered my guitar.
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.
Because of my age and what I do for a living and the amount of time that I've spent away from my family and loved ones, I'm starting to relate more to the late-period Kerouac stuff in the way that I once related to the fun and excitement of the early material. There's a darkness inside of me that I'm only now starting to come to grips with and accept. And it's starting to scare me.
I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
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."
You can't please everybody all the time, but I think for the most part we tend to maintain a healthy level of self-reference to kind of make sure we continue to push things forward.
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.