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.
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.
It has recently come to our attention that Apple Computers' new television commercial for the Intel chip features a shot-for-shot recreation of our video for 'Such Great Heights' made by the same filmmakers responsible for the original. We did not approve this commercialization and are extremely disappointed with both parties that this was executed without our consultation or consent.
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.
I feel like this is more of an open, optimistic record, but there is a theme of mortality that floats through it. For me, I find myself being more obsessed with destinations and endings over the last couple years, even when something is going really well. I like the idea of having a love song about people dying rather than love songs about walking hand in hand down the sand.
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.
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.