Death Cab frontman won’t quit
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Death Cab For Cutie are touring Australia at the moment, trying to avoid flying dinosaurs.
Source: Supplied
Here’s something for Ben.
A memory.
Death Cab For Cutie’s bookish frontman Ben Gibbard is all ears. 12 years ago a band from Frankston chose the Seattle band to open for them in Australia.
“Oh yeah, we have Something For Kate to thank for bringing us over the first time in 2003. We didn’t have any way to get down there, it’s very far and very expensive, and very few people knew who we were in Australia,” he says with nostalgic warmth.
“They were really gracious to us to give us our first shows; Paul Dempsey and Something For Kate are wonderful.”
Death Cab’s fourth album Transatlanticism dropped in 2003 and broke them as the emotional-but-not-emo indie band du jour. Since then they’ve put out another four albums, staying the course, playing bigger and bigger venues, getting endless triple j love and now we have their eighth album, Kintsugi doing what Gibbard and co. do best: super-melancholy, super-uplifting tunes about life choices and the muck and the mire. The title refers to the Japanese of repairing cracked ceramics with gold to highlight flaws instead of hiding them. This one comes after Gibbard split with his celebrity wife Zooey Deschanel which led to an escape from Los Angeles.
The conversationally chipper Gibbard reflects on that drive.
“The first song on Kintsugi, No Room in Frame is like my Escape From LA. As I was leaving Los Angeles in my car I had my most prized possessions and even in a moment of great heartache it was nice to know all the physical things that are important to me could be put in the trunk of a Prius.
“The amount of things that I owned that were like ‘If the house is on fire, grab this’ were not that many things. My dad’s old Gibson guitar, some records, a couple of heirlooms I’ve been carrying through my life,” he says.
“I have to say that looking back on that time of my life, four years later, I found great relief in my escape from LA. LA was always a compromise for me, it was never a choice. And I compromised willingly…There was no doubt in my mind that if things turned out as they eventually did I’d head back to Seattle because this is my home, these are my people, this is a world I understand.
“I made my deal with the devil and it didn’t work out for me…in a lot of ways that are probably best not shared here I should have seen that coming,” he says, talking about the Deschanel in the room.
“Someone once said – forgive me for not being able to place the quote – ‘The artist wants to find truth’ and in my life I want things to be black and white, good or bad, I want to be able to look at something and know it and make a judgment on it, Los Angeles doesn’t allow you to do that. Relationships are too complicated, seemingly good people do really terrible things, y’know. And they do them for very nefarious and seemingly unselfish reasons and selfish reasons too, people I’ve known all my life who live there are in a place where up is down.”
The quote he might be searching for is “The scholar seeks truth, the artist finds.”
Mark him down with the assist. Gibbard felt like his world was turned upside down the first time he and the band headed here.
“It may sound like a trite observation but we landed, it was 6am and I was trying to sleep and the birds were just waking up and you take for granted the sounds in your environment. Crazy sounds, crazy looking birds. I dozed off and woke up and I heard a pterodactyl outside,” he quips.
“I walked through Sydney and saw this huge bird with an orange beak standing on the street and I thought, ‘Of course that’s a thing’,” he chuckles. “Weird animals, they don’t exist anywhere else in the world. For us it’s a very unusual mosaic of wildlife, y’know. One of my hobbies is trail and ultra-running and the only way I’m running in Australia is to go with someone who’s from there. It’s insane wildlife, I don’t trust myself with the crazy animals you have lurking in the weeds,” he says, not meaning to sound like he’s into Zoophilia. Sorry, anything Zoo-related is still too soon.
It’s not just our weirdass birds, Gibbard isn’t a fan of losing a day and some sanity on the flight out here either.
