Death Cab for Cutie: Gets Analog in a Digital Age
Words by John D. Luerssen
With its extraordinary ability to balance art and integrity with commercial success, Death Cab for Cutie is arguably the most important modern band in America in 2008. Boasting world class songs, an amiable demeanor and a warm closet full of gold records—including its near-platinum 2005 Atlantic Records debut Plans—Seattle-based DCfC returns with its second major label offering and sixth proper studio album, Narrow Stairs.
Marking an about face from the technology-touched Plans, the new disc is served by the memorable, up-tempo “Bixby Canyon Bridge,” the pensive, shimmering winner “The Ice Is Getting Thinner” and the nine-minute jam-turned-single “I Will Possess Your Heart.” Marking the group’s return to the analog approach that gave its 2003 Barsuk Records swan song Transatlanticism life, Death Cab’s erudite frontman and principal songwriter Ben Gibbard says the overall tone of Narrow Stairs is dark, sad and energetic.
Gibbard, who is joined by journeyman guitarist and longtime producer Chris Walla—also a veteran of outside projects by the likes of Tegan and Sara, Nada Surf, The Decemberists and The Long Winters—and the inventive, unyielding rhythm section of bassist Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr, concedes that the vibe of the record was partially informed by a decision to go back to writing with his guitar.
“I’m feeling like I’m a lot more proud of this record than I am of any album we’ve done in a long, long time,” Gibbard says. “I think the fact that I came in with songs where the structure was in place, and the songs had a lot more sections and pieces to play with, allowed it to flourish.”
At the time, we speak in mid-January, DCfC is in the mixing stages of Narrow Stairs and honing in on album art. Not surprisingly, Gibbard and Walla are still excited by the disc’s innovation and newness. “There are four songs where we got Ben’s vocals off the floor, which is so fun and cool!” Walla announces. “Ben is such an amazing singer. He’d have to be able to pull that off.”
“The big, sort of…goal for this record was to get everybody playing and singing live for as much of the disc as we could,” Walla continues, “and to very much build the record from that idea, if not have that be the actual record. When we made Plans, the way we did it just left so much time for scrutiny and evaluating things. You end up tracking so much more. Going away from that has made for a really interesting record this time, where the performances are all complete thoughts again. It’s got such a linear feel to it, and it’s not micromanaged chorus by chorus, or verse by verse, or line by line.”
Take the aforementioned, nine-minute long “I Will Possess Your Heart,” which—save for a couple of overdubs—went down absolutely live. “There was a moment in that song where I kicked over Nick’s bass Pi and it made this loud distorted noise,” Walla laughs. “He almost stopped playing, but he didn’t, and our engineer, Will, ran in and plugged it back in. Now when you listen back to the song, you can here Nick’s Pi exploding a minute and a half into the song. And it is bizarre, but it sounds really good.”
“That was a live recording all the way through that we built onto,” Gibbard marvels. “We added some keyboards and some delays, and Chris was playing guitar and just killing it…and the whole thing just came together and it sounded beautiful. That never would have happened if we just tried to map it out, and pace it out and have everyone just record their parts.”
“The first five minutes are a jam, building up, but we’ll edit the last three-and-a-half minutes into a single,” Gibbard adds, chuckling at the very idea. “We know what we’re doing. We’re not like, ‘Eight-and-a-half minute singles—Atlantic, deal with it!’ We want to sell records as much as they do. OK, maybe not as much as they do, but we wouldn’t be on a major label if we didn’t have an interest in success.”
Just the same, Gibbard and Walla both use the term ‘departure’ to describe what the latter calls the “creepy, heavy tone” of Narrow Stairs—whose title was suggested to the band by Harmer and reflects what Ben calls the album’s “dark aesthetic.”
“We all sort of got really interested in distortion this time,” says Walla, who just released his politically themed solo disc Field Manual (Barsuk), which showcases his own tremendous songwriting abilities. “It’s a funny thing; the demos were pretty heavy, topically—with the exception of one really bizarre case which was like the fluffiest, happiest sounding thing we’d ever done.”
