Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) transcript

hey there: just to let you know, this is being presented just as i typed it into the old laptop in preparation to write the article, so you don't get to know what i asked, and i can almost guarantee there are mistakes. but here it is:

Ben Gibbard transcript

I’m just in New York hanging out and getting ready to go over and do Conan this afternoon.

[Austin] was really fucking hot and kind of miserable. The show was passable, I think; a festival’s a festival, I think, and everything’s always a little bit off. And playing outside is kind of shitty--especially when it’s hot—because nothing reverberates and you feel a little bit awkward. But it’s OK; people seemed to enjoy the show.

I’m excited about it; we’ve never done Conan before. I’ve been watching it for years. I’m kind of nervous.

That’s basically it. I think every song starts on a guitar or in front of a keyboard or in front of a computer, and can kind of construct it up from there. And I just try to write without too much editing. When I’m in a writing session or a writing mode I just spend my Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, just working on music and trying to write as much as possible and then let all that stuff sit and after the fact go back over it with everybody else. We go through the songs and figure which ones are good and which ones are bad and do that whole editing thing where I need to change this lyric and we need a bridge here. It’s not stream of consciousness or anything, but I try to write as much as I can and figure out if it’s good later.

I write during the day; I keep a pretty regular schedule just as much because that’s [how] I’ve always worked best. When I was in school, I would have my classes from nine till noon and then do all my work in the afternoon so I would have the night off. After 7 p.m. or so I just shut down. I can’t think about creative stuff; I can’t do my homework. That’s also the only time I get to have to myself. Actually, for about two months [when I was] finishing writing the record, I rented an apartment in downtown Seattle—a studio apartment in a random building—and just moved my piano and a desk in there and some really minimal recording stuff and I would just go there during the week. Just take the bus in there and work on music and then go home. It’s kind of the Nick Cave model. I just liked that idea of writing the music somewhere else—of writing the record someplace where you can leave it there. When I had all my stuff in my house, I’d be in the basement all day, I wouldn’t leave the house. My girlfriend would come home and I’d just be crazed. Because I’d been there working all morning but I can’t leave it or let it go: it’s still down in the basement like a fucking ogre down there trying to come up the stairs and pull me down there.

There’s no way to have that not happen [the music taking over your life] but at least with having the writing exist in another physical place you fool yourself into thinking it’s not happening.

It was a couple of things. Number one, I bought a piano and I own a piano for the first time in my life. The reason I’ve written things historically on acoustic guitar is because it just feels like the most pure [way]. It feels good to pick up [an acoustic]. An electric guitar you have to plug in and let the tubes warm up. It just feels really good playing an acoustic instrument. And having a piano for the first time was just really great. I think it’s also a function of what I’ve been listening to and the fact that I’ve been listening to less guitar music the last couple years. I just never felt that inspired to pick up a guitar and write on guitar [for this album] for some reason. A lot of the songs started out as playing with the computer—not electronic music—but more like finding a sample of something and cutting that up and writing a song around that, rather than something that already existed. To me, for this record, it was far more inspiring and exciting to do things not on guitar. But it’s weird because for me now that’s changed 180 degrees; I don’t if it’s just because we played with Built to Spill a couple of times, but I feel like I’m excited about guitars again. I feel like I got it out of my system. I mean, who knows? Maybe the next record will be all piano; we haven’t even started to think about it yet. At this point, I’m more excited for the next record to be more of a guitar record. We’ll see.

Somewhere between guitars and Pink Floyd. The next record will be six songs and they’ll all be 20 minutes long.

