The Paramount Theatre in Seattle was filled to sweating capacity one winter evening in 2005, all the seats and floor space having been taken over by fans of Death Cab for Cutie who were looking to welcome back their hometown heroes. The band was just ending the first leg of their tour in support of Plans, the album that turned the four young men from the best indie-rock band around into one of the best rock bands working today. By the end of the band’s nine months on the road, they would sell almost a million copies of the album, thanks in no small part to the chiming, radio-friendly single “Soul Meets Body.”
On this night, the scene inside the theater was positively triumphal. The band and audience fed off each other’s energy, sending the music and the crowd response to giddy heights. It was marvelous to witness.
As the band raced through another pointed and emotional song, three preteen girls stood on the first balcony, wearing matching Death Cab T-shirts and jostling one another as they sang and danced along with every word.
These three fans were obviously one of the legions who were converted to the church of Death Cab in the past five years, somewhere between the release of 2003’s Transatlanticism, the band’s appearance on The O.C. and the band’s live show in Seattle.
What would these girls, and the thousands of fans like them, think of Death Cab’s latest album, Narrow Stairs? How would they react to the raw expanse and the shifts in mood and volume that mark the two opening tracks? Would they recoil, wondering where their favorite band has gone, or would they dig deeper, reveling in the album’s parallel slides, from chugging near-metal riffs to rumbling psychedelic pop?
“I’m willing to have people accept and reject this record more than anything I’ve been involved in,” Ben Gibbard, Death Cab’s frontman and principal songwriter, says. “We haven’t turned such a corner that I think we’re going to alienate a lot of people, but if we do, I’m willing to accept that. I think with this record, we’ll get a sense of who’s in it for the long haul.”
It’s a bit of a contentious statement coming from the cherubic 31-year-old, but one he is in a perfect position to make. Besides the meteoric success of Death Cab, Gibbard has also gained a great deal of notoriety as one-half of the electronic-pop duo The Postal Service, whose album Give Up has, since its release in 2003, turned into the second-best seller on Sub Pop Records behind Nirvana’s debut album.
So, if there should be any time for Gibbard and his bandmates (guitarist Chris Walla, bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr) to test their own boundaries as a band and potentially test the limits of their fans’ loyalty, this would be it. In fact, from the comments Walla made to the online entertainment newspaper The A.V. Club three years ago (“... Already in the conversations [the band has had], the next record is seeming kind of weird ... I think the next record’s going to be the prog-rock record.”), the band seemed like they were ready to head in this new direction all along.
Gibbard, however, refutes that notion. “We never had any conversations amongst the four of us about anything further than what was right in front of our faces,” he says.
He will admit, though, that all four members could sense a change was coming. “Subconsciously, we knew that if we were going to keep things interesting, we were going to have to approach this record differently, whether or not it came as a direct result of the songs being structured differently or how we were going to approach the material in general.”
To that end, the group took a completely opposite approach to the way their last album was recorded and written. “Recording Plans was a rather arduous experience,” Gibbard remembers. “The entire record was basically a construction project,” with the band piecing together each instrument and element of the songs one after the other. “We were in this studio in Massachusetts, and I was hearing Jason play drums for six hours and thinking, ‘Man, I really just want to get in there and play!’”
Looking to inject the energy of the band’s concerts and to avoid the drudgery of recording their individual parts in isolation, the four laid down the basic tracks live in the studio. “It really let things breath a little more and let us do what we’re best at,” Gibbard says. “And listening back to this record, there are so many moments that never would have happened otherwise.”
The music on Narrow Stairs was a direct result of the band’s live shows and Gibbard’s self-proclaimed “rediscovery” of the guitar.
That aesthetic choice makes for one of the more striking differences between the two albums. Plans’ subdued dusky vibe on songs like “Brothers On a Hotel Bed” and “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” has been superseded by the driving pulse of “Long Division” and the bouncy modular “No Sunshine” on Stairs.
Although the notion of a band messing with an already established—and bankable—sound may seem a little strange to those three girls in the balcony, it is something longtime fans have come to expect, having followed the band from the lo-fi independently released cassette that introduced Death Cab (1999’s You Can Play These Songs with Chords) to the glossy, full-fledged productions the band puts out today.