“Jet lag is horrible. We got back from Europe on Monday and there’s something brutal about travelling west. In Seattle there’s a nine hour time difference. You’re awake in the middle of the night. The first time we played in Australia it was like walking with concrete feet, it’s like playing a show at 4am. The adrenaline kicks in and over the years I’ve given in to that feeling of crazy. It’s healthy realising that when you’re awake when you should be sleeping that your head is all f–ked up. You’re emotionally just a mess, crazy thoughts go through your mind, you’re unstable.” He says, taking us right into how strung out he feels.
“Recognizing jet lag helps me go ‘That’s why I feel like I wanna quit the band….because I haven’t slept!!’ I could have saved myself so much heartache and trials and tribulations over the years if I’d clued into that a bit earlier. It’s the difficult thing about being alive in the world,” he reflects.
Death Cab for Cutie – Seattle rock band with 8th album Kintsugi
Source: Supplied
While Gibbard has had irrational thoughts about quitting the band, the quartet became a trio after guitarist and producer Chris Walla chose to leave the band once they’d finished Kintsugi. Walla wasn’t feeling Gibbard’s lyrical approach, the intimate picking apart of his breakup with ol’ mate Zooey.
“I turned in…I felt confident with the material I had for this record, I felt like the batch of songs I had were better than the batch of songs I had for the previous record. You can tell when you play songs for people and they’re super into it … their eyes light up, they’re not just being supportive. ‘This one’s really good, play that for me again’,” he imitates, chirping like a cockatoo.
“A lot of the songs on Codes and Keys had to be reverse engineered. Some of them worked well, some of them, y’know, didn’t. We talked to a couple of different people and Chris announced he was leaving the band after we made the album and at the time we wanted to make sure the producer was cool with Chris because Chris had produced our first seven albums. It was a delicate situation. Luckily Chris was familiar with Rich Costey’s work, we met him and we really liked him. Chris was happy and was like ‘Let’s do it!’” he recalls.
“We (Costey and Gibbard) related on a personal level and even if we never worked again I feel like I made a friend, y’know. He’s one of us. He’s cut from the same cloth. It wasn’t without its tense moments, as making any album is but it was worth it,” he notes.
Gibbard’s commitment to serving the song is evident, he doesn’t phone it in, he wouldn’t know how. He recently quit Twitter saying it sucked out his creativity. A sound theory.
For him, the creative juices have been flowing to the sounds of kosmische staples.
“I’m always oscillating between the deep bowels of ‘70s kraut rock, I’m like ‘Now I have the Roedelius box set of his home tape recordings’. Real Inside Baseball ‘deep cuts’ stuff. I also keep my ear to the ground, I rarely find myself around people in my early 20s socially, I’m just older, whenever I do I’m shocked and reminded that when for people who are 22, everything they’re hearing is the best thing ever, y’know.
“Not because they’re stupid, they’ve just heard less music. I’ve been listening to music for 38 years. Those moments of being blown away are few and far between but then there’s this band called Chastity Belt from Seattle who put out a great record a few months ago and it’s an incredible piece of work. I’m like ‘Wow these guys are in my backyard!’ You have to dig a little deeper,” he adds.
Chastity Belt just toured with Courtney Barnett, someone else Gibbard has been proselytising recently… “Oh man speaking of new artists, I was just looking through my collection to answer this question and she’s phenomenal. COURTNEY’S PHENOMENAL! She’s unbelievable, such a talented writer, she was on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon a couple of weeks ago and the whole thing is balls out. The band she’s playing with are f–king great, such a solid guitar player, so talented, I’m really excited to see how she develops as a songwriter. She’s already writing with a voice that’s so unique and so of herself. There’s nobody that sounds like her, that’s such a rare thing these days; a singular voice.”
See: Death Cab For Cutie, Splendour in the Grass, Byron Bay, July 24-26, sold out;
170 Russell St, city. Sun-Tue, 8.30pm. $ 66; ANU Bar, Canberra, July 30, $ 66; UoW, Unibar, Wollongong, July 31, $ 66; Sydney Opera House, Aug 1-2, $ 59 to $ 71.20; HQ, Adelaide, Aug 4, $ 66; Metro City, Perth, Aug 6, deathcabforcutie.com
