Death Cab for Cutie

for cutie

Context in the Chaos

Words by Mike Hilleary

ver the course of a two-anda-half-year pandemic thousands, if not millions of people across the country— and the globe—were forced into an extended,existential crisis, resulting in all kinds of self-refection and reevaluation on our emotional and mental wellbeing, the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and how we even want to interact with the rest of the world. Contrasting this inner focus was the even greater attention we placed on what was happening outside the confnes of our quarantined homes in and around our local and national communities. Like so many others, Death Cab for Cutie frontman and songwriter Ben Gibbard watched events around him play out with a heightened sense of dread. “We in America had kind of taken for granted this idea that everything was just going to keep working,” he says. “That our institutions will continue to function, that the people in charge know what they’re doing, and that you have nothing to worry about. It just seemed as though many of the things that we took for granted were on the precipice of just falling apart. And I think that when you live with that sense of chaos you are made painfully aware of the fact that it was never functioning as well as you thought it was, and all it took was somebody just to push it a little bit.” This pervading air of frustration, disappointment, and apprehension is something that weighs heavily within the core of Death Cab for Cutie’s 10th LP, Asphalt Meadows. Gibbard himself cites a line from one of the record’s standout singles, “Here to Forever”—“Now it seems more than ever, there’s no hands on the levers.” “No one’s in control,” he argues. “And depending on our belief systems— if we are religious, we believe God is in control, if we are liberal, we believe the government is in control—whatever it might be. And it felt to me, in this particular period, the curtain was kind of pulled back. To use a tired metaphor it was The Wizard of Oz, and you pull the curtain back, and there’s nobody there. There’s not even a guy. There’s no man controlling stuff. It’s running on autopilot and the machine is starting to kind of disintegrate. I think that the anxiety that I was feeling out of that particular time period was a real driver on this record.” While Gibbard undoubtedly had an abundant wellspring from which to draw his lyrical ire, the logistics of actually demoing, developing, and recording the album’s songs posed its own set of challenges in the early stages of the pandemic’s social lockdown. Every Death Cab for Cutie song has always begun from Gibbard, with some kind of skeleton or scaffolding from which the rest of the band—bassist Nick Harmer, drummer Jason McGerr, guitarist Dave Depper, and keyboardist Zac Rae—could then physically get together in a room, sort through the material, and fgure out what was and wasn’t working. Spread out along the West Coast and state lines, that relied-upon system was a nonstarter. Instead of simply sitting on their collective hands, Gibbard reached back to a methodology that wasn’t all that far removed writing with Jimmy Tamborello for The Postal Service. “It was an approach that I think drew on the fact that we couldn’t all be together,” says Harmer. “Rather than making it a weakness, we turned it into a strength for us, which was really fun.” Every week for two years, the members of Death Cab for Cutie played a game of musical telephone, with each individual getting assigned a rotating

day of the week. “If your day was Monday you started a song,” explains Harmer. “It could be a drum beat, it could a bassline, it could be a drum beat and a bassline, everything except vocals and melody—because that’s 100% Ben. In any case the only other rule was you had to have it fnished and sent to the next person by the close of business. Then the next guy would open it up. You could add to it, you could completely change the key, you could even delete all of it and start over. It really sort of put the trust in everyone to make good creative decisions. It really made everyone really want to elevate their contributions to keep the momentum and the excitement going through the week. In a weird way, it brought us together as a unit.” While the approach wasn’t completely bulletproof— resulting in compositions that will never see the light of day—the body of work that makes up Asphalt Meadows is undoubtedly elevated by the rarifed context of its creation. “I don’t know if we’re going to continue to write like this moving forward,” says Harmer. “But I certainly think that for this time, and this place of where we were at as a band, it was sort of the best thing that we could have stumbled across.”

