I take things a little bit more critically now, like, "What did I think I was saying in that song? What is this song about?" I thought the lyrics were incredibly descriptive, and now they sound really cryptic and weird. I'd like to also think that when I listen to songs from Something About Airplanes that I'm proud of my development as a writer. I don't think I was doing anything poorly at that time, but I can certainly see how my writing has changed.

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.

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.

Death Cab is a militantly analog band. We'll continue moving forward with our sound, but there will be no crossover.

When I listen to Airplanes record, it takes me back. I remember a lot of my thought processes when I was 20 or 21, writing those songs and recording that record. I wonder what I was thinking when I was trying to say a particular thing. I hear some of the weird little nuances in the recording; I can hear what the room sounded like. I remember what it smelled like. I can remember sitting up in guitarist Chris Walla's bedroom and for the first time in my life having this realization like, "Maybe I can do this. Maybe I can make music that in some capacity people will enjoy and come see me play."

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. I’ve always been maybe an abuser of alliteration, but I’ve always loved it and I like how those words sound together.

Every record we do there are always two camps. There's the camp that's like, "I love it. It sounds different than the last one." There are the people that are like, "I want it to sound like the last one." 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.