Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard has spoken to NME about how divorce and making peace with his past shaped new album ‘I Built You A Tower’, as well as his thoughts on major label life and the doom that younger generations are facing.
Released last week (Friday June 5), ‘I Built You A Tower’ is the indie veterans’ first release on the legendary Anti- Records, after over 20 years signed to major label Atlantic. Their new home rekindled a dormant approach to their music and seemed to sit perfectly alongside Gibbard’s desire to make sense of his past, as the frontman explained.
“I started to ruminate on this idea that one’s memory and their past is like this cityscape,” he told NME about the concept behind ‘I Built You A Tower’. “We have compartmentalised memories. I was envisioning this horizon of buildings of various shapes and sizes that all held moments and times in your life – like if you see an aerial shot of Manhattan. When we move through different periods in life, we create a new edifice to hold that memory.”
The impetus to do so came from the pain of Gibbard’s marriage coming to an end, all at a time when he had to dig deep into his past each and every night for a gruelling tour celebrating 20 years of both Death Cab’s ‘Transatlanticism’ and ‘Give Up’ by his cult side project The Postal Service.
“I’d argue that most divorces are painful,” he continued. “I don’t hear a lot about ‘awesome’ divorces. I suppose there are some. A 10 year period of my life came to a close and I found myself in a position where I had more professional pressure on my life then I’d ever had with this Death Cab and Postal Service tour. It all depended on me. It’s weird to say it out loud, but it is a statement of fact. It’s a co-headline where if the singer of one band doesn’t show up, there’s no show.
“At the same time, I’m spending half of my time preparing for this tour and the other half talking to lawyers or therapists. I found on the tour that I was dealing with some very difficult things related to my divorce that were not for public consumption. I was having to manage this part of it while an hour later going out at Madison Square Garden.”
He added: “Being on that tour and doing those shows was a welcome distraction, but there was still an element of context-switching. It was very eerie to go from, ‘It’s 2023 and I’m trying to put the pieces of my life back together from the life I thought I was going to have until I passed away’ while I was time-travelling back to 2003 and living in my 25-year-old self for the whole set.”
From there, Gibbard leaned into the metaphor of giving all his feelings and memories a place or ‘tower’ – a tip he recommends just so we can “get through our days”.
Check out the rest of our interview with Gibbard below, where he tells us about the beauty of an indie label, going back to analogue, and how he’s really doing now.
NME: Hello Ben Gibbard. You’ve described this time as “a new chapter”. Do you mark a new era for each album or does that come simply from being back on Anti- Records?
Ben Gibbard: “I think it’s mostly [because of the] label. We’re in the midst of a new chapter after being on Warner for the last 20 years. It’s a real change of scenery. As I’ve been talking about this record and talking about the catalogue as a whole, I feel like we are in the midst of a new chapter that started with the last record [‘Asphalt Meadows’]. ‘Codes & Keys’ through to ‘Thank You For Today’ are of a particular chapter, but I really feel that starting with ‘Asphalt Meadows’ is when Dave [Depper, guitars] and Zac [Rae, keys]’s integration into the band really started to bear fruit. We started to really learn how to be a five-piece. With this record, everyone just feels really confident with their role in the band. It just feels as if we’re really firing on all cylinders in a way that is reminiscent of other high watermarks in the band’s career to this point.
“That can sound a little self-serving as we’re here to promote a new album and I don’t want to be sitting here trying to blow smoke, but it does feel as if we’re hitting this stride where things are both effortless and feeling really inspired.”
How does having a label like Anti- as a home alter your approach to making and releasing music?
“First and foremost when we met with Anti-, we went to their offices in Los Angeles and in the small talk we were just talking about music in this way that I don’t remember talking about at Atlantic. Immediately being in the room with Anti- and talking about things that we like and aren’t market-driven, we just immediately felt, ‘This is fucking great’. It was awesome to be in a room and not have somebody ask you if you want to hear the new Kid Rock single. That happened at some point early on at Atlantic.
“Don’t get it twisted: we had the antithesis of most people’s major label experience. We were able to make the records how we wanted to make them, there wasn’t someone coming in and saying, ‘I don’t hear a single’. Our successes were our successes and our failures were our failures, at least from a critical perspective. Atlantic did a wonderful job, certainly in the States.