We met with everybody that could be met with and we met with the heads of Interscope and Elektra and Epic and they were just blowhards. Just dudes—and women, too—who would just get up and their whole presentation trying to sell you on the label was talking about themselves. And granted, there are people who’ve done amazing things and maybe if I had recorded Unforgettable Fire I’d have an ego about it too, but just … real blowhards. And we’re sitting there meeting with these people and all they do is talk about themselves and talk about how great their label is because they’re running it. And when we went in to Elektra—first of all, it was pretty obvious that everybody’s head was on the chopping block. You could cut the tension and the grief in that room with a fucking knife. We’re meeting with this label and everybody had their eyes sunk low and I went to ask to use the bathroom and somebody gave me shit about it. What the fuck? And Sylvia Rhone, who was running the company, was just sitting there talking—first off, Ric Ocasek is a really awesome guy, by the way. That needs to go on the record. Any comments about Ric are not directly related to Ric. They had gotten Ric to call me on the phone and try to talk me up about Elektra, but he didn’t know anything about our band, so he was just kind of making a fool of himself to me, and not by his own fault. As if I was gonna go, ‘Oh my god! Ric Ocasek! We’ll totally sign!’ I mean, I love the Cars as much as anybody, but really. So somewhere in the meeting they’re like [whispers], ‘Go get Ric!” So they go and somebody grabs him and pulls him in the room, like his presence alone is going to make this meeting go well. And you know Sylvia’s sitting there and talking all about how they’re all about artist development and they want to do the slow burn and all that shit that major labels say and they don’t mean. And I felt in my own little way like Kanye [West speaking up against Bush] on TV. When I was watching it, you could just see him getting really nervous and I kind of felt the same way when I decided I was going to stand up to this person, ‘cause I’d just fucking had it. Like you know what? Two bands that we’re friends with—Nada Surf and Spoon—and we know what happened. I mean Nada Surf had a fucking hit, and you dropped Spoon a week after their record came out. We’re friends with these bands and you’re sitting here talking how you’re all about artist development and we have two bands that we’re really close friends with that have been dropped from your label. And she was like, ‘We’re not going to talk about that now; we’ll talk about that in my office.’ So we go in the office and she gives us this story about Spoon that’s totally erroneous. All about how, ‘Well, I never met the band so we didn’t have a connection and this and that and it didn’t work out.’ Just basically didn’t try. And I saw Britt [Daniel, of Spoon] like two weeks later and he was like, ‘What the fuck? I was in her office for three hours and she talked all about how great our band was.’ I mean, [did she] not think I was gonna check up? These are my friends. Do you think I’m not gonna get the real story? Once we walked into that place and especially because of Nada Surf and Spoon, it was just a bargaining chip. It was embarassing for everybody there. Especially after what had happened to Spoon and Nada Surf, I wouldn’t be caught dead signing to a label that would do that to people.

You go into these meetings and you put your guard up and you think everybody here’s gonna be stupid and annoying and we were gonna have to go in there and pretend that we liked these people. And we hadn’t found anybody we were really excited about,and we went [into Atlantic] and it was like night and day compared to these other companies. Atlantic has had a huge restructuring in the last couple years. And I honestly can say, at this point in our relationship, that I like everybody there. And I don’t mean I think everyone’s going to do a really good job and they’re really going to move units or anything; I like them as people. The people I have to work with I actually want to hang out with, which is not something I was ever expecting from a major label situation. And we have a long way to go with these people; I’m not trying to paint a rosy pcture here, but I think that right now I feel really good about our decision and the people we’re working with. They’re good people; they’re solid, hardworking people.

And Atlantic was relatively late in the game. By that point, we were still talking about it, but it didn’t seem like anything had come up that was really worth doing. But once we sent [Atlantic] the list of demands we had written up in 1998 when we almost signed to Mammoth and were rejected scoffingly, and Atlantic said, ‘Yeah, we can do all this; let’s do it now.’

The bottom line is that Atlantic is being the kind of label that we want to be on. We’ve put a lot of work into this over the years and we’ve gotten to a point where we know what we’re doing: we know how to make records, and we know how to tour, and we know how to do press. We’re not newbies. And they recognized that and respect it; they realize that we don’t really need an A&R person. We can kind of do this ourselves and we want to sell records and we want to be successful, but we want to do it our way.

