Ben Gibbard

“When I look back at 2003, it was the best year I've ever had creatively: having 'Transatlanctism' and 'Give Up come' out in the course of six months. I'll never have another year like that.”

“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.”

“I just rediscovered my guitar.”

“I've always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He's a great vocalist.”

“If you're going through a difficult time, and there's a piece of music that speaks to you - be it musically or lyrically or both - you are almost always able to access that music. You're always able to sit down with it.”

“I know that the Seattle my parents knew is not the Seattle I know and that these things exist in a state of constant flux and change. The hope is that at least some of that change can be for the better.”

“Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them.”

“It's trippy to think we have an album that's 10 years old. It's even trippier to think we have a couple of albums older than that.”

“I think there's something that feels so good about a 1-4-5 chord progression. It's a very standard chord progression, and it just feels good to the ears.”

“I think a lot of people who become music fans have that moment where they break from their parents' music, they break from the radio and MTV - at least in my generation, they did, and MTV isn't really a thing anymore. And you discover something that defines you, that is outside of the mainstream.”

“I love bummer songs.”

“Death Cab always gets right of first refusal on everything I write, but I tend to know early on. There's a song that has yet to be released - it might come to light at some point in the near future - that when I was writing it, I was really proud of it lyrically.”

“Living this life in the same sorta way that Kerouac lived, you get to hang out at shows and drink and you're able to not really face reality and adulthood the way most of my friends are.”

“We tend to think of our idols as kind of superheroes; maybe less so today, given that people have a tendency to overshare on social media, but when I was growing up, all you knew about these people was what they allowed you to see - which was them doing superhuman things, up on stage in an arena with all these people going crazy.”

“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'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.”

“When we moved to Seattle, everybody kind of disappeared into different corners of the city and it was a very difficult time for the band.”

“I remember hoping there'd be 10 people at a show in 1998 when there was an incredible write-up in the local weekly. I don't want to go back to that period of being obscure and having nobody know who I am, let alone have to struggle to get people to come to the show.”

“I think the narratives on 'Trans,' 'Plans,' and 'Narrow Stairs' moved away from the way I wrote on the first couple of records, which was a lot more impressionistic. I was writing those songs in my early 20s, so I thought I was being more clear than I actually was.”

“I love San Francisco more than any other city outside of Seattle, but I've seen it go from a vibrant, creative community to a playground for tech bros.”