“I can try and sell this narrative of a return back to our indie roots or something, and that’s technically true, but overall we all just feel a lightness. If we wanted to make a record that was more in the vein of ‘Laughing Stock’ [Talk Talk’s 1991 classic] than ‘Plans’, no one would bat an eyelid.”
Would it be too tidy a narrative to say that the Death Cab and Postal Service anniversary tours brought about any kind of sense of closure of a chapter?
“Those chapters are never closed because we’re playing those songs so often live. We’ll be playing songs I wrote when I was 20, and I’m like, ‘Oh that’s a cringe-y lyric, what the fuck?’ – then alongside songs we wrote last year. It’s never closing a chapter, but spending that much time with my 25-year-old self was illuminating. There are these moments where I’d be playing a song from ‘These Are The Facts And We’re Voting Yes’, ‘Something About Planes’ or ‘Photo Album’ and it’s like, ‘I really like the interplay of these elements’. I find myself asking the question: ‘Why don’t I do this anymore?’ or ‘When and why did I stop doing this?’
“The conclusion I came to was that once I started recording on a computer, the songwriting process changed pretty dramatically. I started to diverge away from the process of how I wrote songs for the first three or four records. It kind of started with ‘Asphalt Meadows’, but certainly with this record, I decided that instead of fucking around with a drum machine for a couple of hours or pulling drum loops from a folder, I would just record a bunch of drums myself in the spirit of how I would used to write a part that you could sing like a guitar part.
“I recorded myself doing all this drumming and then would start a lot of the songwriting process from there. They’re not electronic elements, it’s a human playing. I felt like my hands found places on the guitar that felt both new and familiar. I would put a bass part on it that felt new and familiar. I found myself with these demos that didn’t sound like the music we were making in the early ‘00s, but just the process of making music that way without all these found sounds and samples started to feel more organic and more like a band.”
It’s said that the best music comes from imperfection, but music technology strives for perfection and the magic is lost…
“I completely agree. I’m working on this theory that there’s such a lack of great rock records over the last 20 years, when rock ‘n’ roll has fallen so far out of fashion, because the methodology with which people were making those recordings stripped a lot of what made guitar music great out of it. With Pro-Tools, going beat detective on the drums, putting five guitars on with a computer, auto-tuning the backing vocals… once you have the option to fix everything, you lose something. As our producer John Congleton repeatedly said, ‘Dude, in six months you’re not gonna hear any of this stuff’.”
“Aside from the fact that the songs are amazing and that Cameron Winter is such an amazing singer, one of the many reasons that this Geese record [‘Getting Killed’] has hit so hard for people is that it’s just really fucking loose. This sounds like an album that came out before 25 years ago and it has life in it, there’s oxygen in it, it feels like human beings making music. I can’t imagine that record having the impact that it’s had if it was cleaned up. In my own personal listening, I’ve just been having this strange epiphany. These are the things that Jack White has been saying for years, but things sounding a little off and not perfect is what makes rock music really work. It is the fundamental element in guitar-based music.”
What do you think about all the online psyop debate around Geese?
“This is Geese’s fourth record. That discourse around them being a psyop or an industry plant is fucking ridiculous. The only valid point I saw was that we are given the impression in a streaming economy and a social media world that we all have access to the same levers to promote ourselves. The reality is that it’s not true. Amplification of posts, the new payola, etc, but those guys are amazing and they deserve everything that’s coming their way. As a fan, I’m just really excited to see what they do next.
“I also hope that they as human beings have the fortitude to weather the weight of expectations.”
Back to your album. What can you tell us about how you used the music to make sense of the fallout from your divorce?
“As I always do for every record, I’m writing a lot and we had about 90 songs. I started writing around 2023 and the last songs were written around the middle of last year. I started to realise that if this record was going to be about divorce and be – to oversimplify it – a ‘breakup record’, then it’s going to be the result and I want that exploration to be internal. I didn’t want any of the bitterness of, ‘You did this’, ‘fuck you’, ‘I’m so glad I’m not with you any more’. I kind of already wrote that record, it’s called ‘Kintsugi’ [after split from Zooey Deschanel].”
That was over a decade ago, too…
“I’m almost 50-years-old. Outside of just not wanting to repeat myself, I also feel like being older and actually being in constant therapy, I’ve hopefully developed an emotional maturity that maybe I didn’t have before.”
