Death Cab for Cutie

On August 30th, innumerable indie rock lovers donned their favorite indie rock T-shirts, Converse and shoulder bags, got their hair just messy enough and crooked their thick rimmed glasses. Then they traveled to their favorite indie record store to buy their favorite indie rock band’s new album. These fans picked up the new jewel case, trying to hide their excitement by putting on an I-don’t-even-care face. And as they turned the album over they noticed something was missing. “Hey! Where’s the little dog logo?” Then they noticed something else. “What’s this ‘A’ doing here?!” Cue the Jaws music. Is it the same “A” that Hester Prynne had to wear emblazoned on her chest? No, but that would almost be better. This “A” stands for Atlantic. As in Atlantic Records? No way! Uh-oh. Where’s the oxygen mask? Death Cab for Cutie is no longer indie! What should we do?
Buy the album.
    Death Cab for Cutie fans know that with each successive album, Death Cab has only gotten better. Frontman Ben Gibbard’s songwriting and lyrics have improved, as have guitarist Chris Walla’s production and mixing skills. Nick Harmer has gotten better at gluing the music together with his pulsating bass. And now, finally there’s a drummer who’s stuck around for more than one album, Jason McGerr, who’s recorded some of the band’s most impressive drum tracks to date. If you’re concerned that changing to a major label has adversely affected the band’s sound, don’t worry; and if you’ve got plans to pick up Plans, keep them. But if you’re just looking for a “Boohoo my girlfriend left, so I’m sad,” song-after-song sort of album, this isn’t it. Plans goes deeper. It examines how true love is watching someone die (“What Sarah Said”); it considers the insecurity of growing old and into someone you yourself, and perhaps the person you love, can no longer recognize (“Brothers On A Hotel Bed”). Yet, Plans still retains the catchy yet melancholy tone that has made Death Cab famous.
    In a set of two interviews, Synthesis was able to talk to the members of Death Cab For Cutie—with Chris Walla and Jason McGerr at the Lollapalooza festival in Chicago, and then later over the phone with Ben Gibbard—about the making of Plans, their move from Barsuk to Atlantic, the trials and tribulations of playing difficult music on stage for the first time, and much, much more.

[07/24/2005  Chicago, IL | Chris Walla and Jason McGerr at Lollapalooza]

For this record, you moved from the small independent label Barsuk to Atlantic. Has that changed the way you work at all?
Chris Walla: Yeah. I honestly think the biggest difference is all the new people that we’re meeting. It used to be when we got to this stage with an album at Barsuk, there were really only three or four or five people that we were ever dealing with from day to day at the label. And then booking when we were setting up tours. Then, when we were finishing Transatlanticism we didn’t have any management, either. We were taking care of everything ourselves. And after five or six years of taking care of everything yourself it’s hard to get used to delegating and spreading things out—letting other people have control of different aspects of the record.
    They stayed very much out of the process of making the record. It was all the details after that, which we were involved in, which in the past we weren’t very much involved in at all. They’d finish something and run it by us, and we’d be like, “Really? You guys did that? Yeah, I guess that’s fine.” For me that’s been the biggest difference. Sort of in terms of so many people to meet. Like different radio reps. Spending lots and lots of time with the label when we’re in New York. That sort of thing.
Jason McGerr: It seems too, I don’t know about you, Chris, but this seems like it’s happening really, really fast.
CW: Yeah.
JM: Like we just finished the record. It was scheduled to have a release in October sometime and it got bumped up like six weeks or something like that. All of a sudden we’re like, “holy shit!” We’ve got to practice. We’ve got to get artwork. It’s been sort of light speed. And now we’re here, and doing all this press. The next thing you know we’re going to blink and it’ll be Christmas. So in that climate, things start to move a whole lot faster, too.

Transatlanticism has been repeatedly hailed not only as your “best album to date,” but also as your “breakthrough” into mass popularity. Did this sort of press affect you or put any added pressure on you when you approached Plans?
JM: I think it produced less anxiety. When we came out of the studio with Transatlanticism we all wanted to listen to the record instead of shelving it for six months. I think that gave us more confidence as a band to know that when it was time to go back in we were going to be just fine. I personally didn’t think about numbers or labels or anything like that. It was a far more relaxed record all in all. We spent more time on it. There were times when we’d put in 14 hours in a day—especially Chris. It came out pretty effortlessly, I think.

Transatlanticism grapples with the ideas of distance and space, whether they are emotional or geographical or physical. What are the overarching themes running through Plans, and are there any undercurrents one might miss if they are only listening on the surface?
CW: I think if there’s a theme to Plans, there’s still that notion of distance and space, but Ben ended up writing more about what’s the beginning and what’s the end of any given thing. Like I’m in love and things are great now, but you’re gonna die. There are larger questions that he’s addressed but in an intimate way. That’s right on the surface of this record. It’s very present. I think the writing by and large is a little more direct. I’ll be curious to see how it all gets received over time. It feels like Transatlanticism felt. It’s almost an extension of that process and that time.
    We’ve said this a bunch of times, but this is only the second record where we’ve had the same four people playing on it. We’ve been lucky enough to have Jason on two records in a row, so we’ve actually got to build on what happened with Transatlanticism. Whereas with all the other records, Transatlanticism included, we had to start fresh with each one.