When we’re making a record—everything from the first record to this record—it’s very much about being in the moment and making the record as good as possible. None of us when we were in the studio were saying, ‘Well, I don’t know what Atlantic’s going to think about this.’ The label situation really was only positive. We never had anybody come by the studio other than to say hi. There was never any interference on that front. I think we spent less on this record than most major label releases get, and that’s mostly because Chris [Walla] produced it and we’re not paying him $1000 a day. I think about it in this way: We were able to go to a place and make a record the way we want to make it. Do we want to rent a grand piano? Sure, we can afford to do that. Oh shit, we need to have Jason [McGerr] come and re-track these drums. Fine, let’s do it. We want to mix in a good studio, not the Hall of Justice where three of the tracks are out.

People talk about going to a major label for the resources, but really, I would rather borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars from a large corporation that can afford to lose it if something goes wrong than to borrow half that from a label run by one of our best friends. Basically having our friend put his house up on the chopping block in good faith that you’re going to make a record that’s gonna sell. That’s the reality of the situation for me. So when the indie vs. major argument comes up, I say, ‘We wanted to take our time and make a record the way we wanted to make it and not have any kind of financial barriers.” And doing that on Barsuk would’ve meant a far larger risk to our friends than doing it on a major label. I feel like, given our ambition as a band and what we want to accomplish, I would never want to pull our friends into that and have them be responsible for it. This is our thing.

I feel that wherever this band is going, I feel that I have a lot of faith in the people who have been following the band over the years and let’s say hypothetically that this record does really well, exceeds everybody’s expectations. I can’t even quantify it, but at a certain point, you’re getting into more of a casual listener. And whether that’s after 75,000 or 100,000 people, who knows? Everything after that are people who are casual listeners, who probably love the music, but they also probably love Nickelback, and that’s fine—I don’t care. So you can’t pick your fans and you can’t say how much somebody likes a certain thing or how much they should like it. I think we’ll always have a really strong core fanbase of people who’ve been fans over the years. As long as we don’t turn into complete assholes—which I don’t see happening … I mean, my favorite band is Teenage Fanclub and we played a festival in Japan on the same stage as Teenage Fanclub and we got to hang out with them and I always wanted to meet them and they turned out to be exactly what I wanted them to be. Not only were they great, but they obviously liked each other, were really gracious, they were really intelligent and funny. And me and Nick were watching them, going, ‘This is what I want us to be.’ Who knows how long the band will last and what’s going to happen, but for me, it would be so great to accomplish that kind of thing. Those guys are older now, but they’re doing it with dignity and there’s something so timeless about their music. Whether or not that’s in the cards for us, I don’t know. They’ve went from little indie band through being on majors and supposed-to-be-the-next-big-thing and then that not really happening. But it’s truly all about making music for them. And we’re talking about music in ways that we haven’t really talked about before because of the new label situation. Like today: We’re taping this weird concert for MTV which is us, Mary J. Blige, Sean Paul and Nickelback. It’s just weird shit. And it’s gonna be fun; I’m not speaking disparagingly about it. Anything we’re ever gonna do for MTV is not gonna be cool: it’s going to be something like this. There’s no point in waiting for something awesome to happen with this lame multimedia conglomerate. I think the most important thing in doing anything creative is balancing one’s ambition with what’s really important, which is making good records and making good music. And that can happen anywhere: it can happen in a basement or it can happen in Madison Square Garden; it doesn’t matter.