Most break-up records try to say, ‘I’m strong, I’ve got this’, but you repeatedly sing, ‘I can’t hold it together’ throughout…
“It’s just being honest. I feel that the records that people connect to the most are the ones that are the most transparent. There is a tipping point with that, where you tip into self-loathing and whining. I’m sure there are moments I probably tipped off the edge of that. At the end of the day, one of the most powerful things to say to people is, ‘You’re not alone’.
“At this period in human history, not just the political climate that we’re living in, it’s incredibly important that we all look at each other and say, ‘This is OK, I don’t feel OK right now’. Not so much because I want you to look at me and I want attention, but because I know that you’re not OK either’.”
Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien recently said the same to us – that it’s no surprise how much young people are struggling…
“Well no, and I’m a Gen-Xer so my internal programming and default has always been, ‘What the fuck? Fucking get over it! Come on!’ That’s the ‘90s of us. At the same time, I find the conversations around what’s wrong with Gen-Z and Gen Alpha to be rather ridiculous and insulting. What young people are walking into as adults today is unlikely anything we have ever seen; certainly any post-war generation. They are starting so far behind where their parents and their grandparents started in regards to how they’re able to make a life for themselves.”
And they’ll still be called ‘entitled’…
“The idea of owning a house is out. The idea of having a career? Good luck, AI is coming along. Can you blame kids for trying to be influencers? Can you blame them for getting into crypto? Can you really look down upon someone who’s just trying to find a way to keep their head above water? It’s incredibly insulting and stinks of this attitude of ‘I went through the trenches, why can’t you?’ Now a trench is not a home, it’s renting for the rest of your life. Young people are very easy to pick on and they always have been.”
There’s a real fiery post-punk energy to the album, especially across the likes of ‘How Heavenly A State’, ‘Envy The Birds’ and ‘Punching The Flowers’. What sounds were you reaching for to translate how you were feeling?
“When we were starting the Death Cab and Postal Service tour, we had this filmmaker named Lance Bangs out with this. He was filming a bunch of stuff for us and we’ve known him for a long time. He brought Ian MacKaye [Minor Threat, Fugazi] to the show and we got to go to the Dischord House afterwards. That was just an unbelievable experience. I said to our bass player Nick [Harmer], ‘I’m really glad that 47-year-old me got to do that and not 27-year-old me’. As a massive Minor Threat and Fugazi fan, 27-year-old me would have been freaking out. I wouldn’t have been able to handle it.
“Ian was just a lovely guy and from that point on I found myself just listening to an egregious amount of Fugazi. In no world am I saying that I was trying to make us sound like Fugazi, because no one can make us sound like Fugazi, but what I took from those records was that they’re relatively simply arranged: it’s drums, bass and two guitars. There are not a lot of overdubs or adornments and they’re some of the most heavy and powerful records in my collection. I had this renaissance with Fugazi and found myself recognising how the way that we’ve made records for the last 20 years as a culture has just failed us in terms of presenting the power of what a band can be.”
Did you feel young again?
“I just don’t want to make old people music! I feel like we’re all just raging against the dying of the light here. We cannot control getting older, but we can control getting old. We can control not getting comfortable, keeping the tempos up, the level of distortion. We can make music that feels like an extension of the things that are and were the most important to us, without trying to have the equivalent of a musical dye-job in our hair.”
Given everything you went through that inspired this record, how are you now?
“I’m much better! There’s been the actual therapy, and then writing my way through this has always been incredibly illuminating for me. This period of my life is about three years in my rear view. We move on the best we can. The older I get, the more I realise that one of the biggest lies in songwriting is the ‘I’m over you’ song. That, ‘I don’t need you any more’ song. Those are the things we tell ourselves to move forward.
“We move forward in life, but you bring a piece of it with you. You can either choose to look at that period as a waste of your time or want those 10 years back, but I refuse to think of it like that. I think, ‘I was with this person for 10 years, we had eight good ones and two kinda bad ones, but I wouldn’t change any of them’. That person will always be with me somewhere in my heart as is everybody who has been in my life.
“The short answer is: ‘I’m doing great’.”
‘I Built You A Tower’ by Death Cab For Cutie is out now. A full UK and European tour kicks off in September. Visit here for tickets and more information.