Deemed an ill-fit for the disc, the unnamed track was subsequently yanked from Narrow Stairs. In the past, they might have kept it around to arrive at 11 album tracks, but this time Gibbard brought 15 finished tunes to the table. “This, really honestly, is the first record we’ve ever had where we can all definitely say that we have more than enough album-contending tracks. With the last couple albums, we had enough material, but we didn’t have a lot of wiggle room. Like, ‘If we can’t make this one work, I don’t know what we’re going to do.’”
“And you know, I’ve dealt with this guy…” Gibbard explains, “who is a reputable music industry douche bag that will remain nameless. And when we were recording the major label debut, he did say one insightful thing that will remain with me. And that’s, ‘The problem with albums these days is that they’re just too long.’ People lose track of the fact that just because you can put 74 minutes of music on CD, there’s no reason for it, and you don’t get any real value by giving people more music that they don’t want to listen to. It’s probably better to have an album with 10 or 11 really solid tunes that are really economical…where you maybe had to make some tough decisions to slice that record down to 40 minutes. Otherwise, you might compromise everything you might have accomplished thematically.”
One of the 11 songs slated for Narrow Stairs is “Talking Bird,” captured entirely live. “I got the vocals live and in playback I thought, ‘I could have never sung it that way if I was sitting in the room with a microphone putting my vocal part over it,’” DCfC’s frontman says. “I think it’s so much more of a gratifying experience, because you’re hearing the song back immediately after you’ve put it down, and that’s a real rarity…especially these days.”
“That doesn’t happen that often when you’re puzzling it all together,” he continues. “And making a record like that isn’t all that inspiring. Don’t get me wrong, we’re all very proud of Plans [which reaped the singles “Soul Meets Body” and “Crooked Teeth”], but there’s an added level of satisfaction when you put on an album and remember how the stars all aligned for four minutes that day, and the band just nailed that song together. I’d say that’s one of the reasons this is turning out to be my favorite album that we’ve ever done. It just feels like an album made by a band, instead of a recording made bit by bit while the other guys are out of the room playing PlayStation. With Plans, I can honestly remember recording in that barn in Massachusetts, watching The Sopranos while Jason was doing his drum tracking. And that just doesn’t feel like a band experience.”
**********************************
After capturing its first four records on two-inch tape and then flipping to the digital format RADAR for Plans, the band’s live-to-analog approach was what Chris Walla calls, “The right decision based on the material…Plans wasn’t the kind of material we could just play live right off the bat. The album was very much more of a construction project, where Jason would go play drums on the scratch track. Then we’d get that perfect and add the bass, and we’d be watching the tuner—to make sure that was perfect.”
“Plus,” Gibbard intones, “I think I speak for all of us when I say that we were trying to play down the pressure we were feeling as far as the major label debut thing goes. Although we told the press Plans was no big thing, I think we were clearly nervous and a little more affected in the way we put music together. One of all of our favorite records of the last year was that latest Wilco record [Sky Blue Sky]; they did that almost entirely live to tape. We’ve had these experiences over the year and a half following Plans where we did sessions for compilations and cover tracks, and we would do all that stuff live. Some of the engineers would tell us, ‘God. You guys are a really good band.’ And it started to seep in [that], ‘Yes. We are a really good band, and why don’t we just start doing this. Stop being freaked out about trying to make everything perfect.’ I give the credit to Chris that he’s able to capture and have a real ear for things. Like, there’s a live guitar solo of mine that goes down that’s just wacky out-of-tune and Chris is like, ‘No. That sounds great. People will listen, and they’ll get it.’ We all collectively wanted to go back and record a song and play it back and go, ‘Wow. The vocal sounds great. The drum lick Jason just did sounds amazing.”
