 Death Cab for Cutie plan for the inevitable
by Steve McPherson
“You know, the band does really well,” says singer Ben Gibbard by phone from New York City, where Death Cab for Cutie are killing time before taping their first appearance on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” “but there are always going to be those people who are anti-sentimental that just can’t stand what we do or they don’t get it. And it’s weird because every once in a while, I’ll run into somebody who has been through a situtation like that [a bad breakup] and found the records and says, ‘I never liked your band, but I got it.’ And I’m sorry that they had to get it that way.”
 I
got it that way. And it’s not that I hated Death Cab for Cutie, it’s
just that 2003’s Transatlanticism seemed to be documenting my life
as it happened, which was downright eerie. A near-concept album about the dissolution
of a long-term, long-distance relationship, Transatlanticism was a listening
experience I almost didn’t want to have. It was like the little broken
voice in my head whose mouth I’d taped shut three months earlier had somehow
gotten loose and started singing. Death Cab’s earlier albums (1998’s
Something About Airplanes, 2000’s We Have the Facts and We’re
Voting Yes) contained the same literate, personal narratives that broke
so many more mainstream hearts on Transatlanticism, but the goods came
wrapped in squallier guitars and rougher drums and just a whole lot more “attitude.”
2001’s The Photo Album was a dramatic step forward in sound quality,
although the simmering anger on cuts like “Why You’d Want to Live
Here” and “Styrofoam Plates” gave the record its share of
spleen. Transatlanticism had songs like “The Sound of Settling”
that heralded an older, wiser Death Cab. And now, after signing to Atlantic
Records and making the move to the major leagues which will inevitably damn
them to a special circle of hell in the eyes of certain indie rock fans, they’re
continuing to chip away at the trappings of their garage band image to reveal
the mortal concerns and beautiful pieces underneath on Plans.
Where before there were the driving guitars of The Photo Album’s
“We Laugh Indoors,” there’s now piano and the electronic influence
of Gibbard’s other band, The Postal Service. When the title track on Transatlanticism
began with gently chorded piano, it stood out, but on Plans, at least
half the tracks begin in such a manner. Underneath, it’s not really such
a departure, though. Gibbard’s lyrics have always skirted the edge of
heavy-handed and there are plenty of people who find choruses like “Sorrow
drips into your heart through a pinhole/ just like a faucet that leaks and there
is comfort in the sound/ but while you debate half-empty or half-full your love
is gonna drown”—from lead track “Marching Bands of Manhattan”—just
too perfectly rendered to be really affecting.  But
Gibbard’s kind of sentimentality is very different from treacly Hallmark
cards. Serious art in this century and in this country is in a bit of a pickle,
having painted itself into a corner with a brush called irony. David Foster
Wallace wrote in Infinite Jest about his protagonist Hal Incandenza,
a teenager in the not-so-distant future, “Hal, who’s empty but not
dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of
sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really
human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental
and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic … One of the really
American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he’s
really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and
need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask.” Once upon
a time, authors like Dostoevsky wrote classic novels about devotion to God and
the power of humanity’s love without a speck of sarcasm, and what makes
Plans a real risk of an album is not difficulty, but simplicity. “I’m
a big fucking softie,” says Gibbard. “I like Cameron Crowe movies.
People can figure out how to make billions of dollars and how to get to the
moon and how to clone a pig and they still can’t figure out the matters
of their own heart and that’s why love songs will always be applicable.
It is the most base emotion,” he says and, in a particularly Gertrude
Stein-esque construction, continues, “and the most least understood thing
in the world.” Diving into that vast quantity of misunderstood love is
the kind of pie-eyed move that gets them comparisons with another indie band
gone major.
Travis Morrison (formerly of the Dismemberment Plan) has been quoted as saying
that Death Cab for Cutie is this rock generation’s R.E.M.: a respected
underground act that put out a passel of indie albums before making the leap
to stadiums and arenas. Time will tell how apt this comparison is, but talking
with bassist Nick Harmer by phone from Los Angeles makes it seem like the jump
to a major was virtually pre-ordained by an infamous list of demands. “We
would just send out this long list of bullet points of things that we would
look for in a contract and things that we would want [in order] to protect ourselves.