[Later, Synthesis caught up with Ben Gibbard over the phone]

Despite the 105-degree heat at Lollapalooza, you had a large crowd sticking around to see you. Some fans started waiting at 2:30 PM, staking their claim in the pit, to see you go on at 8:30 PM. How does it feel to have such a devoted fanbase?
Ben Gibbard: I remember making a comment to someone earlier in the day on Sunday like, “I don’t know who would sit around all day in this heat for anybody.” No matter who it was. I don’t care if the Beatles were playing, I wouldn’t hang out when it’s 105 degrees. I mean there wasn’t a lot of shade. It was really brutal. I was really taken by everybody’s energy level in the crowd. Maybe it was because the sun was going down. I guess if you stick around that long, you’re there for some reason; you’re there with purpose.
    The only time you have any quantitative depiction of the people who like our music, a depiction of our fans, is when we play shows. I live in my head; I’m who I am all the time. I have things in my head, like today I have to mow the yard. I forget sometimes that people are really excited about the band because most of my life isn’t doing that—being on stage, playing shows. We played Milwaukee a few weeks before Lollapalooza and it was off the chain. People were really excited. I always think that we’re going to play a show and then people are going to forget about us if we don’t play another show in their town. I guess to see that many people out there who’ve come to see us play in the heat is reassuring.
     
Did you approach your songwriting differently with Plans than your other albums?
BG: I feel like I wrote fewer songs on guitar. This is the first record that I’ve written where I’ve recorded all my demos into a computer. And when you record into a computer you have the ability to cut and paste things and move them around unlike when you’re working on a four-track. You’re able to find little snippets of things from all over the place and then have that turn into the first idea that starts the song, whether it’s a drum beat off a record or a little guitar loop from something, or just an organ part that really sounds good, and you can make it into a song. So there were fewer songs that started how I would traditionally write, with guitar and vocals—you know, sitting with an acoustic guitar and writing a song. It was more like sitting in front of the computer with a keyboard and running with that. When I think about it, there are only three or four songs on the record where I’m actually playing guitar. I guess it’s a little bit different, but nothing too different.
    Then there’s a song, “Brothers on a Hotel Bed,” that Chris wrote. He just kind of gave it to me and I kind of moved it around and put it together in a way that made sense to me.

“What Sarah Said” is a very moving song about one person watching someone they love die in a hospital. What was the seed for that song?
BG: We had this girl on tour who sold merch for us—her name’s Sarah. She’s a really good friend of ours. Her husband’s in a band that tours with us, so she goes on tour with us a lot. And then one day she was relaying this story to us about how she and her husband were out walking around the neighborhood, just doing nothing, and then she suddenly got really depressed, she had this huge dip, and got really emotional. Her husband was like, “What’s wrong?” And she answered, “I’m going to have to watch you die.” It was this realization of one of us is going to have to watch the other one die. When she was telling me the story I thought that this was just a really beautiful idea—even if it is a really sad scenario—that this is a really beautiful transition in our lives, that we care about someone so much we are willing to go through the biggest transition there is with them.

There are gestures toward religion and religious themes throughout Plans. There’s a reference to Catholic School and the nuns leaving bruises on a young boy’s knuckles, there’s mention of souls several times, cleansing water—which could be taken as baptism, and then references to both heaven and hell. How would you like your audience to interpret these gestures? Are they there primarily because you are addressing throughout the album these big questions about life and death and the line that separates them?
BG: As with anything I write or anything we put out, I would like people to kind of formulate their own opinions on it. So if Sally Church decides that this is a record that has a religious epiphany of some sort in it—great. I mean it’s completely up to her, I guess.
    I kind of feel that any points in the record that reference traditional religious elements… I’ve been in my own kind of spiritual quest, if you can even call it that. I find myself throwing my hands up more than finding any answer to the question of what happens to us after we die. In any kind of religious organization, no matter how high up someone is, they still have as much knowledge as I do when it comes to what happens after we die. I mean, you can study the Koran for 50 years or the Bible or the Torah, but we’re all kind of waiting to see what’s going to happen. And anyone who tries to tell you that they know what’ll happen is deluding himself or herself and you. While I perfectly understand the idea of faith, and what that means, and how it helps people get through their days, I certainly would never knock anybody with strong religious faith. But that being said, nobody really knows what’s going to happen when you die. Nobody knows. I’m more fixated on that fact than finding any kind of religious beliefs that appeal to me. I feel that the mentions of heaven and hell, and then souls, that sort of cryptic baptismal reference, I kind of see them all as a series of things that I would like to believe in. 

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