Photo by Shervin Lainez
Death Cab for Cutie
Death Cab for Cutie
Despite their recent anniversary tours, don't call Death Cab for Cutie a nostalgic act. As they near their 30th year together as a group, the rock veterans have made it clear they're not coasting solely on past glories. In fact, they haven't lost an ounce of ambition to create bold, innovative music that reaffirms and retexturizes their identity.
Photo by Jimmy Fontaine
Nick Harmer
Nick Harmer
“We are always looking ahead,” said bassist Nicholas Harmer during a recent Zoom interview. “We're always wanting to try and find a new expression for ourselves or something that feels fresh to us. I think it would be quite boring for us as players if we were caught in kind of a cycle of just, ‘Oh yeah, this feels like something we've done before.’”
It's evident on their recently released eleventh album, I Built You A Tower. Produced by John Congleton -who returned after producing 2022's Asphalt Meadows - the release marks a return to the band's independent roots via the ANTI- Records label after 20 years on major label Atlantic Records. To call it a "back-to-basics" record does a disservice to the continued sense of discovery driving this unique, risk-taking new chapter.
The sessions went so smoothly that they recorded the album in just three weeks at Animal Rites in Los Angeles, as well as the band members’ homes in Seattle, Bellingham, Los Angeles, and Portland.
“We try to not get stuck in the past and also try to be really aware of what we're good at and what people want from our band and the music that we make,” continued Harmer.
“We want to keep things fresh for us as players. We want to keep things updated for us as living beings that are aging and growing and experiencing life in new ways and we want the music that we make to reflect where we're at in our life stages. But we also don't want to go too far into only being only focused on brand new and always reinventing the core sound of our band.”
Harmer - joined in the current lineup by Benjamin Gibbard, Jason McGerr, Dave Depper, and Zac Rae - described the band's current direction as a “high wire act of balancing pushing ahead and keeping things current.” He noted that the group is focused on “what's moving us musically, what's moving us emotionally, and then also synthesizing that into something that sounds like Death Cab, so to speak.”
While he admits the process is still a bit mysterious how they achieve it, he attributes it to what happens when five minds come together and get their hands on instruments and “start feeling their way” through things together.
Lyrically, Ben Gibbard's songwriting was heavily influenced by personal life struggles, as well as the band's sold-out tours celebrating the 20th anniversaries of critically acclaimed albums (2003's Transatlanticism and 2005's Plans) and fronting the reunited supergroup The Postal Service. During this period, he developed the concept of a tower as a coping mechanism to protect himself.
“There’s this need to find a place in ourselves to put loss and grief,” he explained via press release. “A place that can hold it so we can move on with our lives. But there are these moments where the trauma breaks out of that shell we created for it.”
It’s an album about reconciling with past selves to find a new future. The record helped clear out the band's nostalgic tendencies, allowing them to focus on creating music that feels big, important, and vibrant. As Harmer noted in a press release, “The whole experience of this record got us back to the earliest versions of this band: If the musicians in the room like what we're working on, that's enough. We reconnected with the confidence that comes with that.”
The Shepherd Express caught up with Harmer to talk about the band’s new music, going indie, and why Milwaukee has always been a home away from home.
The band's new album marks its return to its independent roots after 20 years on Atlantic. Why did that feel important to do?
For us, it wasn't really a question of what we should do after Atlantic. We knew that we had a really long and much longer than even what we expected and quite positive run at a major label and we knew that we weren't going to be able to recapture the same experience in another major label system …We weren't going to try and shop around and move to some other label that we didn't really have any familiarity with. We took just a small handful of meetings with some independent labels and ANTI- [Records] was the best by far meeting that we had taken, we just immediately connected with the people in the room and we've always been a band that our relationships are as important, if not more important than the names and labels and all the other things.
We just want to work with really talented people and people that are really enthusiastic about the band. And we've found that with the ANTI- group. So, we feel super lucky that they were interested in working with us and that we connected with them so well. And so far, it's just feels like a great partnership right out of the gates.
It sounds like the biggest thing for the band this time around was less about looking back and more about recapturing that sense of discovery that you guys had at the start. What was it like being part of that atmosphere?
