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 like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.
As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.
Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We'll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.
The songwriting of Hall & Oates is deceptively complex. There are a number of key changes that pass you by as you're listening to the song because they're so seamless and clever.
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'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.
I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.
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.
I feel like there's a lot of beauty in the darkness of Narrow Stairs, but that's not really a place I'm ready to go to for a while. I'm interested in taking a different approach and having the next record be different in tone - I'm just not interested in making another dark, dark album.