Death Cab For Cutie

Taking a break from their Underplay Tour with The Lonely Forest, Washington’s Death For Cutie made a short trip up to Edmonton with Bright Eyes as part of a quick four date tour with the band. It had been five years since they last played the Shaw Conference Centre and in that time they’ve been busy with new albums, constant touring and a boat load of videos.

We caught up with Nick Harmer and Ben Gibbard before they hit the stage for sound check to discuss the pros and cons of small and large venues, the joy of playing with Bright Eyes for the first time in eleven years and the beauty in finding the right visual representation of music – be it in videos, painting or graffiti. Read on to see the band’s take on how advances in technology has enabled creative people to expand their repertoire.

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Bobby: Right now you guys are in the middle of a tour with The Lonely Forest called The Underplay Tour where you guys are doing all smaller venues. How’s that going so far?

Ben: It’s going really well. I mean, these two shows – tonight and Calgary- are kind of exceptions. They’re larger places and Lonely Forest are picking back up with us after the Bright Eyes shows. But they’re going really well. We’re playing a lot of venues that we used to play, that we played kind of on the ascent so to speak and they still feel good. I mean, we played First Avenue in Minneapolis and it’s always been one of our favourite venues and it was great.

Bobby: Like you said, you are doing three or four dates with Bright Eyes. Here, Calgary, Oregon and then the Sasquatch Festival. How did this mini-Bright Eyes tour kind of get interjected amongst the Lonely Forest tour?

Ben: Well, we’ve played shows with Bright Eyes back in like 2000. In fact, I ran into Mike Mogis and Nate and a couple of the guys and we hadn’t played with them in forever. We were kind of joking about it. I think it had been eleven years since we played shows together. Has it been that long?

Nick: Yep, it’s been that long. I mean, they’ve been through and we’ve seen them on other stages, but on the same stage – it’s been that long.

Ben: It’s kind of great because I feel that we’re kind of from the same class. We gradated from the same class basically as Bright Eyes; so it’s kind of great to be able to play these shows with them. And Conor’s brilliant and they’re all great.

Bobby: It’s also good with both of you having new albums for you to promote them at the same time. Like you said, you both kind of came up together, now you have two new albums – it’s kind of like a trip through memory lane.

Ben: It’s also great because it’s nice to have bands that we kind of started out around the same time. We’ve been able to see them grow and they’ve been able to see us grow and play a little bit bigger places. As a fan, it’s been great to see how much his music has grown.

Bobby: Like I said, after these three dates you guys are playing the Sasquatch Music Festival at the Gorge in George, Washington which is a massive festival and its right in the middle of the Underplay tour which is all smaller venues. Which do you prefer? Massive festival and massive shows like Shaw Conference or do you like the smaller, more intimate, one thousand people venues?

Ben: You know; a good show is a good show no matter where you play it. We’ve had some of the most fun shows we’ve every played in front of fifty thousand people and some shows that were really memorable in front of three hundred people. I think it’s easier to… It’s more difficult to put on a great show in a small room because of the intimacy of the room. Especially when you’re on tour a lot and you’re so much closer to people and they can hear the conversations on stage. They’re very present for the whole thing.

I guess I should say a difficult night in a small venue is much more difficult than a difficult night in a large venue.

Nick: Yeah, that’s a good way to put it. I was going to say the exact same thing. They just kind of all scratch different itches. It’s a satisfying feeling to have a great show, small and big. But you certainly feel way more on  spot when you’re in a small room and something goes wrong; but at the same time, it’s easier to just kind of laugh that off too. Just be like “you know what? This is where we’re at and it’s going to be fun.”

It’s sometimes a little harder to have something go pear shaped and bad in front of fifty thousand people than it is to have something go pear shaped and bad in front of three hundred. But like Ben said, a good show is a good show.

Bobby: You gotta roll with the punches type of thing.

Nick: Yeah, exactly. You gotta roll with them.

Bobby: Then, of course, you get to play shows at places like The Gorge. I’ve never been there but it’s supposed to be one of the most beautiful venues ever.

Nick: It’s totally gorgeous.

Ben: We’ve played all the main American festivals at this point. I think we’re a little biased because it’s so close to our hometown but, still, it’s beautiful. There’s no more beautiful a back drop for a festival than that. And it’s the right size festival. There’s a lot of bands playing but it’s not seventeen stages across three hundred acres and everything is scheduled up against each other.

