Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I love bummer songs.
I just rediscovered my guitar.
Liking interesting things doesn't make you interesting.
I think sometimes a narrative can come out of a single word.
I've always had a soft spot for Phil Collins. He's a great vocalist.
As a songwriter, I'm not necessarily writing about myself or my life.
And it came to me then that every plan is a tiny prayer to father time.
I'm not like a 90-mph fastball kind of guy, but I can hit 70 on radar gun.
My goal as a songwriter now is to simply write some memorable turns of phrase.
I like writing on piano and a computer, and a lot of 'Plans' came out of samples and vocal lines.
I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.
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.
To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didnt sign to Atlantic just for the money.
To set the record straight for the God knows millionth time, we certainly didn't sign to Atlantic just for the money.
I've written a lot of songs in the last couple years, but writing a lot of songs doesn't always mean writing good songs.
I'm a war of head versus heart, it's always this way. My head is weak, my heart always speaks, before I know what it will say.
I want so badly to believe that there is truth, that love is real. And I want life in every word to the extent that it's absurd.
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.
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 think that the wonderful thing about music and about songs is that you can listen to a three-minute song whenever you feel you need it.
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.
There's a cinematic quality that happens in my mind when I hear something that really lands. An album is just a journal of a life moving through time.
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.
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 have always been very open and earnest about some things in my life, some things that are not directly in my life, but they're twirling around me at the time.
What we aspired to in 1998, we have wildly surpassed. And I know we all feel incredibly grateful and lucky this band has been able to have the life that it's had.
When you connect as many memories to your geography as I have, and then you see that geography change around you, you're forced to reckon with the passage of time.
At this point in my life, I find myself obsessed with alternate paths I could've taken. I don't think about this with a sense of regret, but with a sense of wonder.
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.
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.
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.
We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.
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.
When I'm old, I'd like to wake up in the morning and not really do anything - just be happy to exist. I'd like to look at my accomplishments and sit back and revel in my own achievement.
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 never sit down before we start making a record and talk about this new sonic palette that we are going to try to explore. We always let the record kind of reveal itself to us over time.
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.
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.
I decided a handful of years ago that I just want to write songs that you can understand as soon as you put the record on. There's no need to veil what's happening in the song the way I used to.
I would much rather hear a song that's written from a fresh perspective, using ideas that have existed in rock & roll for 50 years, than something that is incredibly abrasive to my ears but is new.
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.
It's like, how do you continue to make records that are representative of who you are that your fans will recognize as your band, while still trying to push things forward and present new sounds for people.
I still love 'The Cure' more than almost any other band. But they were really, truly like the first band that I really loved and felt was mine, you know. At a pivotal time in my life when I was 13, 14 years old.
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.
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.
People always talk about how time flies; it's become sort of a colloquialism now. You don't really understand it until you reach your late 30s and early 40s - and I'm sure time will move even faster as I get older.
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.
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.