The band started in the late ‘90s in Bellingham, Wash., where Gibbard, Harmer and Walla were students at Western Washington University. At the time, Gibbard was playing guitar in a few bands and quietly recording his own material on the side, under the names All-Time Quarterback and Death Cab for Cutie (the name taken from a song by the British group The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band that they performed in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film).
After roping his friend Walla into helping him do some recording for what would become Chords, the project soon blossomed into a full-fledged band, including Harmer and their first drummer, Nathan Good (later replaced by Michael Schorr; McGerr wouldn’t come into the picture until just before the recording of Transatlanticism).
Through four full-lengths and a series of singles and EPs—almost all of which have been released through indie label Barsuk Records—and their consistent touring, the band’s fan base grew exponentially, and by the end of 2004 they had become the poster boys of indie rock, thanks in no small part to their association with The O.C.
The band also ended up being one of the first A-list indie bands to cross over to a different tax bracket, signing with Atlantic Records in 2004. Although the move was hotly contested at the time, the band has joined the ranks of groups like Sonic Youth, R.E.M. and Modest Mouse, all of whom were able to make the transition to the majors while keeping their reputation firmly intact.
If there were any concerns the band would literally change their tune after signing to a major label, they were hushed with the release of Plans and should be completely quieted by the time Stairs hits the streets. In fact, Gibbard says, for the most part, Atlantic has been fairly hands-off thus far. “Really, the amount of involvement doesn’t feel that much different than when we were on Barsuk,” he says.
Now that the band has one major-label record under their belt, it has helped them iron out any wrinkles in the involvement Atlantic does have, according to Gibbard. “We learned to communicate and to express what we want and need, and things we will do and won’t do.”
The label is undoubtedly open to listening to the band, considering how well Plans performed for all parties involved. In return, it has allowed the band to record the new album “in a vacuum.” “We had literally no outside involvement whatsoever with the record until we turned it in,” Gibbard says. “I mean, when we were almost done [with Stairs], a couple people from the label came in to hear some songs. They liked what they heard and said, ‘Great! We’ll see you on the release date.’”
Gibbard does take a realistic view of that enthusiasm, however. “I’m sure if the last record tanked, they would have been much more interested in mixing and song choice,” he says. “But for now, they are really cool about letting us do the things we want to do.”
Something the band really wants to do is get involved in this year’s presidential election in some capacity. The fiercely outspoken and liberal band acted similarly in 2004, when they took part in the Vote for Change tour. Currently, they are poring over the news, waiting to find out who will be the Democratic nominee so they can finally decide exactly how involved they want to be (all four members of the group are staunch Barack Obama supporters).
Gibbard says his involvement with the ‘04 election taught him some valuable lessons about “how things really work in this country. I count myself among the people who were starry-eyed, thinking that if you just do the work, things are going to work out the way you want them to,” he says. “That really was not the case.”
Another lesson learned from the experience was to keep things as apolitical as he could outside of such events. Gibbard says he “took a little too much fervor” into some of Death Cab’s post-Vote for Change shows, spending stretches of time onstage decrying our current president. “I was a little more vocal than I probably should have been, especially in the South,” he remembers. On more than one occasion, fans confronted Gibbard after a show, denouncing his testifying on John Kerry’s behalf. “I had to remind myself that the majority of these people are coming to these shows to get away from that stuff and the barrage of politics that comes with it.”
Outside of an election year, Death Cab does work in support of Seattle-based causes, including donating money from ticket sales to help provide school lunches for kids who can’t afford them, and doing benefit shows for 826 Seattle, a nonprofit writing center for students between the ages of 6 and 18.
Although bandmate Chris Walla does work with PETA, Gibbard is a little wary of using his celebrity to stump for larger causes. “It’s a hard thing to find that balance,” he says. “How do you use the level of celebrity you have, and at what point does that become grandstanding? My parents taught me that when you give and support an organization, you shouldn’t do it looking to get patted on the back. I don’t want it to be something I do to get on the cover of Good Guy Weekly.”
