Five More Ben Gibbard Benders

Ben Gibbard, now off the sauce.

​For more than a decade, Ben Gibbard has been a wildly successful musician. He has fronted Death Cab for Cutie, was one-half of the iconic indie-electro outfit The Postal Service, and, oh yeah, married Zooey Deschanel. But during all that, he harbored a dark secret: he was battling the bottle.

In a new Spin interview, Gibbard comes clean about how bad it got before kicking booze in 2008:

Gibbard says that he realized he needed to change after a particular bender with a friend in Big Sur. "It was so stereotypically my own little Kerouac Big Sur weekend," Gibbard says. "And I remember being on the flight home, going, 'You know what? I really have to do something about this. This has really gotten out of control. But I have a friend's birthday tonight, and I need to go out and have a beer with him.' Cut to three in the morning, five beers and five shots in, eating a pizza. I woke up the next morning and I was like, 'That's it. I'm done. I have lost the ability to control this.'"

Ten drinks! Eating pizza! At 3 a.m.! Truly dark times. But it turns out there was some stuff left on the cutting room floor at Spin. Luckily, we've found it: five more dark moments from Ben Gibbard's life.

1. Gibbard recalls once drinking an entire bottle of wine with an ex-girlfriend while watching episodes of The Office on DVR. "We sat there, our teeth stained purple, and I just thought, who are we anymore? I couldn't recognize us. Because of the teeth, yeah, but also because of what we had become."

​2. During the recording of Something About Airplanes, Gibbard began to develop a crippling addiction to playing Snake on his cellphone. "I would stare at the screen, chasing those little dots for hours, watching myself become bigger and bigger. I knew that eventually I'd run out of room -- I'd run into myself." Gibbard pauses, staring out from his home high in the hills of Los Angeles. "But I kept going."