Death Cab for Cutie
WELL-LAID PLANS
On Their Major-Label Bow, Death Cab for Cutie Draft Something Dark and Beautiful
After their breakthrough fourth album, 2003's Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie experienced a whirlwind of activity: The quartet toured constantly, including a stint opening for Pearl Jam on the Vote for Change tour; lead singer and songwriter Ben Gibbard found surprising success with his electropop side project, the Postal Service; Death Cab became the favorite band of The O.C.'s Seth Cohen and appeared on the show; they signed to a major label. And they recorded a mature, tuneful, melancholy album full of gorgeous melodies and thoughtful insights, many about the relationship between love and death. You could call it Transcendentalism, but the band dubbed it Plans. Death Cab for Cutie's bassist, Nick Harmer, spoke with Barnes & Noble.com's Steve Klinge about the album, those O.C. fans, and streams of consciousness.
Barnes & Noble.com: I talked to Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney recently, and I find it interesting that both of your bands toured a lot after your last albums and did a stint opening for Pearl Jam; but Sleater-Kinney's The Woods is a loud, noisy, abrasive album, and Plans seems to go in the opposite direction.
Nick Harmer: Yeah, I'm not exactly sure how that happened. I'm sure Sleater-Kinney and our politics are similarly aligned when it comes to things, and maybe after the fall of last year [the '04 election], they got really angry about it, and we got really sad about it.
B&N.com: There are fewer songs that rock on this album. Is that something you were conscious of when you were making the album?
NH: Every record gestates in its own way, and we certainly went in with as many rock hopes as we've had for every record.... I think this record -- in the scheme of everything, once all is said and we're done with being a band long into the future -- might be one of our softer records. I don't think we really set out in the beginning and said, you know, let's just make a really mellow record or something like that. I think this record is as much and even more dark and sinister as anything we've ever done. It just doesn't quite have the tempo of rock 'n' roll.
B&N.com: It may be your most coherent and focused album.
NH: We're starting to move that way as a band. When we sit down and talk about our records now, it is more about the album and the experience.... We certainly grew up on albums as kids, and as music fans we continue to listen to good albums and really try to listen to things as whole and as complete rather than song by song. That being said, there's still great singles and great songs.... I think for us, we're trying to hearken back to a time in music or time for ourselves when one song wasn't so indicative of the whole experience.
B&N.com: That's interesting in relation to your connections to The O.C. Death Cab songs are very adult, serious and thoughtful, but that's not what you'd associate with the teen-TV show thing. Do you think that the show has had a direct effect on your audience?
NH: I feel like we're the kind of band that if you hear "The Sound of Settling" or "Soul Meets Body" and you decide that song sounds awesome and rock 'n' roll, and you go out and buy our record and suddenly you're confronted with this thing that's not necessarily what you thought it was going to be, you make up your mind quickly if it's for you or not. If anybody has found us through The O.C., and searched the band out, and then stayed with us, and they come to the shows and consider themselves a fan of our music -- then they've gone through a little bit more of a process of thought than just, "Hey The O.C. told us to like this band." But I don't know; I think that's the "time will tell" sort of thing. Certainly, the one thing that makes it hard to sort of distill out is that concurrently there's this shift in popular culture towards bands like us, bands like Bright Eyes and the Shins and Spoon and Rilo Kiley -- the list goes on and on. These are bands that we toured with for years in relative obscurity. But now, look at the Arcade Fire, look at Bloc Party, look at these bands that don't even have back catalogs: Their first records are coming out and they're selling hundreds of thousands of copies. That was completely unheard of for bands like us five or six years ago.
B&N.com: Returning to Plans, there seems to be an arc or path to the album as a whole; it gets darker as it goes along.
NH: Our album sequencing is as important to us as what songs make the record.... For a long time, "What Sarah Said" wasn't even going to be on the record, and at the 11th hour we reconvened and were listening to all the songs -- we mess around with different playlists and try to figure out what's the most compelling running order -- and "What Sarah Said" came in and sort of tied everything together for us in some way. We do really concentrate on the running order, very much as a group.... it's kind of like building a puzzle.
B&N.com: The melodies have always been great, but the choruses on this album are so memorable, maybe more so than in the past. I love the circular, repeating choruses of songs like "Marching Bands of Manhattan" and "Crooked Teeth."
NH: Thank you. That's another conscious decision for the band. Obviously you're not really ever going to reinvent the wheel, but we certainly want to, at least in our little world, do what we can with this verse-chorus-verse-bridge structure of pop music. Ben tinkers around a lot with that kind of stuff. He really likes denying a chorus where maybe there should be one and bringing one twice as long in someplace else. This record overall has a little bit more stream of consciousness feel to it from start to end.... It's funny how some things repeat in circular moments and come back to you later. In that same way, I think Ben's exploring a lot of those options in his songwriting, which to me, being an English major, is endlessly fascinating. [laughs] I was laughing the other day just to myself really, thinking, If I was still in college, I could write a helluva paper about this record, just about Ben's lyrics and some of the choices he makes.
B&N.com: That's going to happen, I bet. The album's ripe for that because of all the repeated images of love and death and death of love and seasons throughout the album. We English major types love that sort of thing. But some other people may think it's too academic, I guess.
NH: Yeah, exactly. People sometimes give us some grief. The thing that's really sad is that some people ostensibly will listen to the record and go, Oh, it's just a record about some poor sap that can't figure out love and relationships or something like that. I always try to tell people whenever I can, without sounding condescending: Not every song that's about a boy and a girl is just about a boy and a girl. Relationships are kind of the ultimate metaphor for lots of things, whether it be politics or world situations or social problems, or anything. You can really interpret a lot there. Just because we're singing about someone being in love and then being out of love -- that's definitely one meaning and that is sort of the surface meaning, you can't deny that -- but I know for a fact because I've talked to Ben about it before: there's a lot more going on underneath that death of love and love in death thing, a lot having to do with the world we currently live in and all of that.
August 2005
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