Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard: On new album 'Thank You For Today' and Seattle's slow disintegration

Death Cab for Cutie’s ninth record, Thank You For Today, represents a reckoning. Kintsugi, released in 2015, came to be defined by its fractures: it was named after the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics by mixing gold resin into the glue, so as to highlight the cracks rather than conceal them.

The lure of the metaphor was obvious. Kintsugi was the Seattle outfit’s first album since the departure of Chris Walla, their long-time guitarist and producer, as well as the first to follow the collapse of frontman Ben Gibbard’s marriage to actress Zooey Deschanel. No wonder they saw such value in the idea of taking something broken and turning it into something beautiful.

Both of those splits loomed large over the record’s press cycle, but perhaps they shouldn’t have. Fans and critics alike went over the songs with a fine-toothed comb in search of references to Gibbard’s divorce, and whilst there were some, he seemed more interested in eulogising the strange couple of years he’d spent living in Los Angeles, which he once described as a “zero-sum game” – for every positive, a negative. Walla’s exit, meanwhile, was all journalists wanted to ask about, but he’d completed work on Kintsugi – albeit, without producing it – before he left. It was quickly clear that the album wasn’t going to represent the turning over of a new leaf.

It was, instead, the sound of Death Cab as we knew them signing off. One of the most reliable indie rock success stories since the turn of the century were now reshuffling their lineup, bringing in a new producer, and broadening their thematic gaze. Only now, with Thank You for Today, are they finally putting their chalk to the blank slate. It’s a taut, streamlined affair, but with a sharp experimental bent, one that the band balance far more successfully with their long-established melodic guitars than they did on the uneven Codes and Keys in 2011. Dave Depper and Zac Rae, hired hands who plugged the gap left by Walla on the tour for Kintsugi, have now been granted full membership.

In truth, though, the bulk of the Walla-shaped hole has been filled not by Depper, Rae or Rich Costey, who returns as producer, but instead by Gibbard himself. It was his push-pull relationship with Walla that was at the heart of Death Cab’s aesthetic from their 1998 debut Something About Airplanes through to their biggest successes, Transatlanticism and Plans. The conventional wisdom was that Walla kept Gibbard’s broader singer-songwriter impulses in check, whilst Gibbard’s earnestness took the edge off of Walla’s calculation. Somewhere in between this clash of head and heart was where the creative magic happened.

Gibbard doesn’t shy away from the fact that he’s now very much in the Death Cab driving seat. “It’s been very liberating for me to take on the role of creative leader,” he says on a call from his home in Seattle. “I guarantee you that a lot of these songs would not have ended up the way they did if Chris was still in the band. They might not have been recorded at all.

“There’ll be some people who are going to hear the record and say ‘I wish Chris had done this’ but at the same time, there’s going to be others who love how it’s turned out. Not having him as a part of the process was very freeing, and I say that not to diminish his brilliance or his massive contribution to the first 16 years of this band. It’s more that I was happy to leave the studio head-butting behind.”

Recording took place between November of 2017 and January this year, at Costey’s new studio in Santa Monica. Gibbard says the process was enjoyable as any since Transatlanticism, which he considers the high watermark for positive studio vibes in the group’s two-plus decades together. A nightly sign-off that started out as an in joke borrowed from another band Costey had worked with – “thank you for today!” – quickly became sincere, and stuck as the album’s title when Gibbard realised how much fun he was having in the company of the long-standing bandmates Nick Harmer and Jason McGerr (bass and drums, respectively).

“Those guys were on the road with us for nearly two years,” he explains, “so I knew what it was like to play music with them onstage, and what it was like to goof off with them, but it’s a whole other thing to be like, “hey, I don’t like that guitar part” or “the keyboards aren’t working for me”. Everybody reacts differently to constructive criticism, so I was nervous – how could I not be? I just felt that the three of us – myself, Nick and Jason – had been playing our cards close to our chest for a little too long, and I didn’t want to dangle any more carrots. And it worked! In the end, we almost had too many good ideas.”