It was completely generated by having conversations with friends of ours who
had gone through major label situations that were just awful, saying, ‘Be
careful of this and don’t do that and make sure that you watch this ‘cause
this is a lie,’ and that kind of stuff. So we just put it all together
in a big list of things and that list was so laughable 10 years ago or five
years ago, one, because we weren’t a band that had any kind of clout or
muscle to move around in negotiations but two, just because the industry wasn’t
willing to take any risks on bands like us for whatever reason.
 “So
this time when people came around we thought it was going to be more of the
same: We sent out the list and you know, predictably, there were a few labels
that were just like, ‘Ha ha ha, yeah right; have a good day,’ but
surprisingly we sent it to Atlantic and they called back and said, ‘Looks
great!’ We always said that if they gave us these things that we’d
do it and now they’re giving us these things.”
Not that the roundabout journey through the offices of the major labels was
without its share of drama. I had heard something about their experience at
now largely defunct Elektra Records; this was the label that dropped their friends
Nada Surf after their second album failed to live up to label expectations in
the wake of their hit “Popular” and dropped Spoon before their record
A Series of Sneaks had really even hit stores. “When we went in
to Elektra—first of all, it was pretty obvious that everybody’s
head was on the chopping block,” says Gibbard. “You could cut the
tension and the grief in that room with a fucking knife. I went to ask to use
the bathroom and somebody gave me shit about it. And [label head] Sylvia [Rhone]’s
sitting there and talking all about how they’re all about artist development
and they want to do the slow burn and all that shit that major labels say and
they don’t mean. And I felt in my own little way like Kanye [West speaking
up against George W. Bush] on TV. When I was watching [West], you could just
see him getting really nervous and I kind of felt the same way when I decided
I was going to stand up to this person, ‘cause I’d just fucking
had it. Like, ‘You know what? Nada Surf had a fucking hit, and you dropped
Spoon a week after their record came out. We’re friends with these bands
and you’re sitting here talking how you’re all about artist development
and we have two bands that we’re really close friends with that have been
dropped from your label.’ So she gives us this story about Spoon that’s
totally erroneous. All about how, ‘Well, I never met the band so we didn’t
have a connection and this and that and it didn’t work out.’ And
I saw Britt [Daniel, of Spoon] like two weeks later and he was like, ‘What
the fuck? I was in her office for three hours and she talked all about how great
our band was.’ I mean, [did she] not think I was gonna check up? These
are my friends. Do you think I’m not gonna get the real story? I wouldn’t
be caught dead signing to a label that would do that to people.”
I guess you could say that the indie aesthetic is still alive and well in the
band, despite the sculpted contour of Plans. “People talk about
going to a major label for the resources,” Gibbard says, “but really,
I would rather borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large corporation
that can afford to lose it if something goes wrong than to borrow half that
from a label run by one of our best friends. [It would] basically mean having
our friend put his house up on the chopping block in good faith that you’re
going to make a record that’s gonna sell. So when the indie vs. major
argument comes up, I say, ‘We wanted to make a record the way we wanted
to make it and not have any kind of financial barriers.’ And doing that
on [their former label] Barsuk would’ve meant a far larger risk to our
friends than doing it on a major label.”
 Given
the current state of the music industry, it’s debatable whether any major
record label could actually afford to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars,
but the point is well-made and it’s something I hadn’t considered.
Death Cab was outgrowing tiny Hall of Justice Studios (“We want[ed] to
mix in a good studio, not the Hall of Justice where three of the tracks are
out,” says Gibbard) and so they went to rural North Brookfield, Mass.,
to make Plans. “Our experience in Massachusetts was great,”
says Harmer. “It was really kind of refreshing and nice to be isolated.
It’s funny how isolation does different things to different people. Chris
[Walla]—our guitar player and producer—he sort of embraced it like
a madman really. He never left the barn of the studio the entire month. He just
got focused in on it and he never wanted to leave. Ben and I, though, would
go through these periods where we were just like, ‘We gotta go someplace.
Just take us to a shopping mall! I don’t care!’ We just wanted to
know that human beings exist.”