I think with every records there are certain kinds of ideas and themes that tend to be more in the forefront in my head. I think that the album really only took shape in the last month or two of making it. You know, a song like ‘What Sarah Said’ wasn’t originally planned to be on the record for some reason. Not to sound all artsy or anything, but one thing’s that’s been kind of bothering me lately is this sense of the record as being about growing older. I don’t really see it so much as being about growing older as becoming aware of things in life that maybe you had not spent too much time thinking about before. For me personally, so much of my life now is unrelatable to other people who don’t do what I do, you know what I mean. Like normal people don’t spend their time galavanting around the country playing rock shows. Normal people don’t spend two weeks flying around with Pearl Jam and Tim Robbins in private jet. Most people don’t do that. It’s not a relatable kind of situation and the more those kind of weird unrelatable situation happen, the farther I find myself drifting from people in my life that I care about because you get farther away from reality. And for me, I try to be conscious of and present in people’s lives in my life, like family and friends and, you know, the lady at home. And really taking stock of these relationships and feeling a sense of commitment in my life, maybe because of the fact that I am getting to be that age where I want people to be in life forever. I think that for me, and i don’t know if this is the onset of pessimistic realism, I find myself seeing the end of that. A song like ‘What Sarah Said’ comes out of this story that our friend Sarah was telling us about walking with her husband one day and getting really emotional and being like, ‘God, I’m gonna have to watch you die and that really sucks.’ But there’s something beautiful about having people in your life that you care so much about that you want to see the end with them. And to me, that’s colored, certainly, songs like ‘Soul Meets Body’ and ‘I’ll Follow You into the Dark.’ I see it as an incredibly touching sentiment that your commitment to somebody makes you aware of your mortalitly and theirs.

Obviously, when you have songs about death it can come off really heavy but … even a song like ‘Brothers [On a Hotel Bed]:’ I think that’s where people are getting the idea of this theme about getting older. To me, I don’t feel like people my parents’ age have enough songs about them that aren’t fucking cheesy as shit. Any song that deals with people who are adults and their adult lives and real things people go through tend to be these really sappy, shitty, triple-AAA [Adult Album Alternative], bad, poorly written songs. The fact that it comes later in the record is indicative—I wanted the songs more sunny in the front end and as the record goes on you have songs about being older—I just wanted to write a song about people that don’t get to have songs written about them in an intelligent way.

It’s weird I sometime feel like the songs that I’m really excited about on the record, maybe other people aren’t gonna be, so whenever I find somebody who likes the songs that I like on the record, I’m really excited about talking about them. The thing I like about the line [‘Both a beginning and an end’] is [it’s about] the beginning of a relationship and the rest of your life and the end of all the anticipation. I watched this movie recently—‘Beautiful Girls’—have you seen that movie? By Ted Demme? A great movie! Kind of fell through the cracks. I don’t think it’s even really a cult film. I found it as Best Buy for $6 and bought it and thought, ‘Oh my god, this is great!’ There’s this line where he [Timothy Hutton] is sitting with Uma Thurman and says, ‘I just want a couple more of those firsts.’ You know, the first time that you talk on the phone for two hours and you can’t stop thinking about that person. And that’s the end of that. And that’s fine; that’s what happens. But I don’t think anybody that’s honest with themselves doesn’t—no matter how content they are in their life an relationship and whatever—doesn’t want another one of those. And that’s what happens with people: that’s what happens when people get to be middle-aged and they freak out. Any age, really: it doesn’t matter. You want so desperately for that to happen again; the fact that it happened once you should be content with, but if people are honest with themselves, a lot of people would give up everything they have to have get one of those again.

That record [Transatlanticism] is one big breakup record for me, too and that’s chronicling the end of a four-year relationship. It’s the kind of record that I don’t ever want to write again, for a number of reasons. I feel that I put that to bed in a way that [said], ‘That’s the end, that’s the last of those. I’m never writing another record like that again.’

I did an interview with this woman who was really kind of lame to me on the phone and then she decided she was gonna start taking potshots at me about [‘You Will Be Loved’] and how she thought it was the meanest song and how could you write it. And you know, do you even get it? To me it’s a really touching song; it’s more about saying there are, of course, faults in relationships, but there’s something really exciting about that idea and I’ve seen that play out in my own life. Things don’t work out with people and you don’t know why, but you find somebody that you click with just perfectly and it makes total sense. It makes everything that came before make more sense.