Bobby: Take a cab from one stage to the next.

Ben:  Yeah, yeah. It’s the perfect size.

Bobby: Going back a few months ago, you guys released a rather rare and unique video for You Are A Tourist on April 5th.  What was the genesis of the idea to do it – how did you describe it – “the first ever live, scripted, single-take video to be broadcasted as it was filmed.” How did that idea come about?

Nick: It was a friend of ours named Aaron Stewart-Ahn. We’ve done videos and collaborated with him on various projects over the years. And he had this idea, it was as much spawned from all of us being from a generation of fans of live TV – whether it be Saturday Night Live or an episode of Thirty Rock being broadcasted live or even sporting events. And then as well as the fact that there as also been a lot of one-take videos that has been made over the years that have also been really exciting. But those have always had a chance to sort of get it right. Like “we’ll just do fifty takes and then we’ll get it right and then that’s the video.”

So we thought why not just sort of combined those two threads? When he brought that idea to us, initially we thought “well, that sounds fun if not kind of impossible; I don’t know how we’d do it.” And then we kind of dreamt further into it and then we found the production team and talents of Tim Nackashi who’s the actual director of the video. He had a great concept and really kind of brought that into focus. Actually, all the credit goes to him and the choreographer and the production team behind it to really pull it off. I mean, our involvement on the day off was pretty minimal. Obviously, we were in it and the music was there; but there was so much going on behind the scenes and so many moving pieces that – like I said – hats of to them for getting it right. That’s really what I think; it was the team who put it all together.

Ben: Then we just get to slap our name on it and call it ours *laughs*

Bobby: We did it! It’s all us!

Ben: *laughs* It’s very collaborative though.

Nick: To be honest, in the history of the band, I think the best and the most fun experiences all along have been things where we’ve really sort of collaborated. We’ve found other artists and creative people and said to them “you do your thing, we do our thing and then we meet in the middle.” I think almost every time that that’s happened as band, we’ve been at the nexus of something really exciting. So, again, this is just one more thing that I really feel that we’re good at and comfortable with. I know we’re going to look to do – maybe nothing quite as splashy in terms of the press angle on it – but certainly we’ll look for more collaborative stuff in the future.

Bobby: When I was watching it, I was just wondering how much planning and pre-production must have gone into it to get all the moving pieces, the choreography, all of it together. It must’ve been an insane amount of work.

Nick: It was and, I’ll say again, credit to them. They only had about three weeks to put it together. They had a concept, we chose it, and it was a pretty fast turn around. This wasn’t like a six month project in putting stuff together. We hit the green light and then three weeks later we were doing it. Then for the actual shoot, we had about three days of actual pre-production rehearsal. Day one was just really rough construction stuff for the set and the technical side of things. Day two was starting the run through – just rough rehearsals, not dress rehearsals. Then the day of, we did a number of dress rehearsals. We even ran one twenty minutes before we broadcasted the one and even then there was stuff that was not right and going wrong. So it really was, when it came time for the live one, it was like “hold your breath!” It was pretty exciting.

Bobby: Now do you guys still ever wear those suits with the flashing light ons?

Ben: They’re incredibly uncomfortable! Imagine if you wove kind of like Christmas lights through your pants – you know those spiky ends and stuff. It was really not comfortable. I couldn’t wait to get those things off.

Nick: They itched and scratched.

Ben: It was not fun. They look great. It was worth it.

Bobby: But worth it for one day and that’s all.

Ben: Exactly.

Bobby: Speaking about collaborative videos, you’re second video from the album for Home Is A Fire was done with Shepard Fairey. You co-directed it as well right?

Nick: I wouldn’t really say I had a director role in it. Again, it was just sort of one of those things where we had a collaborated sort of people where I initially had a concept and we knew Shepard through some personal contacts. He was somebody that I thought would be a great asset to this idea and thankfully he was into it as well. As soon as we just started talking about it and then, again, Aaron Stewart-Ahn, who was part of the You Are A Tourist video was a producer on that video and a cameraman. It was really collaborative. We worked with a lot of people that we worked with before. Justin Mitchell was a camera guy on it and he shot our documentary – Drive Well, Sleep Carefully – so we really got to sort of utilize the brain power and the creative instincts of a lot of people we worked with before.