As much as the studio approach needed to be different this time out to fit the songs on Narrow Stairs, Ben Gibbard’s song craft went back to square one. He explains: “As I look back on the writing process for Plans, I wasn’t feeling very inspired by my guitar. For some reason, I would pick up the guitar and immediately put it down, as if it were broken. I think that album had a lot of piano, because it was the first time I ever actually owned a piano. For the first time, there was this other option—this fantastic acoustic piano in my house! So most of those songs were written on piano, keyboard or in some kind of ProTools capacity…where I would take a little loop of something I had done and kind of constructed a song around it. I think that led to Plans not being very chorus-heavy. A lot of songs just had an A-A-A-B-A-A structure, without a lot of variation. So going into [Narrow Stairs], I made a conscious decision to want to sit down with the guitar and make sure they could all be played on an acoustic. And for the first time in an album or so, I was making sure all of the songs had choruses and taking more of a traditional approach to songwriting.”
And despite reverting back to analog in the studio, Gibbard still very much embraces the luxury of writing on a computer. “There are an endless amount of options,” he says. “Like, ‘I’d love to hear what an acoustic guitar sounds like right here. Or, ‘What if I moved that line to a piano line?’ It’s so easy to kind of experiment, and I don’t know if I’d ever go back to writing on a four-track. Of course there’s the potential to get lost in the arrangement of a tune when you have 24 tracks on a computer to fiddle with.”
“For me, a song doesn’t really take flight until it has a lyric on it,” the DCfC frontman continues. “And that’s the hardest part. Until I can visualize what’s happening with the song…that’s the point where I really become inspired to move forward with the arrangement and the song itself. So there are times when I get really caught up in a really great instrumental part, and that happened this time out with a couple of songs that didn’t make the cut. And now I think, ‘I wish I had finished that one because it had such a great melody and a great guitar line.’ Without a lyric that I’m happy with, it could be the greatest song ever melodically or arrangement-wise, but it doesn’t have any resonance.”
Gibbard says his songwriting took the turn he felt it needed back around the band’s second album. “I keep coming back to “Company Calls Epilogue,” which is on our second album [2000’s We Have the Facts And We’re Voting Yes], and I had concocted this narrative of going to the wedding of someone that you used to be in love with…and I was very proud of the descriptive nature of the song. It focuses on all of these details of the experience that are not necessarily the first things that one would go to. It’s not about, ‘She looks beautiful in a white wedding dress;’ instead, there are lines about little kids chasing each other around and the feel of the wedding. It’s all of these secondary images. To me, that’s where I broke through as a songwriter and became less obtuse. That started my shift to becoming a far more narrative writer.”
To this day, he reveals that he has an ongoing fixation related to his songwriting. “I want to write songs with complete sentences,” he confesses. “I almost have this obsession with shortchanging words. I would never be so pretentious to say that my lyrics are poetry. That’s the most annoying things ever and one of my biggest pet peeves as a songwriter, when someone does that. That’s such bullshit. Poems are poems. Song lyrics are for songs. And when people have come up to me in the past to suggest my lyrics are poetic, my first reaction is to give them a talking to about it, while being as nice as I can. Like, ‘Frank O’Hara is a poet. Jeff Tweedy is a phenomenal songwriter—not a poet.’”
As for the craft itself, Gibbard usually writes either in his loft apartment near Seattle’s Capital Hill or at Death Cab for Cutie’s practice space. Due to the fact that the latter has no windows, it’s dire, but also ripe for introspection. The very same building where Walla’s Hall of Justice studio was formerly housed and where Nirvana’s Sub Pop debut Bleach was recorded nearly 20 years ago, Gibbard proudly describes it as “this shitty triangular building in this neighborhood north of downtown Seattle.”
That working class location matches Gibbard’s self-described “working class approach to songwriting.” Although he’s prone to taking breaks in writing, specifically when he gears up for a new album release or touring initiative, he has little trouble getting to work when the time is right. “I kind of just tell myself, ‘OK…this month I’m working on Death Cab songs,’” he says. “So I get up and go running or whatever and spend the day working on something. And more times than not it’s a failed endeavor.”