That push-pull between the need for human interaction that drives the creative
process and the need to shut out the world in order to craft the end product
got to Ben Gibbard a lot earlier than the rest of the band since he’s
largely responsible for coming up with the seeds (“We always say it’s
less like politics and chemistry,” says Harmer, “and more like farming.”)
that will become the songs. “For about two months [when I was] finishing
writing the record, I rented an apartment in downtown Seattle and just moved
my piano and a desk in there and some really minimal recording stuff and I would
just go there during the week. Just take the bus in there and work on music
and then go home. When I had all my stuff in my house, I’d be in the basement
all day. My girlfriend would come home and I’d just be crazed, because
I’d been there working all morning but I can’t leave it or let it
go; it’s still in the basement like a fucking ogre down there trying to
come up the stairs and pull me down.”
For this album, Gibbard says he just didn’t feel excited to write on guitar,
hence the prevalence of keyed instruments on Plans. “It was far
more inspiring and exciting,” he explains, “to do things not on
guitar. But it’s weird because for me now that’s changed 180 degrees;
I don’t know if it’s just because we played with Built to Spill
a couple of times, but I feel like I’m excited about guitars again.”
 That
news likely comes as welcome relief to fans who miss their more-rocking early
days, but don’t bet on their albums returning to the themes that dominated
in the past. “That record [Transatlanticism] is one big breakup
record for me, too,” says Gibbard, after I cop to my discovery of them.
“That’s chronicling the end of a four-year relationship. It’s
the kind of record that I don’t ever want to write again, for a number
of reasons.” Plans has gotten a reputation as being a record about maturity,
but Gibbard doesn’t really see it that way, precisely. “I don’t
really see it so much as being about growing older as becoming aware of things
in life that maybe you had not spent too much time thinking about before. [I’ve
been] really taking stock of relationships and feeling a sense of commitment
in my life, maybe because of the fact that I am getting to be that age where
I want people to be in my life forever. And I don’t know if this is the
onset of pessimistic realism, [but] I find myself seeing the end of that. A
song like ‘What Sarah Said’ comes out of this story that our friend
Sarah was telling us about walking with her husband one day and getting really
emotional and being like, ‘God, I’m gonna have to watch you die
and that really sucks.’ But there’s something beautiful about having
people in your life that you care so much about that you want to see the end
with them. And to me, that’s colored, certainly, songs like ‘Soul
Meets Body’ and ‘I’ll Follow You into the Dark.’ I see
it as an incredibly touching sentiment that your commitment to somebody makes
you aware of your mortality and theirs.
“Obviously, when you have songs about death it can come off really heavy
but … even a song like ‘Brothers [On a Hotel Bed]’: I think
that’s where people are getting the idea of this theme about getting older.
To me, I don’t feel like people my parents’ age have enough songs
about them that aren’t fucking cheesy as shit. Any song that deals with
people who are adults and their adult lives and real things people go through
tend to be these really sappy, shitty, triple-A [Adult Album Alternative], bad,
poorly written songs. The fact that it comes later in the record is indicative—I
wanted the songs more sunny in the front end and as the record goes on you have
songs about being older—I just wanted to write a song about people that
don’t get to have songs written about them in an intelligent way.”
 It’s
these “adult” songs (acoustic stunner “I Will Follow You into
the Dark”; meditation on mortality “What Sarah Said”; gentle
paean to maturity “Brothers on a Hotel Bed”) that form the album’s
heart and when Gibbard strays into more familiar territory he does sound maybe
just a bit tired of boy-girl problems. “Crooked Teeth” seems like
the same song as Transatlanticism’s “Tiny Vessels,”
but without the sharp edges that made it an outstandingly bitter pill for anyone
who’s ever gotten in over their head with the wrong person. “Summer
Skin” and “Your Heart is an Empty Room” sound like outtakes
remastered for a career retrospective boxed set: good enough songs, but not
really A-list somehow.
