Sorry that I haven’t posted my pics from The Myriad show….I left the card reader to my camera at the church….so I’ll have to post them tomorrow. Andrew got a really great shot though….go check out his picture from last night.

I’m not sure if any of you have read the Ben Gibbard article in the current Paste, but it’s incredible. They let him write it himself, and it’s such an interestingly introspective piece. It’s almost weird how honest he is in the article. He says some things about life and love that I think you’ll all find fascinating.

He also writes some cool things about songwriting that I wanted to post here, especially in light of what David Bazan said in Paste last month about songwriting. Here are a few of Gibbard’s quotes:

I’d like to think I’m a far better writer now than I was 10 years ago. When I first started the band, and I began writing in the way that has marked the trajectory of how I go about making music now, I was convinced that my writing was wildly descriptive and very dense and interesting, and people were really going to have to chew on this stuff. But now I’ll play a song like “Bend To Squares” and it’s like, “What the [junk....he used other words...sorry to be so ccm] am I talking about here? This song makes absolutely no sense.” I would just write what I thought were profound, dense lyrics. They may be about something in my head, but they don’t translate to being about anything that anybody could understand just listening.

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.

My goal as a songwriter now is to simply write some memorable turns of phrase. The reaction I’d like from every song is “Wow, I listen to this song, and it’s about such-and-such, and there’s this lyric in there that’s just awesome.” At the end of the day that’s what I want.

Isn’t that great stuff? I’m not sure if he and David Bazan are polar opposites, but I do think that Ben is allot more comfortable with his music having a message.

What do ya’ll think?….where would you fall between the two views…..Bazan: don’t push a message…..Gibbard: don’t get in the way of the message?