Such is the excitement that surrounds a rare London appearance from Seattle’s new favourite sons, Death Cab for Cutie, that when I arrive early in the afternoon at Brixton’s O2 Academy, set to play host to the band’s headline appearance later in the day, there are already crowds of fans gathering around the venue. Huddled under umbrellas – it’s a miserably grey London “summer” day – these fans await the arrival of their heroes. That Death Cab are now amongst indie rock’s genuine royalty is an undeniable fact, but nevertheless one that remains surprising, even to the band themselves, given their humble roots, and the long route that they’ve taken to get to this point. I sat down with lead singer Ben Gibbard and bassist Nick Harmer to chat about their new album, Codes and Keys, the problems faced with keeping a fanbase happy while remaining creative, and the changing status of independent record labels. I started though, by pointing out to Gibbard that this very website is named after one of his songs…
Ben Gibbard: Yeah, we were just wondering about that! We were just saying, “it has to be a real coincidence…”
How does that feel?
BG: It feels… very nice actually. Our band is named after a song by the Bonzo Dog Band, so it’s kind of nice to think that you’ve put something in the world that someone wants to name something after.
The new album represents a bit of a shift from the two that preceeded it. When you decide to do something a bit new like that, is it a pressure you put on yourself to change things around, does it come from your label to do something different, or is it more just a natural progression into the sound?
BG: With any record that we’ve made, I think with the exception of Plans [Death Cab's major label debut], we’ve never really put that much pressure on ourselves, and we’ve certainly never had any from the label. I think that by the time we signed to Atlantic, we were pretty much already a known quantity, and I think that they wisely realised that we know how to made a record, and they didn’t really want to get too involved with that. Thankfully the records we’ve made have been reasonably successful so they’ve never had to get involved. But really, I think with this record more than any other, the writing of it was just different… maybe because I was writing it in Los Angeles and not Seattle, where I’ve written the last two or three records, but I just felt I could write as openly or as freely as I wanted.
I’ve always felt that your band has been about evolution and not revolution. Your sound continues to change but you’ve never had a ‘Radiohead moment’ and done something radically different. Codes and Keys is new ground for you, but it’s unmistakably a Death Cab record.
Nick Harmer: I feel that way…I really feel like if you start with Something About Airplanes and you listen to every album chronologically then I think you can hear the evolution. I think it comes from a lot of the choices that Chris [Walla, the band's lead guitarist and producer] makes as a producer, he tends to react to what we did on the last record. So because we attempted the last album [2008's Narrow Stairs] on tape, we recorded it on 24 analogue tracks, then this record was all on Logic, on a computer. So that contributes to the changes as well.
BG: We’re not the kind of band that have a summit, that we sit around and talk about how we’re going to, “this one’s going to be totally different, you guys”. We just come into the studio having been influenced by a number of things, anything from the music we’re listening to to the toys that we’re playing with…
What were the different influences for this record? You’ve mentioned Brian Eno in previous interviews.
BG: Yeah, I think a song like ‘Unobstructed Views’ has a very Eno-esque vibe to it. But it’s never really an overt influence like “we’ve all been listening to the band X, and we want to take as much from the band X as possible”. Usually it happens more like, say, Chris has been getting really into an MS-20 keyboard he’s got, that I don’t know how to make music on but he does, and he’ll run the drums through it, and we’ll just go “okay, let’s run with this, see where this is going”, and then over the course of the following weeks certain tones will come through in the way that he’s producing the track. As much as we’re all gravitating towards the songs that I’ve written that tend to be about a particular series of subjects, or that are all related, we’re still weening out the ones that don’t fit tonally or lyrically with what we’re doing in the studio.
Your lyrics are one area where the evolution of Death Cab, and of you as a songwriter is really clear; the lyrics now are a lot less obtuse than they once were. Is there a reason for that, was it a conscious decision to write like that or is it just more suited to the kind of music you’re making now?
BG: Writing lyrics for the earlier records, in my mind I wanted every line to be somewhat profound, and veiled, and full of metaphor, and when I go back to that material there are moments that I’m extremely proud of, but there are also moments that I realise that what I was trying to get across to the listener wasn’t necessarily coming across to the listener the way I wanted it to. And that’s fine, people find and form their own interpretations, but it wasn’t what I wanted to communicate.
I think the important aesthetic of those early albums is that they are so open to interpretation, that they mean something different to everyone. They feel much more personal than the later records, where you’ve perhaps moved towards a more widely recognisable sound.
BG: I think that the more I write songs, the more I find myself attracted to songwriters who just get to the point. I think that in the earlier material there is… the melody and the way I sang it was really just a vehicle for the lyrics, like in my mind I think that was far more important than it is to me now. And I don’t mean that in the sense that I don’t think the lyrics are important, I absolutely think the lyrics are important, but at the same time, I started to value, in relation to the obtuseness and wordyness of the lyric, just a little more economy. Like if a melody goes “da-da-da-da”, there’s room for four syllables, in the past I would have tried to figure out a way to stretch that melody out and fit in more because I couldn’t say as much as I wanted to say in those four syllables. So I’m trying to be more economical and somewhat mimic, at least tonally, that thing that someone like Randy Newman does, you know, if you listen to that record Sail Away, every song is so economical – there’s so few lyrics, but it’s so vivid, you know? And I feel like in the past I’ve done a pretty good job of writing very long verses with a lot of words and a lot of imagery, and I know for a lot of people that’s their favourite type of writing that I’ve done, but for me personally, I want to be a little more economical and let the melody and the voice do the work.
It’s a good measure of your success that you’ve managed to make the transition into doing something that’s more mainstream and to have changed as much as you have as a band, and still have retained the core of your fanbase.
BG: Well thanks! It’s nice to hear that opinion. We’ve been a band for fourteen years and I don’t think we’d still be doing it if… well we were talking earlier about a band, who will remain nameless, who I have been listening to a lot recently, and I like the record but I just don’t see where they’re going to go from here, and I guess it’s just… people probably listened to our early records and thought the same thing, so I don’t want to dismiss anybody’s ability to grow, but I think one of the blessings and curses of being a band who’s been around as long as we have is that our own back catalogue is, I wouldn’t say our own worst enemy, but certainly we’re very aware of our back catalogue.
But do you still enjoy playing those songs live?
BG: Oh, absolutely, but when we’re in the studio we’ll be like “oh that bassline sounds good”—not to pick on you [Ben gestures towards Nick, laughing]—”but it sounds a lot like something off We Have the Facts” and that’s okay sometimes, but we usually want to try something a little different. So I think that being around for this long creates ‘eras’ that people gravitate towards and then that’s their favourite one. And it’s nice to hear the opinion that you have, of the evolution of the band, but there’s also the thing of… people going “why can’t you make another record like Plans?” or whatever.
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Part two of Adam Nelson’s interview with Death Cab For Cutie, can be found here.
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