DC4C sells out! -Annie!

[obiwankobe]

Movin' on Up (Without Sellin' on Out): An Interview with Death Cab for Cutie
[24 October 2005]

by Jennifer Bendery
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On their rise from unknown act to major-label stars, Death Cab released five true albums (along with a handful of EPs and a collection of rarities). PopMatters tracks the band's rise:


Something About Airplanes
(Barsuk, 1998)
The group's strong debut set the template from which their other releases would either build or respond to. The group proved that indie guitar-rock could be pretty without being twee, and matched their restraint with careful crafting.


We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes
(Barsuk, 2000)
Arguably the band's finest effort, this disc offers more breadth to the original aesthetic. "We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes is something you want to discover and cherish with no strings attached, and pass it on as eagerly."
— original review


The Photo Album
(Barsuk, 2001)
The Photo Album sounds like a band treading water, not so much because it's flawed as because they seem to have quit getting better. "Death Cab for Cuite has beefed up the sound. The production is clearer; gone is the static, hazy spell band member/producer Chris Walla created on the first two albums."
— original review


Transatlanticism
(Barsuk, 2003)
The band starts moving toward the mainstream with this brighter-sounding release and drew split reactions from fans and critics. "But for old-school Death Cab supporters, it's gut-check time: Did you like these guys for their 'rock' or their 'indie'?"
— original review


Plans
(Atlantic, 2005)
This album marks their first release with the full weight of expectations, and they succeed not by trying to write a great album, but by focusing on the steady craft that brought them here. "This record isn't a musical revolution, but more of a musical lullaby, a sweet collection of sad and hopeful stories."
— original review

At the record company meeting
On their hands -- a dead star
And, oh, the plans they weave
And, oh, the sickening greed
Re-issue! Re-package! Re-package!
Re-evaluate the songs
Double-pack with a photograph
Extra track (and a tacky badge)"

— From "Paint a Vulgar Picture" by the Smiths

When a beloved indie band signs to a major label, the fallout generally includes longtime fans shaking their heads and mourning the loss of what was once a musical gem now being bleached, painted over and sold alongside packets of M&M's and camera film on the shelves of Wal-Mart.

But in the case of Death Cab for Cutie, the Seattle-based band that just ended a five-CD stretch with Barsuk Records to release their latest album with Atlantic Records, the unthinkable has happened: diehard fans are buckling up and coming along for the ride to commercial success. Instead of treating the shift to the mainstream as if they were just shot in the face, Death Cab followers appear to have faith that the band will continue prioritizing artistic integrity over profits, even as millions of new pairs of ears gain access to their best-kept secret.

At least, this seems the case with Plans, Death Cab's newest album that fans and critics are praising as "a headphones album" because of all the intricacies that will go unnoticed by listeners who blast the songs at 80 mph with the windows rolled down. The meticulous melding of electronic music with vocals and guitars that is such a marker of Death Cab's sound can be attributed to Chris Walla, the band's producer and guitarist. Indeed, amid the transition to Atlantic, Walla's masterful production work on Plans is a main reason why the band's original edge is preserved on the album.

Fans of Death Cab's previous album, Transatlanticism, will be pleased to hear what drummer Jason McGerr has said about Plans: "If Transatlanticism was an inhale, Plans is the exhale." The most noticeable difference between the two albums, however, is that Plans has a lot fewer guitars on it, said Walla. "We went for wider and dreamier and more atmosphere." The result is a catchy but emotionally dark album resembling a bastard child of New Order and Elliott Smith.

Reflecting an increasing reality in today's music industry, the album's title track "Soul Meets Body" was already circulating the Internet before the album was released. While executives at Atlantic may not be happy about losing profits to music dorks playing on the Internet at 2:30 am, Walla encouraged fans to bring it on. "I love it," he said. "The more anarchy we can give to the record industry, the better." The ability to leak songs onto the Internet "only serves to put artists first".

Still, Walla acknowledges the divide between his philosophy and that of Atlantic. "Their infrastructure and business model is set up to sell physical copies of music in the physical world," he said. If a label is losing money on CDs in stores and on CDs in the virtual world, how will that company make money? "From a stockholder's perspective, something like that is kind of terrifying," said Walla. "But from the perspective of kids who like music and want to hear music, it's amazing." Walla said he identifies "more with a kid who wants to hear music than I am a person who's looking at numbers. We would be disingenuous if we were to devalue what the Internet has done for us."