You know, the band does really well, but there are always going to be those people who are anti-sentimental that they just can’t stand what we do or they don’t get it, and it’s weird because every once in a while, I’ll run into somebody who has been through a situtation like that [a bad breakup] and found the records and say, ‘I never liked your band, but I got it.’ And I’m sorry that they had to get it that way. You know, I’m a big fucking softie. I like Cameron Crowe movies. People ask how come I write almost all love songs. But 90% of all the songs ever written are love songs. You know, Stephen Merrit wrote 69 of ‘em. And it’s genius. People can figure out how to make billions of dollars and quantum physics and how to get to the moon and how to clone a pig and they still can’t figure out the matters of their own heart and that’s why love songs will always be applicable. It is the most base emtion and the most least understood thing in the world, and that’s why i don’t think there’ll ever be a shortage of information on the subject.

I think the most important thing is to never specifically refer to anybody. I think the trick that I get away with is that the songs that people think are really personal aren’t. There are songs that are more applicable to my life than others, but hopefully they’re either being presented in a way that they can be universally understood and hopefully appreciated or they’re so specific that it’s the details in the song that are important, and not the actual narrator. As far as personal problems, I’m not going to tell you where my moles are or who was the greatest lay of all time or the worst or whatever; I think that maybe some of the appeal of the band is that the songs appear to be incredibly personal but even if they’re personal songs, people can relate to them in a way that’s exciting and apply them to their own lives, because some of the songs are so specific in their construction. There are certainly elements in my own life or in my friends’ lives that I would never want to put into a song but a song like ‘Styrofoam Plates’ [about an absent father who passes away and the narrator’s lingering resentment], I did get permission from the person first. I told them about it and played it for them and he was really touched by it and moved. I think in a weird way, just in that situation, I think that maybe having his dad—and I’m not patting myself on the back or anything; it’s just the reality of it—it gives them a legacy outside of their own lives. I mean, that song will hopefully resonate with people. Growing up, I was a huge Kerouac fan and to me it was as much about Kerouac as it was about Neal Cassidy and you have this character who lives forever because of their proximity to this person who was able to document them, that’s really exciting to me. That’s the reason why we have a song like ‘Song for Kelly Huckaby’—my friend Kelly: that song will always be around for him and for his kids. And I’m not saying this is all a masterplan, but I’ve always been into that design of deifiying these normal people and it makes them into something really exciting. That’s always been really appealing to me.

I think that Conor [Oberst] does that really well, too [making personal moments into music]; it’s all about the details. To me, you have such a broad palette to work with when you’re writing music and I think it has as much to do with ability and aesthetic as anything else. A great song is a great song no matter what, but I can’t imagine writing a song I didn’t want to be about something. When I start writing lyrics, [I think] ‘What’s this going to be about? How am I going to make this be about something?’ It’s one of the reasons I love Raymond Carver. I love these little tiny, you know—one of my favorite Raymond Carver stories is about this kid who’s walking down the river and he sees this other kid fighting to pull a fish out of the river, he’s trying to catch it and they both help each other catch the fish. They never even get each other’s names;t hey’re trying to figure out how they’re going to divide it up and who’s taking the front or the back, are they gonna cut it in half? And they eventually cut the fish in half and the kid goes home and he want to show his parents the fish and his parents are fighting and he brings the fish in and he’s all proud and thinks that the fish is gonna actually stop his parents fighting. Like they’re actually gonna pat him on the back. They just basically say, ‘What is this shit? This thing stinks get it out of here!’ and they take the fish and throw it in the garbage. And the kid’s just destroyed. That’s a really dramatic kind of example, but it’s about something. And what the story is about is not really dealt with specifically in the plot of the story. And that to me is just so great. I mean, I’m certainly not comparing myself to Raymond Carver. I try to find places to put that in the songs; sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

My favorite song on the record is ‘Different Names.’ I don’t know if that’s going to be a crowd favorite, but that’s really exciting to play live. I like the fact that the song—it’s the same song, but it’s two very different interpretation of the same basic theme. And that one, we have a lot of sequencers and stuff going at that point, but it’s exciting because I get to kind of do this Garth Hudson-style two-handed keyboard thing where it’s like playing both keyboards at the same time. It’s surprisingly accomplishable; I wasn’t expecting it to be. I’m really enjoying playing that one and ‘Your Heart is an Empty Room’ is really fun to play, too. Those on the new record are definitely my favorite right now.