Death Cab for Cutie’s Nick Harmer on Raising Arizona (1987, directed by Joel Coen)

As Told to Mike Hilleary

Much like your favorite album, where so much of it is your mood and circumstantially dependent on where you’re at and what you want to experience. Sometimes you want a movie to make you think, and sometimes you want pure entertainment. I would say that one movie that’s had a lot of resonance for me in my life, and in a new way— I’ve always loved the flm, but a movie that I the layers of its brilliance more and more—is Raising Arizona by the Coen brothers. I loved it when it came out. I thought it was hilarious. And now that I am a parent, it is absolutely, to me, the most spot on movie about parenting in so many ways—the madness and the chaos of it. It’s got so many emotional layers on top of just being two of the fnest comedic performances between Nicolas Cage and Holly Hunter. I can’t say enough about that movie right now, mainly because it took a change in my own life—becoming a parent—to suddenly recognize even more of the nuance and feel the sting of it. The frst time I saw it was in college. There was a kind of this Coen brothers awakening that was happening for me. I worked at a video store when I was in college and so, you know, at a certain point you just start working your way through everybody’s output. Even early on the Coen brothers were superstars, but Raising Arizona just felt like such a screwball comedy, and then later in life, like I said once the context of my life changed a little bit and have some maturity under my belt, that I recognize just how layered it is. The thing that really resonates with me is that pervading threat of the man on the motorcycle coming to get the kid. There’s just this feeling that the world’s coming to get your kid and you really want to protect them and keep them away from harm. It’s such a perfect embodiment of this dread of time coming for you and it’s a really a really powerful feeling that kind of pervades in that movie. Every once in a while when things kind of feel a little bit stressful, I think, “Oh the guy in the motorcycles is getting close.”

Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard on Do the Right Thing (1989, directed by Spike Lee)

As Told to Mike Hilleary

Amovie that I continuously come back to, that I’m always kind of amazed by and inspired by is Do the Right Thing. I just think it’s one of the greatest flms ever made. The cinematography is incredible, the characters are incredible, just the scope of this movie taking place over the course of one day, the hottest day in New York in the summer with just all the tension that is occurring. And it’s just so multi-layered. You know I watched it relatively recently, and it was shocking how relevant it still felt. Sometimes when movies are kind of commenting on societal conficts or whatever it might be, they sometimes can feel frozen in a particular time, where someone could say, “I’m so glad we’re past that,” or “I’m so glad that these conficts don’t exist anymore.” And I wouldn’t say that about Do the Right Thing. Watching Do the Right Thing, especially in the wake of everything that happened in 2020, it feels like this movie came out today. I mean the end of the flm Radio Raheem is choked out and killed by the police. It’s pretty fucked up that this movie was made in 1989. We are not past the plot points in that flm. There are scenes in that flm that are just so powerful and brilliant. There are a series of scenes in fact where Spike Lee is zooming the camera in on a character and they’re just unleashing a series of epithets. Danny Aiello is doing it, John Turturro is doing it, the Korean shopkeeper is doing it, the Puerto Rican dude on the block is doing it. And it’s incredibly powerful. It’s this shocking series of shots. And I think the brilliance of Spike Lee in that movie to include that is to highlight the tension between these groups that exists—and to an extent still exists today but was certainly existing in that time in the context of the flm and in the context of this neighborhood in New York on this particular day. But they’re saying it right to the camera, and the frst time you see it, you’re like, “Oh my god.” It seemed as if Lee decided to shoot it that way so that you would feel like the recipient of that hate, and to sit with it, and be like, “Wow. That is such a demoralizing and demeaning thing to have somebody say to you.” Growing up in a predominantly white suburb across the water from Seattle in Bremerton. It was overwhelmingly white. There were a lot of Pacifc Islanders because of the Navy, but there really weren’t a lot of African Americans in my school or in that particular community. And so I feel like growing up where I grew up, in the time I grew up, no one told us who Marcus Garvey was during Black History Month. Nobody talked about the Black Panthers. Nobody talked about how when you call 911, in certain neighborhoods, they come in an hour. Growing up in the late ’80s, early ’90s, Spike Lee’s flms—specifcally Do the Right Thing—but also the music of Public Enemy, taught me more about what it was like to be Black in America. I obviously could never understand it. I could never relate to it. That was abundantly clear. But I was learning about Black history, learning about the Black struggle in America, not in school. I was learning about it through Public Enemy. I was learning about it through Spike Lee. From my generation, for those of us who were kind of listening to this music and watching these flms, it was incredibly revelatory to us, especially white people in the suburbs. It affected me greatly. There was no social media. There was no internet. There was no way to learn about people who were different and were having a different experience from myself. I think it allowed me a level of empathy, certainly not understanding, but it was a way for me to kind of learn about a different experience in this country that I would have no have no way of knowing about in that time.

(Portions of Ben Gibbard’s conversation have been abridged and edited for structure and fow.)