To the contrary of the business plan driving corporate giants like Atlantic, Walla thinks music freely circulating the Internet "absolutely" benefits bands. "It weeds out" bands that make bad music, he said, suggesting that if a band puts out "a tremendous piece of crap, nobody would have cared about it and it wouldn't have sold a bunch of records when it came out anyway." He cited the band Arcade Fire, which he described as a bunch of "kids of Montreal who made a weird little pop record that caught fire and resonated with a whole bunch of people." Despite minimal marketing, vigorous Canadian file-sharing elevated the band to its current popularity. "How do you argue with that? You don't. You can't," said Walla. "I think that's great."

Walla sees the role of major record labels changing dramatically in the next few years. "I think they'll be much less involved in the creative aspect and more and more of a distribution service." While there are always going to be entertainers to promote on record labels, Walla said the artistic end of the process need not be part of a label's responsibility. "I never considered Bob Hope much of an artist," he said. "He was an entertainer," much like Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson. Spears may not be making "any grand artistic statements with her music, but that's cool," said Walla. "There's nothing wrong with that." But for artists with an interest in musical ability versus entertainment value, the market is really changing, he said.

In light of the segment of fans who view Walla and singer Ben Gibbard as demigods, Walla laughed and said he doesn't know why that is. "People really connect with Ben's songs," he said. "I think that's a lot of it." While Gibbard's songs may be about a broken heart half of the time, Walla said it's the honesty of the lyrics that runs deeper. "It's not, 'Oh, my heart's broken,'" he said. "It's writing about all those places in between. I don't know anyone else who can write a song about regret and loss, about a glove compartment, and make it work."

Aside from word-of-mouth popularity, Death Cab has found success in unusual avenues of popular culture. They are the favorite band of a main character in the FOX television series, The OC, which displays a Death Cab poster hanging in a character's bedroom and even features Death Cab performing in a fictional club on the show. The OC stint "kind of just happened," laughed Walla, after FOX asked for clearance to use a song. In addition, the band's song "Transatlanticism" was prominently played in an episode of HBO's Six Feet Under. Gibbard has appeared on MTV 2 and released a well-received album with his side band, the Postal Service.

Walla said he doesn't feel the band is "selling out" by allowing songs to be used in mainstream venues as long as "outlets don't become more important than the fact that we've been a band for eight years, touring and making records for a long time". There is some danger in taking it too far, he acknowledged, but the band is careful when it comes to making licensing decisions. "We get tons and tons of licensing requests and some are really lucrative," said Walla. "But if it seems like it's going to pop up in the grocery store, we won't do any big product ads."

While Death Cab has taken some flack for signing with Atlantic, fans have been "very supportive" for the most part, said Walla. "We would have made the same record for Barsuk," he noted. Whether or not someone likes the band's new album less than the last one is "a perfectly valid sort of thing. I don't have any problem with that. I do that all the time," he said. "That's how music works. It's a time and place in your life. It might not have anything to do with the actual quality of what you're doing." But someone who decides the new album is worse just because it's on a major label "is pretty delusional". The real secret to keeping fans is "to have some integrity" and to "be honest about what we're doing and why we're doing it".

Ultimately, Death Cab is "making the sort of records we want to make," said Walla. "If we wanted to make a record for an audience or a label, this is the point at which the sharks can smell you." Walla said the band is "not at all controlled or restricted by Atlantic", and that contractual terms are "clear that we get to do whatever we want". While Atlantic executives may come into the recording studio to listen in on a session and make suggestions, Walla said bandmates have no problem with replying, "Yeah, we see what you're saying. But we like how it is."

[obiwankobe]

Death Cab, Full Speed Ahead

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 21, 2005; WE06

SPIN MAGAZINE crowned Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard "the poet laureate of the young and hopeful."

"I'll take it where I can get it," Gibbard laughs over the phone from Salt Lake City, a recent stop on Death Cab's tour supporting its major label debut, "Plans." (The band is at the 9:30 club Sunday and Monday.)

Of such high praise -- and there has been much of it in recent years -- Gibbard says that "it comes to the band in waves, at different times, for different reasons. There were certainly times when we were starting out, when we finished [our] first tape and people were really reacting to it and enjoying it, that we realized maybe we're on to something, that this might actually work. I'd been in a number of bands before, and they'd never really amounted to anything."

