Past to present: Death Cab For Cutie walks you through their repertoire

Indie rock success story Death Cab For Cutie has announced the release of their new EP Keys and Codes, featuring 7 remixed tracks from their latest hit album Codes and Keys.

The 2 Bears’ revisiting of “You Are A Tourist” and a remix of “Doors Unlocked and Open” by the Aussie electronic act and professed Death Cab fans Cut Copy are among the tracks.

Death Cab has come a long way from what merely started out as frontman Ben Gibbard’s solo project in 1997, and continues to build a solid discography in their name.

From Airplanes to Codes, guitarist Chris Walla and drummer Jason McGerr walk you through a special breakdown of the 7 full length albums that lead up to their next release.

Something About Airplanes (1998): 

This album was made in our old house in Bellingham. The control room was in my bedroom and we ran cables down into the living room. I remember we only had two microphones. We didn’t know how to be a band and I didn’t know how to record an album. We were making everything up as we went. There are some moments on this record that are really amazing and fun to listen to. All the decision were made with nothing but passion and completely out of necessity. I have a real fondness for this record. -Chris Walla

We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes (2000):

This album never made it anywhere near a real studio. We did a bunch of it at Nick’s mom’s house and the rest of it was finished in my bedroom at my parent’s house.

This was a really weird point in the band. We weren’t making any money and we thought we may never make any money. But we were serious about this and because we had to quit our jobs or drop out of school to go on tour, Nathan Good, our drummer left. He just didn’t think he could do it.

If there was a moment of mowing through adversity to finish a record, this was it. This was our “three against the world, this may not work, but fuck, lets do it” moment.  -Chris Walla

The Photo Album (2001):

The Photo Album is the first record we made in a proper studio, well semi-proper. It was made in 29 straight days at the Hall of Justice. These 10 songs were the only songs Ben had written, so we had to make them work. That was it, there was no fat to cut. It was meant to be a snapshot of what the band was doing live at that point. That’s where the name The Photo Album came from. -Chris Walla

Transatlanticism (2003):

The band parted ways with Michael and then I offered my services for the recording of Transatlanticism. Nick and I were friends before Death Cab even started, so there was already a camaraderie before we all set foot in the studio. Transatlanticism became a commercial success and that opened the world to us. We signed to Atlantic records based on the success of this album. Death Cab became a brand new group in a way. It was a very loose, fun and fearless record to make. -Jason McGerr

Plans (2005):

Plans was our first major label release. There were more people invested in this both financially and mentally. Chris calls this our clip board record. It was much more under the microscope. We locked ourselves in a room for a month to do the bulk of the record. It was a very focused record more than anything else. -Jason McGerr

 
Narrow Stairs (2008):

We’d been touring from the beginning of Transatlanticism right through Plans. Our last memory of the Plans tour was playing very hard on stage and sweating it out. And that’s how we started recording this album, four guys in a room playing their instruments. We put the computers away and we were throwing it down like we were going on live.

Ben came into Narrow Stairs with a lot more material than he did with The Photo Album. It was written from a much darker place because of the amount and type of work we were doing. Narrow Stairs has some teeth. -Jason McGerr

Codes and Keys (2011):

It took a while to figure out what we wanted to do. We knew what we didn’t want to do. If we started this record the same way we did Narrow Stairs, we were going to end up some place we had already been. We decided the guitars weren’t going to be the harmonic focus of Codes and Keys. We stripped all the guitars out of the demos and built harmonic foundations out of other instruments like the piano, synthesizers, samples and shortwave static. It turned into this big collage experiment. We treated guitars much more as punctuation at the end of a sentence, rather than as the whole sentence itself. The record is so much more emotionally balanced from a writing perspective and that really allowed us to try different things. -Chris Walla

Death Cab’s remix EP, Keys and Codes is available on November 22. Until then, the band will leak one remix every week on their website.

Posted by Marc Andrew on Nov 1 2011. Filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.