From the Archvies: Death Cab for Cutie Interview

This idea shamlessly stolen from Jeffrey Overstreet, who is revisiting his movie reviews on his blog. In 2003, I interviewed Ben Gibbard and Chris Walla from Death Cab for Cutie for Paste right before the release of Transatlanticism. Here are some excerpts:

on the "vision" for the album:

BEN: I don’t know if we had a set vision per se. We kind of went into it using a different MO than we have before. Every record we’d made prior to this was started with us—we’d rehearse songs…and take it out and tour it for a long time…and then do it in the studio. The Photo Album was a lot of that, almost the entire record, we’d played a ton of it before we ever got in the studio to record it.

With this record, we just sat on demos. I would work on songs, I’d pass out discs and everyone would chime in. We were able to deconstruct all the songs and then build them back up in a way that we’ve never done before, which was I think far more productive and exciting and interesting than going in and taking a photograph of a song you’ve been playing live for three months.

on the production being more "crisp" than "warm" :

CHRIS: That makes perfect sense. I think I’m just getting better at what I’m doing. Not like in a “it’s the best-sounding record EVER” kind of way. It’s a huge learning process. The thing about making records is that there are no rules. There’s no script. If you’re following a script you’re making a really boring record. The formulas are so…I mean, there’s some of them that people stick to for a reason…some microphones sound good certain places and that just always works, but as far as how you build a song or how you track an instrument or whatever, it’s just all trial and error.

BEN: There was this guy who used to live in Bellingham when we first started playing who was the guy who somehow got all this money and bought all this recording stuff, and he had like every "industry standard"—like every last thing. Everything was set "industry standard"—I mean, that’s where you set it.

And when Chris was recording the first record, he’d like throw a quarter in the corner and that’s where the mic goes. And put a mic there.

CHRIS: It's come a long way from that…but even so, you know, it’s like—that’s how a lot of this record happened…there’s a lot of flying change. There’s a lot of weird accidents on this record that we just ran with. When you plug in an amp and you turn it on and the amp’s totally f---d up and it makes some crazy noise, I have to think twice about not recording it. Are we sure we want to fix that? That’s pretty cool!

At the end of the interview, I mentioned that I hated the question "Why do you make music," even though I often and asked it when I couldn't think of anything else to say.

ME:So, Why do you play music?
BEN: Why do you write about music?
ME: Um...Because I like it.
BEN: There you go.
CHRIS: I think it’s sort of the logical extension of anything that you love. If you love looking at photographs, you figure out how to make them. If you love reading books you figure out how to make those. That’s my answer.