We just knew going into this record what we wanted to accomplish and we really had a strong batch of material. We knew which songs we were going to bring in, and everybody knew what parts they were going to play, and we just had so much more clarity on the kind of album that we wanted to make from the very beginning. So, it became about execution at that point and it really became about working with John Congleton again, who was able to work as fast as we were able to play and perform. And I think he really helped keep the process of making the record and moving along at a good pace and kept us from sort of second guessing ourselves all the while making sure that we were getting good performances captured. And it was just a really invigorating thing to be a part of, honestly.
I'm just excited. We could see from the material through making the record, we could see how these songs were going to be performed live and now we're at the precipice of going out on tour and I'm just excited about bringing this material out on the road because I just know that how it's all going to work and that's something that was important to us all along the way.
Were there any specific moments that were the sense of discovery was really prevalent?
I mean, always when making a record, you think that you're going to end up with one thing and then something [else] kind of raises its hand. I think a great example is the song “Stone Over Water.” That was a demo of a different name even in our kind of big pile of demos that the rest of us in the band had I wouldn't say skipped over, but it didn't really connect with us.
Early on when it got submitted from [singer] Ben [Gibbard], we were kind of like, “I don't know if we really like that one.” We'll just kind of push it aside. And then when our producer, John Congleton got involved, he asked Ben to send him all of the demos and he kind of went back through everything and double checked our work and he said, “Hey, I think that there's a song here that you guys missed. I think that this song ‘Stone Over Water’ is actually really good and I think you guys should track it.”
And we were kind of skeptical, I think all of us including Ben. We were pretty skeptical going in of like, “Is this going to work? Is it not?” I mean, this might just be kind of a pet project from John, I don't know. But I think once we really kind of rolled our sleeves up and got to work, he not only showed us kind of what was inside that song, but once we kind of started tracking it, we realized like, “Oh, he's right. This is a song that we missed.” And really thankful that we had his ears on the material to support us in that way. So that was a sense of discovery. That was a song that we weren't even planning on tracking and then it's now become kind of one of our favorites on the record.
So, it's kind of exciting that that came through even, I wouldn't say in the 11th hour, but it definitely wasn't one that we really had identified as something that was going to make it, and now we can't imagine the record without it.
The anniversary tours celebrating the band’s past albums—combined with Ben pulling double duty fronting The Postal Service at the same time—heavily shaped this new record. How was that time helpful for the group?
The anniversary tours were I think this thing that we embarked on as just sort of a love letter to fans of those albums and we really wanted to make a cohesive show between the Postal Service album and Death Cab's Transatlanticism and give people an experience to celebrate this kind of very unique accomplishment that Ben had that there were two albums that were released in the same year that had such a broad impact. And I think we embarked on that as a celebration, but I think as it went on, we realized how instructive it was for us to remember things about the early days of the band. Certainly, it washed over me a number of times on stage just sort of how open and sparse some of the arrangements were in our early material and how much we had sort of resisted this temptation to overdub and layer sonics and make these thick walls of sounds.
And I think that that feeling of the space and the music and that energy that happened when the five of us were on stage playing those songs, it was so exciting for us that we looked at each other multiple times during that tour like, “This is the energy that we need for the new album. This is what we need to bring forward.” And so I think it was a really great celebration but it was also a good reminder for us and I think it really kind of reconnected us with some parts of the band that I wouldn't say we ever lost necessarily, but certainly I think as time went on, we got further from and that brought us kind of close to some expression that I think felt really, really right and appropriate for where we're at right now.
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Ben came up with the concept of the tower to make sense of everything that was happening in his life. What about the album’s concept of a tower fascinated you?
Ben certainly went through some personal stuff. And as we were putting this record together from a writing standpoint, Ben had some real fertile emotional territory to reach into and explore for himself and it became clear to us as a band that we really just needed to let him kind of work his way through what he was feeling and what he was processing. I think that The Postal Service-Transatlanticism tour was kind of a springboard for him into those feelings and then him processing a lot of stuff in his own life through the lens of where he's at these days.