Ben: I have his movie with us by the way; I brought the DVD so we can watch it.

Nick: That’s awesome. He’s a film maker too and he has another DVD coming out about surfing in South America. Anyway, it was just nice – again, in some ways I feel like the watchmaker where I just get the team together, wind up the watch and then it sort of just does its thing. I had very little to do with it other than bringing the people together.

Ben: But Nick’s also a really great sheppard too – no pun intended. He’s very good at wrangling creative people and producing. I feel like, maybe not in the traditional sense in “we have to find money to spend on this” but just like…

Bobby: Organizing.

Ben: Exactly; and kind of making it happen. He’s always been really good about that – in the band but also in this particular kind of conflict as well.

Bobby: Now Shepard Fairey, he’s most recently known for the Obama Hope poster and before that for the Obey tag and Andre The Giant Has A Posse and all that. Now, when I was watching the video, it reminded me of – well, actually, yesterday I got back from Brazil and one thing that me and my friends were fascinated by was all the graffiti on all the walls throughout Rio di Janiero and Sao Paulo. It was beautiful, intricate artwork on sometimes somewhat dilapidated buildings. Watching the video of LA having all these tags and artwork spread on it, personally, brought me back to that. It got me wondering – what’s your guys’ personally opinion on graffiti and tagging?  Do you believe that it an art form?

Ben: I absolutely feel that there should be a distinction made between just tagging a building and doing a piece on it. I think in many ways, as we were driving around Los Angeles – because I kind of tagged along for the filming as well – and seeing a lot of these pieces that other artists had put up on vacant buildings and on walls where just kind of nothing was happening.

Shepard put a piece of one wall on Riverside Drive that had this beautiful Christ The Redeemer. Someone had put a Christ The Redeemer way up on this retaining wall and it was just gorgeous. It was symbolic and it was beautifully put up.

I think that one can’t come without the other. Some people are going to choose to do pieces and other people are going to tag stuff.

An interesting thing that happened during the filming was kind of along those lines. Shepard was putting up a piece of this building. We tried to get a hold of people who’s building it was to say “hey, do you mind if we put this piece up? We’re just going to shoot the video and then we’re going to immediately take it down. There won’t be any residue. We’re using a particular type of glue that won’t leave a mark, it will dry – it will be fine.”

They couldn’t get a hold of the guy so they were like “fuck it, let’s just do it.” They started putting up the piece and the guy comes out and is like “what the fuck man?” Now, at this point, everybody knows who Shepard is. He’s kind of famous now. He’s like “I know who you are!” And around on an adjacent building there was a gigantic Obama mural that he had done. He’s like “I stop kids from going up there and defacing your Obama mural all the time and you’re fucking doing it right there to my building!” It escalated and then got really calm. It just kind of became this thing were the guy was hurt that we didn’t ask that we did it first and that kind of thing.

It was an interesting example of context being everything. Putting up a gigantic piece on a building that you have no investment in is like “hey, that makes the neighbourhood look a lot nicer;” but if you have a big, white wall on the side of your building and people come along and put a piece on it without your permission – people get kind of pissed. So I think the laws of private property have to kind of override the artistic instinct in some cases.

But I mean, fuck man – if a building’s falling into disrepair, nobody’s living in it and nobody’s using it, you might as well turn it into art because it’s better than having just an ugly building there.

Bobby: Create something out of it.

Ben: Exactly. Absolutely.

Bobby: Which kind of could even help, in turn, revitalize the neighbourhood or turn it into more of a centre of innovation and creativity.

Ben: It also says something really sort of beautiful about the human aesthesis: trying to make something beautiful out of something ugly. I don’t think people should be punished for trying to do so.

Bobby:  You guys often have a lot of visual representations with your music. I mean, Codes and Keys isn’t even out yet and you already have two music videos for it. For Plans, you released a music video for all eleven songs on it on the DVD Directions. What makes you decide to do so many visual representations of your songs? To add that extra element to it?

Nick: I’ve always felt that that’s presence of the lyrics that Ben writes. I feel like the music that comes out of the band and the lyrics are very image based. I think, for me personally, they create a lot of imagery in my mind. It’s always interesting to us that the images aren’t specific and unique to one case. Everybody has a different sort of visual thing that happens to them when they hear the music or react to the lyrics. I feel like there’s something that’s exciting when those two genres cross. Whether it’s music in film or music in television or whatever. When those two elements have their intersection – for our music, I feel like it’s kind of a nice way to add another dimension and another experience to the music.