This new look, five-piece iteration of the band has turned in its most adventurous set of songs yet; right from the intro to opener “I Dreamt We Spoke Again”, on which Gibbard’s vocals are coated thickly with distortion, there’s a palpable sense of new ground being broken. Lead single “Gold Rush”, for the first time in Death Cab history, is built around a sample – a snippet from Yoko Ono’s 17-minute avant-garde epic “Mind Train”, that made up most of the first side of her 1971 LP Fly. “You Moved Away”, meanwhile, is an exercise in sparse atmospherics.

There was a sense that the lyrical scope had already begun to broaden on Kintsugi, but Thank You for Today is the first Death Cab record on which romantic relationships don’t provide the primary focus. For better or worse, Gibbard’s first, failed marriage came to thematically define Codes and Keys and Kintsugi in the public imagination. Now that he’s happily hitched again, heartache is no longer on the agenda, leaving him free to explore new topics – although only on his own terms.

A slew of early songs penned for this record were pointedly and uncharacteristically political. As part of the anti-Trump 30 Days, 30 Songs campaign that brought the likes of Aimee Mann, Franz Ferdinand and R.E.M. together in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Death Cab released “Million Dollar Loan” – a scathing satire that revolved around a comment the now-president made in one of the debates, in which he dismissed that sum of money, borrowed from his father, as a meagre starting point relative to the empire he built. After Trump won, Gibbard couldn’t help but continue writing in a similar vein.

“The buildup to and then fallout from the election was all-encompassing in this country,” he recalls. “Anywhere you went, anybody you bumped into, that’s all they wanted to f***ing talk about. I don’t have a pedigree for writing political material, but I was going into my studio in January of last year, and all I could think about was that this motherf***er was being inaugurated in three weeks’ time, and with all that impending doom on the horizon, how could it not find its way into the songs?”

It didn’t stick, though. Gibbard came to realise that national politics, however pervasive, were not in his thematic wheelhouse. He’s glad, too, given that only now he’s coming to realise how many of his contemporaries fell into that trap.

“We’re speaking right now in the summer of 2018, and the gestation period for a lot of albums is about eighteen months. So, a lot of the records that are coming out now were written in late 2016 or early 2017, and I’m finding that a lot of them are poorly written political albums: everybody feels the need to chime in, lest they be accused of not caring enough, or of not having an opinion. I have to admit that I’m slightly embarrassed for some of my compatriots who, in 2018, after years of writing about the sides of life that have nothing to do with politics, have suddenly decided they’re Bruce Springsteen.”

He name-checks one of his heroes when he explains Thank You for Today’s political trepidation – if Billy Bragg wants to talk about Trump, then Gibbard will tune in. For his own part, though, he ultimately views his new record as its own quiet rebellion against the current administration.

“I came to realise that you cannot get away from him. Even if you try, he will not give you a break, so the last thing I wanted to do was give this guy more time, to present him with another microphone,” he says. “If our music has been comforting to people in the past, it’s been because of the character and the content of the lyrics, so in these really sh***y times, I thought it’d be best to play to my strengths, which was to write songs that are introspective and that feel separate from the political world.”

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Accordingly, Gibbard returned to writing about his own life – just not as he had before. Thank You for Today’s closer “60 & Punk” is halfway between a lament and a love letter, dedicated to a teenage hero of his who then became a friend and mentor in adulthood. He tactfully refuses to name names, but whoever the central figure is, Gibbard’s recently watched them contest a fierce battle with alcohol addiction.

“It was very sad to see them in that condition, but also beautifully humanising,” he explains. “We tend to think of our idols as kind of superheroes; maybe less so today, given that people have a tendency to overshare on social media, but when I was growing up, all you knew about these people was what they allowed you to see – which was them doing superhuman things, up on stage in an arena with all these people going crazy. None of that removes the shackles of humanity. It doesn’t ward off addiction or mental illness. I wanted to document the series of interactions that brought me to that realisation.”

The changing nature of friendship hangs heavy over Thank You for Today. It’s a record preoccupied with transience in general; you get the sense that, as Gibbard has rounded the corner into his forties, he’s found life no more certain or stable than before. It’s why the likes of “Autumn Love” and “Summer Years” ache with escapist nostalgia, but that isn’t to say that he’s avoided tackling the things that discomfit him head on. It was hardly a shock when he used much of Kintsugi to paint an unflattering picture of Los Angeles; he’d been less than complimentary about the city as far back as “Why You’d Want to Live Here’ in 2001, and the bright lights and sunshine of Hollywood were never an easy habitat to square with somebody who’s made introversion his calling card.