For us, I think we knew that this record was going to have some heft to it and it was kind of only in the studio that once we started sequencing the songs that we had recorded and choosing the ones that we wanted to make the record, that we kind of realized that there was this song called “I Built You A Tower” that we had sort of demoed up almost two separate versions of that kind of had these different expressions and that we felt like they were kind of related to one another in a way that it felt like they deserved to be on the same album together. And then once we thought about that metaphor in that song of building a tower to put someone in, it felt appropriate to ... And it's not even someone, it's this notion that in your life, in order to kind of just keep moving through life, you have to kind of get good at compartmentalizing feelings and emotions over time and so you are constantly building towers.
The metaphor of containers for feelings and moments of time is something that we liked. And also, this album became what happens when those containers can't hold those feelings any longer and what happens when the containers can't hold back the emotions and the stuff that you've put in them and kind of the mess that that makes when they break open in unexpected ways. It just felt right to us to name the record that and to kind of push ahead with that metaphor given I think a lot of the subject matter of these songs, I think. I hope so anyway.
I imagine that was gratifying to help Ben realize that concept and help him process everything.
Yeah, it did. I mean, I've said before in other interviews, I think in some records we are more involved as songwriters, and I think in this record we were most involved as editors almost. We really got to stand back and really react to the music that Ben was writing and a lot of the lyrics that he was writing and really be listeners and say, "Yes, these are working for us. These have emotional heft and weight. You're onto something here." And that I think was our biggest contribution as a group to this record was helping focus on quite a bit of demos that he wrote for the record. I think he ended up writing almost 90 songs and we knew that we were only ever going to go into the studio with about 15 or 16. So we really worked at figuring out which of the 90 were going to make the final list of 15 to bring into the studio.
Sounds like the recording process was pretty fairly streamlined with recording at everyone's houses and then John's studio.
Yeah. It actually kind of surprised me. Once we got to John's studio, we tracked the record in three and a half weeks and I honestly, we had set aside double that amount of time to use and when we got to the end of three and a half weeks and we looked at each other and we're like, “Did we just finish the record?” I think there was this collective moment of like, “That doesn't seem possible that we were able to go that fast.” And we had this kind of moment of like, “Did we underthink this?” And John being the producer that he is and something that we depended on him for basically turned us and was like, "This is great. And if it wasn't good, I would tell you." And we'd keep recording, but we have it. And we really believed him when he said that.
So, I think again, the speed of the record and how quickly we kind of moved through it was a result of the year and a half or so of demoing and really processing and really making a lot of decisions ahead of time going into the studio. I knew exactly what I was going to play on every song. There was not a moment of like, "Huh, I don't know, what am I going to do here?" We all had real specific ideas about things and that helped really just make sure that we were concentrating on capturing good performances, which moved quickly, which again, like I said, surprised me maybe at the time, but now I'm just really glad momentum and speed really added to the energy and the chemistry in the album.
What are some of your favorite early Milwaukee memories?
Oh gosh, one of the first places that I remember us having a real show outside of the Pacific Northwest was in Milwaukee there. We had two friends, Carly and Janelle, that had basically lobbied this local club called the Cactus Club. And had basically been like, “You have to bring this band through from Seattle.” And it was kind of this first place we played where we had found these people that had heard of our band outside of Seattle and it was really validating. And even though in the end there was probably 10 people at the show at the most, still to drive that far and to play a show there really meant something at the time and I think really gave us a lot of lift early on that we could leave our state and there would be like-minded people in other places.
This would have been in ‘99, 2000. Even though there was the internet, it was not the internet that it is today. So, finding people, we weren't the savviest tech kids and maybe still aren't, but it was very exciting being out there. And then over the years we met friends and other bands that we've known. Ben and I used to joke all the time that if everything falls apart in Seattle and everyone hates us, well, let's just move to Milwaukee because we love it there so much.
Is this your first time playing at the Miller High Life Theatre?
I think it is our first time? I'm not sure. It might be. I can't keep track. I think so. [Editor’s note: the band performed a sold-out headlining show May 6, 2024, with The Postal Service show at the venue]
I know you've played the Riverside Theater in the past.
Yeah. The Riverside's cool. That's a nice place too. Like I said, we have not had an experience in Milwaukee that has been bad. Even Summerfest is fun. It's a great town. So, I've got high hopes for where we're playing this time. I think it's going to be a good show.
Death Cab For Cutie with opener Jay Som perform July 11 at Miller High Life Theatre.
