Death Cab’s Ben Gibbard Talks “Something About Airplanes,” Obama, The Postal Service

Photo: Metcalfe/Getty To celebrate the 10 year reissue of Death Cab for Cutie’s debut record, Something About Airplanes, the group’s frontman Ben Gibbard opens up about revisiting the ten track set (and the bonus live album from Seattle in 1998), Barack Obama’s Presidential victory and why the next record from his much-adored electro-pop side-project the Postal Service might be the next Chinese Democracy. How was the experience of revisiting this album for you and the band? Well, from time to time, I’d put on these songs to reference something, a lyric or how I delivered a line. Because the further you travel away from the recording of the song, it will change drastically live. They become their own entity over the years and stray away from the original recording. For me, though, the thing that was the most pleasantly surprising was just hearing the live show [from Seattle’s Crocodile Café in 1998]. When Chris [Walla, Death Cab’s guitarist and producer] unearthed that, he was talking it up, saying, ‘Oh man, it sounds really good. We sounded really good back then.’ At first, I thought he was just being the cheerleader here. I couldn’t imagine us sounding as good as we did ten years ago. Not to toot our own horn, but if you put that thing on, we actually sound pretty good. Which tracks from the record have held up particularly well over the years? I still really like “Your Bruise.” It’s the archetypal kind of Death Cab song, with arpeggiated guitars and the kind of boxy, broken-up drums. And “Pictures In An Exhibition” is kind of a pop song. It’s the most accessible on the record. I’m not saying it’s “There She Goes” by the La’s or anything, but it’s just a pop song in its very, most basic structural sense. Do any of the tracks from the album make you cringe? My singing voice has changed a bit over the last ten years. When I first started singing in high-school bands, my voice was kind of nasal-y and twangy. There’s some remnants of that on the record. I’m not so muc
	Published: 2008-12-11 Provider: Rolling Stone
Keywords: Rock News