Those songs that form the core, though, are flat-out amazing; they represent
the kind of writing (along with songs like “Styrofoam Plates” and
“Transatlanticism”) that places Gibbard alongside the finest rock
songwriters. His ability to inhabit narrators and turn them into characters
and not caricatures is best shown on “Brothers,” where an aging
protagonist addresses his life’s love, saying, “You may tire of
me as our December sun is setting, ‘cause I’m not who I used to
be/ No longer easy on the eyes but these wrinkles masterfully disguise the youthful
boy below/ who turned your way and saw something he was not ready for: both
a beginning and an end/ But now he lives inside, someone he does not recognize
when he catches his reflection on accident.” Gibbard’s recognition
of seeing in someone “both a beginning” of a lifelong relationship
“and an end” to all the anticipation of first dates and first kisses,
not to mention the end of your life together, is what gets me most and I ask
him about it. “I watched this movie recently—‘Beautiful Girls’—[and]
there’s this line where [Timothy Hutton] is sitting with Uma Thurman and
says, ‘I just want a couple more of those firsts.’ You know, the
first time that you talk on the phone for two hours and you can’t stop
thinking about that person. And that’s the end of that. And that’s
fine; that’s what happens. But I don’t think anybody that’s
honest with themselves doesn’t—no matter how content they are in
their life and relationship and whatever—doesn’t want another one
of those.”
Listening more and more to the song, though, I’ve become even more impressed
with the beginning of the next verse: “On the back of a motorbike, with
your arms outstretched trying to take flight, leaving everything behind/ But
even at our swiftest speed we couldn’t break from the concrete in the
city where we still reside.” At one point in the interview, Gibbard begins
talking about writer Raymond Carver and his elliptical way of getting at meaning.
In his own way, Gibbard’s been doing this in song since “I Was A
Kaleidoscope” from The Photo Album, singing “Parents layered
clothes until their children couldn’t move and then left them outside
until there noses were blue” in the middle of a pretty standard breakup
song. This metonymic eye for detail that can turn a small part of an experience
into a metaphor for the messy whole is Gibbard’s stock and trade, and
while it’s been cleaned up on Plans, it’s been there since the days
when they played the Foxfire here in Minneapolis.
 “The
woman that ran that place—Elizabeth [Larsen]—was really nice and
we had a great time,” says Harmer. “Since then we’ve moved
to the Seventh St. Entry and First Avenue. We’ve actually been a band
long enough that we’ve seen a lot of changes downtown there. When we were
first coming to Minneapolis it was a little desolate across from the Target
Center and now … it looks like a shopping mall!
“It’s funny to have such an authentic, grounded rock club right
next to this sort of fake, postured restaurant,” he continues. “Like,
one of these things actually lives it and breathes it and the other thing just
looks like it. I’m imagining tourists coming into town, sitting across
in the Hard Rock Café and look[ing] over at the dingy club with all the
silver stars painted on the side of it and going, ‘I wonder what goes
on in there; probably a lot of bad stuff.’ You don’t understand!
[First Ave] is where people cut their teeth! That’s where it happens!”
Gibbard adds, “First Ave is one of those clubs that we’ll always
go back to. We’re not gonna play anywhere bigger in Minneapolis; if it
takes playing there three nights, we’ll play three nights. It’s
a very comfortable place, we know the score in there, we know everybody that
works there.”
With
an album that asks so many questions about what’s going to happen to ourselves
and the people we hold dear over the years, it seems only natural to finish
up by asking about the future of the band, but apparently, Gibbard doesn’t
have quite the long-term view for that that he does for his other personal relationships. 
“I don’t fucking know,” he laughs dismissively. “The
band could last another 10 years, it could end in six months. I don’t
know. We get along great, we enjoy each other’s company, we’re playing
better than we ever have before; that’s all I can really take stock in
at this point. Bands break up; that’s just what happens. My only hope
is that whenever we decide to stop playing it’s for a real legitimate
reason and not because somebody calls someone else a fucker.” ||
Death Cab for Cutie are playing two shows at First Avenue with Youth Group.
Mon., Oct. 10 is an All Ages show at 6 p.m. and Tue., Oct. 11 is 21+ at 8 p.m.
Both are $20 advance/ $22 door. 701 First Ave. N, Mpls. 612-338-8388.
For more information on Death Cab for Cutie, check out their
official website at DeathCabForCutie.com.
Head over to PulseTCmusic.BlogSpot.com
for complete transcriptions of the interviews with Nick Harmer and Ben Gibbard.
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