Gibbard has some local roots -- he lived in Herndon from 1988 to 1991. He was too young to go to shows at the 9:30 club but says he found WHFS ("when it was free-form") on the dial and heard such bands as the Stone Roses, Ultra Vivid Scene and the Pixies for the first time.

Eventually Gibbard found himself in the other Washington, growing up in Seattle during the heyday of grunge before settling in Bellingham, a college town 90 miles to the north. Gibbard, attending Western Washington University as an engineering student, was playing in a power pop band called Pinwheel when he met budding producer Chris Walla at a concert -- Gibbard was wearing a Teenage Fanclub T-shirt and the two bonded over a shared fandom for those critical favorites from Scotland.

By summer 1997, Walla was recording the slower, quieter, more introspective material Gibbard was writing under the name Death Cab for Cutie (after a Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band song featured in the Beatles' "Magical Mystery Tour" film). Those lo-fi four-track recordings were eventually released on an eight-song cassette titled "You Can Play These Songs With Chords" (1,000 copies were pressed). To play them live, a band was needed, so Gibbard turned to bassist Nick Harmer, his roommate and fellow DJ on the campus radio station, and drummer Nathan Good. (Three drummers later, that spot is held by Jason McGerr.)

Still, for a long time, the singer-songwriter says, "rock 'n' roll was the daydream I had when I was at work."

Gibbard, who earned a degree in environmental chemistry, explains that he'd always looked at his life in relatively small increments -- six to eight months -- even as Death Cab was generating its first buzz.

"Basically, I'd sit on the back porch of the refinery I was working at in Ferndale, Washington, doing environmental testing, have a cigarette and think, man, we're going on tour , it's going to be so fun -- but never that music was going to be a potential career. The goal was always to make enough money to just kind of not have to work for a couple of months and tour. Obviously the expectations and dreams have been far exceeded."

In 1998, a new Seattle label, Barsuk, released the band's official debut, "Something About Airplanes." As recording technology expanded -- "Airplanes" was recorded on an eight-track machine, 2000's "We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes" on a 16-track machine -- Death Cab's atmospheric indie-pop sound, melding Gibbard's sweet, aching vocals and poetic landscapes with melancholy yet infectious melodies, was rewarded with slowly graduating sales and sold-out shows in increasingly larger venues.

On a major label scale, the numbers were small, in the 100,000 range until the band's breakthrough album, 2003's "Transatlanticism," which has sold more than 300,000 copies. Some of the growth could be attributed to two years of plugs on the prime-time teen-oriented soap opera "The O.C.," where indie-rock fanatic Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) constantly proclaimed Death Cab his favorite band and sported a poster of the band on his bedroom wall. Last year, the band performed at the show's hangout, the Bait Shop, and Brody interviewed Death Cab for Elle magazine.

"That came out of left field," says Gibbard of the "O.C." connection. "I don't watch that much TV, or the show, so its cultural significance is kind of lost on me. It's certainly a chapter in the band's history to date. Both the show and us have benefited from our dance with each other, but it's time for us to move on from that."

Death Cab itself moved on. After four buzz-generating Barsuk albums (along with several EPs) and relative stardom in indie-rock circles, the band signed with Atlantic Records. "Plans" was released in August, debuting at No. 4 on the Billboard album chart and selling 90,000 copies its first week. Naturally, the move created ripples in the indie-rock community, with inevitable sell-out accusations.

According to Gibbard, "the indie rock/indie label thing has been kind of lionized into being something a lot more pure than it can be at times. . . . I have far more friends who have been screwed out of money on indie labels than have been screwed out of money on majors. Bad business is bad business no matter where it is. That being said, Barsuk is the greatest indie label in the country -- they've always been honest, always paid on time, always been pro-artist." Death Cab insisted that the Barsuk logo and catalogue information be included on its Atlantic albums, and the Seattle label got vinyl rights to those albums as well.

Even as the band retained creative control -- Walla, who produces the Decemberists, Nada Surf and the Long Winters, was at the helm for "Plans" -- its move to Atlantic allowed for improvements in distribution and promotion. And, Gibbard says, "we actually had some money to go somewhere and try something different." The band spent a month rehearsing and recording "Plans" at the 48-track Long View Farm Recording Studio in North Brookfield, Mass., even though Walla has owned a funky triangle-shaped Seattle studio -- the Hall of Justice -- since 1999. In a previous incarnation, the Hall is where Nirvana recorded its debut album, "Bleach."