As with the discussion of charitable giving, Gibbard is ready, willing and able to cover, at length, most any topic thrown his way. Any topic, that is, other than the lyrical content of his latest album. “I’m not sure I’m the best one to comment on that,” he says. “I feel like I’m still digesting the record. I think that’s what doing interviews on the record is all about. I’m still learning about how to wrap my head around what I just said.”
One can hardly blame him, for there’s much on Stairs to chew on. As Gibbard has shown during his service with Death Cab and The Postal Service, his pointillist lyrics smear all kinds of heady detail into large, almost literary pictures. In years past, the images were focused on people obtaining and losing love. But these days, they have become more abstract as they take on emotions that are a little more slippery, like regret, fear and frustration.
“No Sunlight,” for example, speaks to the loss of idealism and optimism as one becomes an adult, all wrapped up in the metaphor of a sunny day turned overcast. Other songs delve into the notion of “falling into constructs we don’t necessarily want simply because they’re part of ‘growing up,’” says Gibbard, pointing specifically to, “Cath,” one of the heartbreaking centerpiece songs on the new album.
That Gibbard is able to wrench such incisive emotion from even the most upbeat of songs is both a testament to his abilities as a writer as well as an obvious result of how closely tied he is to each piece he writes. “I don’t think I would have written the songs if they weren’t in some way related to me,” he says.
As for how closely related they are, Gibbard gets a little cagey. “There are songs I think are kind of stand-ins for certain people in my life,” he says—though that notion may be news to some folks. “As with any record we put out, there are some people who have been so thickly veiled that I may be sleeping right next to them and they won’t realize a song is about them.” Gibbard is also prepared to deal with “the person who emails me upset because they saw themselves in something I wrote. That’s not specific to me, though. That’s prevalent in any writer’s work.”
Another lyrical subject Gibbard has touched on in the past is what he refers to as his “not disbelief but certainly agnostic position on spirituality.” He is surprised at the notion that Death Cab has many Christian fans. “The closest we got to any understanding that we had a Christian fan base was when we toured with Pedro The Lion about eight years ago,” he recalls. “A couple of people would come up to us and say, ‘It’s so great there’s another Christian band touring with Pedro,’ and we’d go, ‘We’re not a Christian band.’”
The reason Gibbard brings up lyrics is in relation to another secular group with a Christian following, the Brit-pop trio Keane. “That makes sense to me, because some of their songs can easily be transferred into spiritual songs. The same way that U2’s ‘I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For’ can be turned into a gospel song,” he says, though he’s hard-pressed to think of any Death Cab lyrics that can be reused in the same capacity.
Gibbard himself was raised Catholic, and the other members of his band, as far as their frontman can recall, were “probably raised in a family that says they’re Christian just because everyone in the neighborhood says they’re Christian. I wouldn’t be able to tell you what kind of affiliation, which is probably some indication of how much time they went to church growing up!”
When Death Cab for Cutie hits a stage again, it will have been more than a year since their last live appearance together. Following the extended tour for Plans, the group took a full eight months off, giving everyone time to indulge in their own projects and pastimes—Walla recorded a solo album, Field Manual, as well as helped record new albums by Tegan & Sara and So Many Dynamos; Gibbard did a solo tour and made an appearance in a film directed by John Krasinski (Jim from NBC’s The Office); McGerr opened his own recording studio.
Soon enough, the band will be crisscrossing the country, with stops at this year’s Coachella, Sasquatch and Bonnaroo Festivals, and then a full headlining jaunt of their own. Gibbard, for one, is ready. “[I’m] chomping at the bit to just get in a room and turn up my amp,” he says. “I’m looking forward to getting back in that mode of living for a while.”
The question now becomes whether at one of those shows will there be three girls in matching shirts, a few years older, but still friends and who still know all the words. It’s hard to say, really. By this time, those three young ladies could have moved on to their next musical obsession.
Perhaps they took a chance on Narrow Stairs and gave up after the first few minutes of the opening track, wondering where the band that made them so dizzy with glee that one night just a few years ago went.
Even if Death Cab for Cutie does lose this trio of young ladies—and hundreds more like them—in the wake of their newest endeavor, there will be plenty more behind them, ready, willing and able to follow them into the dark.
By Robert Ham