A Quote by Ben Gibbard

The Photo Album is the weakest record. For the first time in our careers, we found ourselves with an economic incentive to be on the road and to be making albums. We had cut ourselves free from the security of day-job life. The goals became primarily financial, at least for a while. That was the roughest time we had ever had as a band, because that was the first moment we realized that this was for real. We were not goofing around anymore. We all threw everything we had into this in a way where we all found ourselves really far from home, and we were stuck with each other.
When I was young, I said to myself, "You've got to make the most of your life." It's all about taking risks. Push yourself to do as much exploration as possible. Find yourself. Because sometimes we think we've found ourselves, but it's only part of ourselves we've found. We haven't pushed ourselves far out there where we make mistakes and things don't work out, but at least we've discovered something. I felt that's what my life had to be.
I found the most difficult thing when you became successful - when I had the record album, it won Album of the Year - that you were cut off from the source of your material. Your material was everyday people, and you were kind of cut off from that, and you had to work at it.
Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn't believe it. 'I'm becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,' they said. 'I'm touring college towns with my garage band.' We were dumbfounded. It was like they were from another planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately.
The first time I was paid was with 'The Lobster,' because with the Greek films, we just had to pay ourselves - work for free while making commercials in order to survive.
I ultimately realized we had gotten together for the music. It was such a huge thing in our lives. We were at the same age, same place in our careers, and we had great fun. But when I became a mother and was at home, I realized that in reality we had very little else in common. I wasn't happy, wasn't getting what I needed. It's tough to realize that. But while a big change can be painful, it also was for the best. I'm happier now than I've ever been.
How far we all come. How far we all come away from ourselves. So far, so much between, you can never go home again. You can go home, it's good to go home, but you never really get all the way home again in your life. ... whatever it was and however good it was, it wasn't what you once had been, and had lost, and could never have again, and once in a while, once in a long time, you remembered, and knew how far you were away, and it hit you hard enough, that little while it lasted, to break your heart.
I would give anything if it went back to analog age. I mean, music was so real, and you had to sing everything on a record; you had to play everything on a record. There was no cut-and-paste - you couldn't get the chorus right one time and then paste it every other time; you really had to be good at what you did.
A band's first album's usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.
As a result of continuous work with these highly toxic substances, our minds were so numbed that we no longer had any scruples about the whole thing. Anyway, our enemies had by now adopted our methods and as they became increasingly successful in this mode of warfare we were no longer exclusively the aggressors, but found ourselves more and more at the receiving end.
A bands first albums usually not great. When you made the first album, you had a day job and you were still trying to be serious about it.
As I walked back to civilization, I realized that for the first time in the six months I had known Curran, we had managed to have a conversation and part ways without wanting to kill each other. I found that fact deeply troubling.
But there was a time when each of us stood naked before the world, confronting life as a serious problem with which we were intimately and passionately concerned... There was a time when Free Love versus Catholic Morality was a question of as much importance to our hot bodies as if a pistol had been clapped to our heads. Further back, there were times when we wondered with all our souls what the world was, what love was, what we were ourselves.
Someone suggested the Kaiser Chiefs while we were looking for a band name. We had so many ideas ourselves, at least one of us had said no to every idea except Kaiser Chiefs.
I wrote my first novel in the same conditions as most first novelists - I had a full-time job, I shared an apartment, I had no time - and so I became a compulsive outliner of everything. Ever since then, my process has consisted of trying to forcibly rid myself of that compulsion.
I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.
We definitely needed to spend a good solid year just finding ourselves before anyone would even notice us. We had our fan-base growing around here in Los Angeles, but I wouldn't even have wanted anyone to come out to see us that was from a record label or something like that at that time, because we really needed to feel ourselves out as a live band.
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