Death Cab For Cutie - Interview - July 2011 [Part 1]
By: Stan Morgan
We’ve been making Stan Morgan send a lot of emails to bands over the past few months, but due to his offensive body odour and regularity with which he uses the ‘c’ word, it’s rare that we let him meet any actual musicians. Due to the recent success of an intense self improvement program cleaning up both his hygiene and vocabulary, we relented, and sent him down to Brixton Academy to meet Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer of Death Cab For Cutie ahead of their sell out show there the same evening. What they said to each other follows.
How do you feel about your new album now it’s out in the open?
Ben: I feel as good about it now it’s come out as I did when we’d just finished it. I’m really happy with it, it’s nice to have the music out in the world and being able to talk about it after people have heard it rather than all the weird esoteric interviews we have to do beforehand, where people are asking us about stuff that they haven’t heard.
The instrumentation on it is more varied than any of your previous albums, what was the reason behind that?
Ben: When we get in the studio it becomes pretty apparent that people have been toying around with different instruments than are their traditional instrument. Chris (Walla) joined the band as a guitar player and played a little organ, but over the years he’s added more things to his arsenal. As we got to the studio it became apparent that he had developed a penchant for these 70s synths and all their possibilities, not just going weooooo-weoooooo, but also routing the snare drum through it as a trigger, and all these things that we could do with the old synthesisers. It was just a function of the fact that a lot of the songs weren’t written as riff guitar songs, along with the fact that everybody brought in these new things that they had been playing around with.
Was it partly being tired of using the guitar as the main instrument in all your songs?
Ben: It just kind of happened that way, I didn’t write a lot of these songs sitting in front of an amp playing guitar, but I think if we wanted to we could certainly have reverse-engineered them to be that way.
Was the decision made during the writing process or the recording process?
Nick: The recording process. We don’t really sit down as a band before we go in the studio and make some kind of battle plan specifically saying “we want to do this this way”. Ben just turns in a big sack of demos to us and we all sit down and comb through them and say “hey, this one sounds great” or “we’re reacting to this one a lot, let’s give it a try” and we’ll start recording it. We’ve always just tried to pay attention to the song in front of us and make sure that the song is as interesting and as compelling as we can make it, and then when we feel it’s time to move on, or we’re finished with it, or even if we just add a stand-still or something we’ll kind of shift. I think the nature of that kind of process, of it being a bit more organic, allows us to try a bunch of different things we might not normally try. We’ll see experimentally if things are working or not and that’s when we end up with something like a found sound or a part that we find really interesting, and we’ll go with that. On this album I feel like we were all very flexible, it wasn’t like Jason had to play drums, and I had to play bass, we were all free and open to take whichever parts come and go, whatever made sense.
The recording process was different for this album, in terms of recording for short periods in different places…
Ben: I think we were able to head ourselves off at the pass and realise that pretty much every record we’ve made up to this point we’ve holed up in one place for weeks upon weeks, months sometimes, and at a certain point going to the same place every day you end up kicking around the same ideas because you’re in the same physical space. It was nice to start a song in Los Angeles, and then three weeks later opening it back up in Vancouver where things sound different, the equipment’s different, the piano sounds different… It sparks creativity when you change your environment.
Do you think the environments had an effect on any songs in particular?
Nick: Not necessarily in the writing or arranging, but most of the songs were demoed before, with the exception of ‘You Are a Tourist’, and it wasn’t like we walked into a studio and were suddenly so inspired by the wooden floors that we wrote a song, it wasn’t that kind of a physical reaction to our environment.
Bern: Sound City in LA is in a dark room, and then you go to Vancouver and it’s on the second floor of this brick building with giant floor to ceiling windows looking out onto the old part of town. It was summer, and we walked to the studio every day, we didn’t get in a car for two weeks. We did ‘Stay Young, Go Dancing’ there, and that fitted great because of it. It was more the songs fitting the environment than the other way round.
Were there any acts in particular that inspired the use of keyboards on the album?
Ben: We didn’t sit around and say “I have been listening to *blank*”. I think if the record has any electronic tinges it isn’t so much that there was a conscious effort to make this a dance record, it’s definitely not that. It’s just a function of when you pull out an old creaky keyboard with a weird oscillator in it that it’s going to sound like those electronic bands from the 70s.
How easy has it been to incorporate the new keyboards into your live show?
Nick: Surprisingly easy. It’s been challenging, sure, but Chris, as our ‘utility guy’ in the band is moving around through different instruments and voices a lot more, but if there’s one thing I’ve always really liked about our band is that we’ve never really stressed out about trying to make the sound of our live shows and albums match 100%. Just by the nature of the live show there’s going to be subtleties and quiet moments on the album that just won’t translate, and trying to add those textures just adds more noise to the room rather than anything else. We figure out what the salient melodic parts are and what needs to happen.
Ben: We’ve always been adamant about just having the four of us on stage. There are some older songs, like ‘Soul Meets Body’ that has 30 ukuleles on the record, and we’re playing to a track on that one, it’s a signature sound that we can’t really mess with. We lean on samples, there are things we can trigger either with our feet or our hands, and we’ve got pretty good a whittling it down to determine what’s important in a song and making sure we include those parts.
Why do you think audiences in the US and the UK react to your records differently?
Ben: In the US Plans did twice as well as Narrow Stairs did, but I think Narrow Stairs was better received here in the UK. We have a theory, we didn’t have a record available over here until about our third record, available on a small indie label called Fierce Panda, and I think that there’s so much music happening over here all the time, it’s such a great country for music and there are so many bands that are based here and coming over from the States when they’re brand new, and the press goes really crazy for them, that I think that by the time we came over here we were a bit long in the tooth for the British press. It was a war of attrition I think, if we hung around long enough hopefully we’d retroactively get some respect.
How difficult do you find it to write setlists now that you had such a huge catalogue of songs?
Ben: It’s difficult. If I had my way we would play for three hours every night, we have seven albums of material but we’re not Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, we don’t have three hours of hits. Thankfully I think that everything from Transatlanticism through to the new record have been relatively similarly successful, so I think that’s it’s probably 70% those four records. Every night I try to get at least one song from every record, but it’s somewhat difficult because we are promoting a new album, but I also don’t want to be the band that goes out there and goes “HERE’S OUR NEW RECORD”, and denies the fact we’ve got six other records that people want to hear. No one wants to hear a band play their entire new record and then five old songs. That would just be a dick move, a real dick move. We play these shows for the audiences, we play what they want to hear, we’re not playing these shows for our own gratification, if we wanted to do that we’d just stay at home and practice.
Artists in this article: Death Cab For Cutie