There are several notable differences between "Plans" and Death Cab's previous albums. One is the relative absence of guitars (though the acoustic guitar remains prominent) and the addition of a variety of keyboards and pianos. After years of cramped living, Gibbard could afford a house with enough space for a piano. "And I gravitated to it a lot when I was writing. There are some guitar songs on the record, but I didn't feel the urge to pick up a guitar most of the time. It wasn't a conscious choice, more of an aesthetic choice."

Another noticeable change is Gibbard's lyrical obsession, which is less with love than with death and separation, evidenced in such songs as "What Sarah Said" and "I Will Follow You Into the Dark." Both examine the way relationships are altered by death. The first is set in a hospital "amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines/In a place where we only say goodbye," the singer noting, "there's no comfort in the waiting room/Just nervous paces bracing for bad news." In the song, Gibbard somberly muses, "I'm thinking of what Sarah said/That love is watching someone die/So who's gonna watch you die?"

Death, says the 29-year-old Gibbard, is "something I've always been attracted to as far as writing about it but never found myself in a place where I felt comfortable addressing [it]. [Here] I do it for the first time, more presently and directly than I have before."

Part of that comes from being in a stable, long-term relationship (with music publicist Joan Hiller). According to Gibbard, "the idea of being with somebody when they die is more a statement of commitment than of loss. The natural progression when you talk about commitment is that someday one of you is going to die, so I felt the desire to address that." In "Soul Meets Body," Gibbard does so by vowing that "if the darkness takes you, I hope it takes me, too."

The album's most profound song, "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," is a solo, acoustic-guitar supported meditation in which Gibbard plaintively notes, "Love of mine, someday you will die . . . if heaven and hell decide/That they're both satisfied/And illuminate the nos on their vacancy signs/If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks/Then I'll follow you into the dark." Some writers have suggested it could become a first dance favorite at wedding receptions.

"In a weird way, if you want to generalize my general outlook on life, it's a sense of romanticism filtered through this pessimistic realism, having a hard time enjoying something when you know there's an end to it," Gibbard says. "I can't imagine that would make a very good first dance by any stretch of the imagination!"

Another track, "Different Names for the Same Thing" is a bridge between Death Cab and the Postal Service, the electro-pop project Gibbard did with Los Angeles-based keyboardist-producer Jimmy Tamborello. The two swapped music through the mail (hence the name) and in 2003 released "Give Up" on the Sub Pop label.

"I was always convinced the record would do 20 or 30 thousand copies," Gibbard says. "It's certainly taken on a life of its own." In fact, the Postal Service album has done better than any Death Cab album: At 670,000 copies, it's Sub Pop's second-biggest seller behind Nirvana's "Bleach" and has sold more than Death cab's four studio albums combined.

There was one small blip -- soon after the album's release, Sub Pop received a cease and desist order from the U.S. Postal Service, which asserted its trademark rights. Happily, an arrangement was worked out by which the duo could keep using the name if it promoted traditional mail delivery service to a young fan base more attuned to e-mail and instant messaging. "Give Up" CDs were sold on the U.S. Postal Service Web site, and in November, the group performed here (briefly) at the annual postmaster general's National Executive Conference, which Gibbard calls "a very surreal experience."

The Postal Service's "We Will Become Silhouettes" (an upbeat song about living through the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust) is featured in television ads for the Honda Civic (the rebirth spot with the butterflies and caterpillars), and that band's "Such Great Heights" opens the new "Grey's Anatomy" soundtrack. Death Cab songs pop up on soundtracks for "The O.C.," "Wedding Crashers" and "Six Feet Under." They're also on a soundtrack to the new video game "Stubbs the Zombie," featuring contemporary bands covering '50s classics. Death Cab covers the Penguins' "Earth Angel."

"When you can't rely on proper radio or MTV, which doesn't even play videos anymore, you have to find an alternate way to promote yourself, to get your music out there," Gibbard says. "As long as that doesn't involve compromising yourself, there's really no wrong way to do it."

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE -- Appearing Sunday and Monday at the 9:30 club.

[*Annie*]

I forgot to read the first on yesterday..... and you post another one.

[obiwankobe]

there there and I think you'd find intresting, so get at them when your ready. If I don't post it when I see it, then I forget about it.

[*Annie*]

Woah, I'm surprised I even understood what you were trying to say.
I will read them, thank you.
The funny thing is, I read print like crazy, but I don't like reading on-line articles... maybe I'll start printing them out and then I'll actually read them.