It’s been great. First Ave is just fucking great. With the exception of the RF problem in there, which is like this weird kind of thing that happens with the guitars, there are like weird frequencies. Whenever we’re doing this tour cycle, there are certain people and certain places, certain things that, without sounding overly sentimental, it feels really familiar. It feels kind of like home, you know? I know that every record I’m gonna talk to Jack Rabid [from NY magazine The Big Takeover] and I love seeing that guy and I’m really excited to hear what he thinks about the record because I just really respect him. There’s the people like that that we talk to and also the places that we go to play. Seeing Conrad at Frist Ave and everybody that works there and everybody is super-friendly. We’ve been going there for four years now and before we were playing Seventh Street, which I’ve got to say, the day that we moved into First Avenue from Seventh Street I was so fucking stoked. I fucking hated playing in that little place. It’s just so filthy. Like the downstairs? The dressing room? There’s one bathroom and you can’t takea shit in there. The bathroom thing is the biggest deal: in smaller clubs we have this little inside joke called GBBD: Girls’ Bathroom Before Doors. If you don’t hit the girls’ bathroom before doors, you’re gonna have to hold it.

First Ave is one of those clubs that we’ll always go back to. We’re not gonna play anywhere bigger in Minneapolis; if it takes playing there three nights, we’ll play three nights. It’s a very comfortable place, we know the score in there, we know everybody that works there. It feels really comfortable.

And I have some family [in Minnesota], too. And I’ll actually be there for a couple days after to spend some time with them.

We haven’t even started working on [the new Postal Service record]. Jimmy [Tamborello]’s got the new DNTEL record and a record called Jane’s Figurines which is all kind of techno which is really good actually. I think that he was sort of getting writer’s block with the DNTEL stuff so he decided he was going to start making some dance jams and it’s fucking awesome. I think maybe early 2007 is the earliest we’re gonna get anything going. For us, I think we just want to keep it fun and keep the emphasis on why we were doing it in the first place and not get overly ambitious. There’s not really enough time to do one band let alone two. We’ll probably get the record done and do a U.S. tour. And also we borrow Jenny [Lewis] from Rilo Kiley so getting her away from her schedule is difficult. I feel like it’s an indie rock summer camp kind of thing where, in an alternate world, this could be the greatest band ever, but it’s just not meant to be. When we were touring, it was still new and exciting because we were all friends, but we’d never played music together. But then towards the end of all that touring—it wasn’t even a lot—it started getting kind of difficult; we started turning into a real band. With real tensions and everything. And I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore if it’s gonna be like this; I already have to do this with one band.’

As far as Death Cab goes, I think the way I stay sane is only really looking at my life in four to sixth month intervals. So I know where I’m going to be until May of next year. You know, every once in a while people try to get really philosophical and deep and ask how long the band’s gonna last, what’s your next direction. I don’t fucking know; the band could last another ten years, it could end in six months. I don’t know. We get along great, we enjoy each other’s company, we’re playing better than we ever have before; that’s all I can really take stock in at this point. Bands break up; that’s just what happens. My only hope is that whenever we decide to stop playing it’s for a real legitimate reason and not because somebody calls someone else a fucker.

I was just talking to a friend of mine who writes for Spin who was going off to interview this band for a story who will remain nameless, but they’re just a crappy pop-punk band. And he was talking about how they all want to be painters and they’re doing art: no they’re not! What the fuck? I know what my limitations are: I make music, I think I do it pretty well. I’m just gonna stick with that; there’s not enough time in my life to start writing screenplays or something like that.