“You will fail more times than you succeed,” he announces. “But I think you need those failed endeavors. During our first few records, I would just kind of wait until I felt like writing. I got some pretty good songs that way, but I firmly believe that being a writer or artist in any capacity, you have to flex that muscle. You have to kind of go to work every day and try to do what you do. And as crazy as it is for me to say out loud, I am a professional songwriter and singer, and this is what I do for a living. I get paid to do this, and I should treat this as such. It is a job…and it’s a difficult job. You have to travel all the time and be away from your loved ones. You have to go through crippling self doubt, and once in a while, that perfect song comes and it is like the best day of your life. And then the next day it starts all over again.”
**************************************
Unlike a lot of bands, Death Cab for Cutie was in the unique situation of being a successful touring band with an impressive number of album sales—not to mention Gibbard’s one-off, gold certified collaboration with Jimmy Tamborello of Dntel as Postal Service—when it signed to Atlantic Records in 2004. Describing the arrangement, Gibbard explains, “Atlantic has been entirely hands-off from the beginning with us. Even with Plans, we didn’t send them demos. This was all stuff that we had been able to negotiate. We would take suggestions, but we still stuck to our guns and made the record that we wanted to make. Of course, having a record that’s approaching platinum to our credit, in this contemporary environment, and counting all of the records we sold on our own leading up to Plans…they’ve realized not to mess with a good thing.”
“Of course, if this record totally tanks and they pick up an option for a third record, maybe we could be in a different situation,” he admits. “But I feel very fortunate. They’ve been pretty fantastic. We don’t really have any complaints. They’ve been treating us with a level of respect that I think we deserve. We make our own decisions. We’re adults who have been doing this long enough, and they recognize that. There’s nothing about the experience to date that’s stunk like a rotten fish for me. I think we made the right decision.”
As for advice on how you can turn your own band into the next DCfC, Gibbard has little insight, believe it or not. “Because I live in Seattle and we’re pretty much a band of the people, we go out to see our friends play and stuff. I’ve been approached by people from time to time who ask ‘How do we do it?’ And I always feel like I’m stumped for an answer. We just found ourselves in a situation where people just liked our band, and we worked at it for a long time.”
“Every time we went on tour, the first time there were 25 people, the next time there were 50 and then 100 people,” he continues. “We just found ourselves finding success that way. There’s no substitute for drive, creativity and believing in what you’re doing. But I think sometimes when it comes to business, it just comes down to having something somebody wants. I’m very close to my songs…and I love my songs, and they’re a part of me, but by putting them on a disc and then putting them up for sale, it becomes something that somebody wants to own. And people pay money for something that they want to own. They come see us live because we have something that they want to see. I think it can be frustrating for young musicians, and artists in general, that things aren’t going as quickly as they’d like. But trying to analyze what people want and what people don’t is kind of a fruitless mission, you know?”
Another fool’s errand might be to hold your breath for a sophomore Postal Service disc. “I’ll go on record saying that the next Postal Service record may or may not ever happen,” Gibbard says. “Jimmy and I are still working together and throwing ideas back and forth, but as time goes on and we find ourselves busy with our own music…we have some stuff, but it’s been difficult to find the time and the drive to do the record. I’d love to finish it at some point and maybe even do some performances, but it’s just not a priority for either of us. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be, but there’s nothing on the books quite yet.”
In the meantime, there’s gold in that there closet. Gibbard is hesitant to tell us where his are hanging. Meanwhile, Walla—who has RIAA-certified discs of 500,000 sales for his contribution to Postal Service’s Give Up, as well as Death Cab’s Plans and Transatlanticism kept in a warm, well kept office closet—only cops to having one gold disc hanging in his home. “I only have our Canadian gold record for Plans hanging…it’s in my kitchen,” the guitarist laughs. “How could I deny something that is certified Canadian Gold?”
“You know, its funny,” Walla marvels. “I’ve heard stories of producers who carry their gold records around from studio to studio, so that when someone in the band argues with them, they just turn around and point to the gold [laughs]. Can you imagine?”
With Narrow Stairs ready to drop in May, Gibbard is anticipating how the fans, critics and curiosity-seekers will respond. “I will be interested to see how people will react to it. Whether or not people like it, I think it’s indisputable that we’ve tried to do some new things on this album. For that alone, I’m extremely proud.”
No comments:
Post a Comment