Interviews -Death Cab For Cutie-

← Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next →

I heard that until the last album all the songs were played live before recording, but all the songs on this new album were made in the recording studio. So I guess it's a new experience for the band to play all the new songs live. How did you feel playing live?

Nick：I think every song on this record, we have a presentation for live so far. We don't know what to expect and I think that's so exciting about our coming touring is we get to find out. So we are trying out best faithfully. We're gonna play them live and some songs... I hope every one of them sticks live. But maybe some songs more translate very well and they'll only live on the record. That's hard to know right now but I'm very looking forward to seeing which songs work the best live, and what little things we can do. Maybe we'd play a song and we'd realize it didn't work very live in that way, then we'd go back to try to add some more things and kind of tinker with some of the formula a bit to try to come up with something exciting for everyone including us to do so. I think that's what very exciting about making a record in the way we did. It makes me hungry to go out play live whereas when we finished "The Photo Album", that tour after the album was more of the same. We toured down with the songs and here we are playing them again. It felt nice to have that confidence that I knew that new songs would work live. I'm more excited about the unknown right now.

The studio album of Death Cab For Cutie has a very sophisticated sound production. What do you focus on when you play those songs live?

Chris：I feel like more and more we take that philosophy and sort of unhinge and open it up, and sort of rough it up a little bit. When we were rehearsing for the new record, I think we approached learning the new songs for the stage like trying to incorporate with as many elements as we can. I mean stage shows are very rock. It's much more rough than the record is. But I think we are trying to incorporate more these elements.

I saw that Chris and Ben were playing keyboards on a few songs which I think gave a good accent to the show. Do you have any plans to bring in any other electric instrument?

Ben：For the new record, Jason has a brand-new sampler. There's a whole samples and he has different samples from pads which you can hit with drum sticks. And then he's sending me some pads and I play it as well. That's probably the biggest and newest element to the live setting which we've been. I think it's going really well.

Jason：People are gonna be running across the stage a little bit.

Ben：Yeah. Nick will play guitar for the half of the song and bass for the second half. Chris will play guitar for the first shift and piano for the second. So there's gonna be a lot of movement on the stage with the new material. The new material from the record, we weren't be able to play last night because we couldn't bring the right gears.

Do you have any interest in digital recordings?

Chris：I have been always an analogue kind of guy so the new record is all tracked on the tape and mixed on the tape. It's not that I think digital recording is necessarily bad. It's partially because I haven't got into it yet. I haven't really felt the need to [use] until recently. There're certain things you can do in the computer world which you just can't do on the tape. But I think there're something you can do on tape that's really difficult to do with computer also. There's a really specific, very particular thing that happens when somebody knows that they're recording to a piece of tape; knowing that they're recording to something that you can't really manipulate that much. When you're playing a part, you can't move parts around. You have to perform it the way you want it to sound. Performances on the tape to me is a little more bloody and desperate somehow. And particularly if you're doing live recording with a bunch of people in the room at the same time, there's just the thing that happens. There's that space between all tracks that acts as a clue that makes sound like everybody's in the room at the same time. Digital recording is just like anything else. It's a medium. Some people prefer to paint with oils and some people prefer to paint with watercolors. It's really a preference thing at this point. There're are distinctive advantages to both.

You always record in a studio called "Hole of justice" which is a famous place where Jack Endino recorded many great indie rock albums. Could you explain a little more about this studio?

Chris：It's a terrible dive [laugh]. There's mice. It's been a studio now for 23 or 24 years. And it's been through a whole bunch of different owners. But it's good because the building in it has been one of the cheapest in town. I mean... if you're doing a record and didn't have a large budget, it's totally a place to do it. A lot of people still do overdubs there. There's hundreds of records made there... like many of them are important records. It's like this little tiny triangular building and there's a control room in one and a live room in the other. That's kind of all you get. There's a bunch of graffiti on it outside. Paintings are pealing and it's really scary but the energy is good inside. I guess it's a crazy punk rock landmark.

So what made you want to own that studio?

Chris：I don't own the building now. I co-own the business with our record label Barsuk. But that's really good question [laugh]. Well, I think it was a step-up from where we were.

Nick：Which was nowhere.

All：[laugh]

Chris：I guess we made it up to be a little too awful just now. It's not that bad. It's functional. It's warm... kind of.

Ben：Cold... kind of.

Chris：Well, yeah... it's a really good functional working-class studio. It's definitely nothing glamorous. It's very blue-collar.

Nick：It has a great history and great ambiance. I think obviously Chris more so than us but... the honeymoon is kind of over. The excitement of being in Hall of Justice was great but now is like we're kicking doors and stuff like that [smiles]. Anybody would kill to be in that building because it made a great history. But I think we're spoiled and saying things like, "we could afford to go other places now [laughs]."

Chris：The thing I've discovered is that about every 3 or 4 years, it changes owners. We're about 3 years into it and I'm kind of sick of it. And now I understand why. When we took the place over from John Goodmanson, he said, "are you sure you want to move in this place?" He was just through with it at that point. He wanted to be out there. And I was like "yeah it's amazing! It's the best studio I've ever been in!" which was, at that point, was true [smiles]. Certainly I've made a bunch of records there and I'm really proud now. But it's time to.

By the way the next question is for Ben. Do you think your success as Postal Service has had any effect on the playing with Death Cab For Cutie? And how are you going to keep the balance between the two bands?

Ben：I've never set my mind that if one sells more copies than the other, that's more important. Death Cab is something that I've been working at for 6 years - the focus of my life. I'm very proud of the success of The Postal Service. It's something I love doing as well. But I think the balance is just keeping the priorities. Luckily, I have no pressure from Jimmy Tamborello of Sub Pop. There is no pressure to do more than we've done so far. I think the best part is that their arrangements are clear to everybody. I love doing both bands because it's a lot of fun. Nothing could really compete with being on stage, being in a band, and being a live musician. I mean The Postal Service is not much of a live, you know. It's not as exciting because I think there is not so much things that could go wrong. It's far more exciting to be on stage making every note of music rather than relying on 70% of it is coming out of computer.

[Chris and Ben leaves at this point]

← Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next →