We’ve made proper videos obviously like You Are A Tourist but I also love recently just the way that technology is in our lives now that you can go to YouTube, you can go to Vimeo, you can go to these sort of different video outlets and fans and interested people are excited about that as well and they’ll make things and post them.

There’s so many different videos for You Are A Tourist that are out there right now and we didn’t even make most of them. I think that’s just kind of an exciting thing that’s happens and we like to sort of facilitate that as much as we can because we live in a world where that’s possible. You don’t have to have a million dollars and a cable television station to make a video. People can make them on the iPhones. They can make them.. iPhones.. I don’t even want to use any proprietary names. There are so many different ways to record stuff in the world that it just takes somebody with the right drive to put it together. It’s just passion at a certain point and that, to me, is really exciting. I love going online and looking at the alternate sort of stuff and then occasionally somebody makes something for us that we stand behind. *laughs*

Bobby: Like, “we fully support this.”

Nick: Exactly, like this transcends something that somebody just made on a weekend for fun. You can see how much time they invested in it.

Ben: We also live in a time where elements of technology are kind of taking something away from the music industry but at the same time, I feel that what we’re gaining is so much more valuable and we were just talking about this at some point while we were making the You Are A Tourist video. We had to kind of come up with a way to pay for this; we had to get the sponsors and the label to help out too. But at the same time, it’s like if we wanted to do this twenty years ago we would’ve had to go grovelling to MTV or VH1 or Much Music or whoever else or find a network that would take a risk on something like this.

We live in a wonderful world now where with something like this *picks up his iPhone*, you can express yourself in ways that you could never do before. I mean, do you remember how much video cameras were when we were kids? They were so expensive!

Nick: It wasn’t just the camera. Then it’s all the extra gear afterwards to get ready. Editing studio….

Ben: Even just as a musician. When we were living together in college, we each had four tracks and they were seven hundred dollar pieces of equipments. We had to save up all our money to buy these stupid little four tracks so that we could record four tracks at a time and we thought they were – I mean they were – an amazing piece of technology. Nowadays…

Nick: There’s an app for that… *laughs*

Ben: Yeah, there’s literally an app for that.

Nick: A dollar, ninety-nine.

Ben: You know, a pessimist will say that the ease to access of technology certainly allows for more mediocre crap to be floating around in the world but the cream will always rise to the top.  The people doing really creative things will never go unrecognized because people such as yourself are making it their living so to speak to find that stuff. People who are doing blogs are always out there, searching all the time and that’s kind of invaluable.

Bobby: Yeah, if you do it good, people will recognize it and share it. Get it on Digg and you’ll have thousands of views in seconds basically.

Nick: I think it’s very cool.

Bobby: Do you have time for a few more questions? *their tour manager had just popped in to check on the interview*

Ben: Just a little bit, sound check is coming up quick.

Bobby: Just a few questions about the new album, Codes and Keys, that comes out next Tuesday. What made you decide to record it not only in four different sittings but in four different studios as well?

Ben: Well we just wanted to kind of mix it up a little bit and we’ve learned from prior records that if we hole up in the same studio for six weeks trying to make a record, we just kind of stagnate after a couple weeks and it just becomes difficult to keep the creative progress moving forward. So we just kind of made the decision to like “why don’t we just take this record and do a couple weeks on, a couple weeks off, and move to a different studio and we can kind of keep the momentum going a little bit better.”

Bobby:  A lot of the songs on the album – Home Is A Fire, Codes and Keys, Portable Television, You Are A Tourist, Underneath the Sycamore, and so on – all have a sense of searching for meaning and purpose in this ever divided world – which we kind of talked about a bit in this interview. Was that kind of the intention? Searching for the hidden meaning amongst all the crazy, chaotic activity of life? Was that kind of the purpose of this album?

Ben: Well, I never kind of write an album… I never sit down to write an album number one. I just kind of sit down and write songs and the theme kind of makes itself apparent. But I would never say I was writing about searching for something as much as just trying to document with every song where I am in that moment when I’m writing that song. If a theme kind of makes themselves apparent in a record, it has more to do with the fact that just what’s been on my mind recently. So I guess clearly I have been and was and am, but it was never a conscious decision.