On that record, there was almost a triumphalism to his return to Washington: “How can I stay in the sun when the rain flows all through my veins?” he reasoned on “No Room in Frame”. Thank You for Today, though, finds him back in a Seattle that he increasingly doesn’t recognise.

The city that he made his home was one that had always greeted him with open arms; as a teenager taking the ferry over from Bremerton to catch shows by the likes of Superchunk and Treepeople, and as a post-graduate aspiring to sell out the 500-capacity Crocodile Cafe and eke a living out of his music. When the band ascended to the upper echelons of America’s indie rock hierarchy via a star-making appearance on The OC, Gibbard bought a house in Capitol Hill: a progressive neighbourhood popular with creatives. He was ingratiating himself permanently within the community that nurtured him as a fledgling musician.

Now, he’s witnessing – and responding to – its slow disintegration. “You Moved Away” was written for the great Seattle eccentric Derek Erdman, who returned to his native Chicago last September after many years as a loveably anarchic presence on his adopted city’s arts scene. The move was described as a “local tragedy” by Seattle’s alternative newspaper, The Stranger.

“He’s just a wonderful, joyous human being, this totally sardonic and irreverent prankster, and his sense of humour became very much a part of the city,” Gibbard says. “We weren’t super close, but his apartment was on the walk to our local co-op, where we do our grocery shopping.

“I’d look into his window, and the walls were always covered in his artwork, really colourful, gorgeous stuff. It was so comforting to see that, and know that he was in the back doing something crazy, or making something beautiful. When he left, it had a profound effect on me, because his spirit is something that we’re losing in Seattle by the day. There’s fewer apartments filled with art, and more and more filled with Amazon badges.

“I never thought I’d live in a world where people are moving to f***ing LA because it’s more affordable to live there and be a musician than Seattle or Portland,” he adds, laughing grimly. “It’s the same thing that happened in New York and San Francisco; the artists and musicians are the people who were bold enough to live in the city before anybody else did. They created the culture, and then that attracted corporations to the city. Just by their very nature, they end up demolishing the thing that led them there in the first place. I love San Francisco more than any other city outside of Seattle, but I’ve seen it go from a vibrant creative community to a playground for tech bros.”

The changing landscape inspired “Gold Rush”, featuring lyrics born of frustration and sadness at seeing decades’ worth of memories collapse around him; intended as a cautionary tale about the risks of attaching cherished memories too closely to anything as ephemeral as a building or a neighbourhood: “I’d like to say it’s about me blaming Jeff Bezos personally for all of this, you know? But it’s not as if some corporate overlord came in, twiddled their moustache and decided to screw all of the artists out of their rent-controlled apartments. It’s the nature of living in a major city; it’s just that in Seattle, the dynamics and demographics have shifted fast and furious. When you connect as many memories to your geography as I have, and then you see that geography change around you, you’re forced to reckon with the passage of time.”

That the war of attrition being waged on Seattle’s creative community is now seeping into the music of one of its great success stories is indicative of how big a crossroads the city has arrived at; the changing populace is something that up-and-coming bands from the area like Tacocat and Chastity Belt have commented on, but now, as Death Cab are ushering in a new era of their own, it’s dominating their thoughts, too.

Late last month, as if to underline their point, news broke that developers plan to demolish the city’s cherished Showbox venue to build a $100m high rise apartment tower. Death Cab, who have their own storied history there, have led the charge on social media to have it preserved, but it’s hard not to feel that it’s symbolic of the fact that, with Thank You for Today, they’re leaving their old selves behind; bands, like major cities, can’t be expected to stay the same forever.

“I’m sitting here now at almost 42 years old, in a house that I own, having made a good living playing music,” reflects Gibbard. “I owe a lot of that to the culture of this city and to the legacy of music here, which I got onto downstream and have ridden to this place that I’m speaking to you from now. I’m not sitting here on my perch saying ‘oh, sucks to be 20 in Seattle these days’.

“I know that the Seattle my parents knew is not the Seattle I know, and that these things exist in a state of constant flux and change. The hope is that at least some of that change can be for the better.”

‘Thank You for Today’ is available on 17 August via Atlantic Records. Death Cab for Cutie play six UK dates in January 2019