American Songwriter April/May 2008

DCfC’s Chris Walla Goes It Alone on Field Manual
Interview by John D. Luerssen


If being the guitarist and producer in the critically acclaimed, fan-revered Death Cab for Cutie and a respected producer of brilliant records like Nada Surf’s The Weight is a Gift and The Decemberists’ The Crane Wife wasn’t enough, one-man wrecking machine Chris Walla asserts himself to be one hell of a songwriter on his first-ever solo offering,Field Manual—which he released through Barsuk Records back on January 29.

Recorded with Canadian-based producer Warne Livesy, who holds production credits for his work with Midnight Oil, The The and Julian Cope, Field Manual is an alluring, atmospheric and politically themed alternative pop record that cannot be denied. When a hard drive containing the completed disc was detained by U.S. customs last fall as it was shipped down from British Columbia, it landed national news coverage. Walla talks about how Bill O’Reilly helped inform one of the disc’s finest moments, why he’s such a freakin’ workaholic and how The Connells changed his life.

When Field Manual was detained by U.S. Customs, were you fearful you’d never get it back?
Luckily, there was a safety drive that backed everything up, but there was a delay because Warne, who was working on the record, was away…so we weren’t able to get to it for a couple of weeks. As a result, there was a real impact on the production schedule. Most notably, the advances that went out to the media had a bunch of rough mixes. And I only had an eight-day window to mix five or six songs.

I love the upbeat vibe of the first single, “Sing Again.” How did that song develop?
That song took shape in 1999, and the chorus hasn’t changed much since then, although the rest of the lyric is completely rewritten. It was written at a point when I was starting to notice that we had enough rock anthems in the world, and I wanted to go in a completely different direction. That’s definitely the oldest idea on the record.

The guitar line on “Geometry Et Cetera” is irresistible. Did it start with that part?
Actually, no. That song started with the chorus/hook, and that’s sort of how most of these songs start. I find myself singing something to myself, and as long as I don’t have an accessible phone or computer, I can usually take an idea and get writing accomplished. The phone and the computer are usually creativity killers for me. Usually, I get inspiration from something that just happened in the quiet of the day…where I was walking around a lake…or I’m on tour on a street in a town that I’m unfamiliar with. Or maybe I’ll wake up with a song in my head that I can’t identify…or I’ll be in a car on a long drive and starting to get sick of listening to public radio through the static. They start all sorts of ways.


“Everybody Needs a Home” balances a warm, optimistic musical vibe with a biting lyrical commentary?
Yes, and that was by design. In the month following Hurricane Katrina, there were so many talking heads on the pundit shows talking about why it happened and who was to blame for the decisions being made in its aftermath. I forget where I was—I know we were on tour to support Plans—and I was flipping through the channels, and it was one of the less-than-civil shows…Bill O’Reilly [The O’Reilly Factor], I think. Someone was trying to cut through his static and just trying to get the point across, like, look, “Everyone needs a home.” It was the first thing that was so simple and so true in that whole debacle that I latched onto it and carried it around with me for a while, and it turned into a melody pretty quickly. One of the things that I really enjoy about it is that there is such a soft collection of letters and vowels on it. There’s percussion, and it’s rhythmic, but it’s really pleasing musically while making a point.


If you get hung up on a song, what do you do to work around the problem?
You know, every one of these songs got stopped up at one point or another. Like… “There’s no second verse. Do I have anything else to say?” And I have found over and over and over, if I can get away from the song for a while, time is always on your side. I do this when I’m producing records, too. I just start stripping elements away. If the bass is carrying all of the changes and I pull that out, the whole dynamic changes. I can get back to instrumental tracks and think of other melodies or other instrumental ideas I might have kicking around. It’s half luck and half work—tinkering and toying around with songs. It’s funny how words will suggest themselves in the strangest places, particularly with a topical record…I found things in news reports.

Between the production efforts, your own songwriting and touring duties with Death Cab, some might think you’re a workaholic.
I think that’s true. Actually, there’s no doubt about it. But I will give myself blackout periods when everything gets shut down. I go to an actual ghost town in the very, very rural north. I’ll work every day for three months on something, but then I’ll go six weeks where I’ll do nothing. So it’s definitely not a nine-to-five gig for me. I have so much belief in creative inertia, and flow and momentum. When there’s a thing that’s happening day after day after day, to deny that and take a day off seems ludicrous to me. It’s not how creative work works.

On your Hall of Justice website, I saw you had posted a bunch of covers, including songs by American Music Club, Clinic and a tune [“Too Gone”] by The Connells, who are one of the great unsung American rock bands of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alongside the song, you write of their 1990 album One Simple Word, “I was 15, and that album changed my life.”

It’s true. It was such a big record for me when I was 14 or 15 and just starting to get into college radio. That and [1993’s] Ring, to a lesser extent, were really important records for me. Few bands at the time could mix melody, power and introspection the way they did.