26/02/11
What started off as a solo project by Ben Gibbard, modestly recording a demo cassette, ‘You Can Play These Songs with Chords’ in 1997, grew to recruit three other members, and gain critical and commercial acclaim, resulting in a long-term deal with Atlantic Records. That band is Death Cab for Cutie. We caught up exclusively with Jason McGerr, drummer for the band most famously admired by Seth Cohen…
How are you doing today? I’m good, I’m feeling great; we’re almost done with a five week tour here in the US. We’ve got another week to go, but it always feels good when you’re round the bend.
And then do you have a little time off?Well, four days and then we fly off to Norway to start a European tour where we’ll be coming through the UK as well.
You’ve just released your sixth studio album, Narrow Stairs. Going back to when you joined the band in 2003, did you ever think that would happen?I don’t count on numbers, I mean I don’t know if there’ll be seven, I don’t know if there’ll be eight, I don’t know if there’ll be ten. I hope we do as many as possible; I’d love to be the 10-record band, or the dozen-record band. We have a funny term that we always use – the baker’s dozen; do you have that term over there?
Thirteen, right?Yeah - if we could get a baker’s dozen out of this, that’d be excellent. As long as it’s fun and everyone enjoys the process and we can still challenge each other and inspire each other then hopefully there’ll be many, many more. When we were on record number three, I didn’t think about record number six, I thought about record number four maybe. I think each time you finish recording you have so much fun that you want to do it again, so you’re always thinking about the next one. But to record six albums under the same name is not a very common thing for most people, so we feel pretty fortunate.
‘Narrow Stairs’ is a very ambitious record, and the first single that you released from the album was the epic ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’. The song is truly epic, and your driving bass line at the start of the track is incredible. How do you feel it differs from your previous albums?This record as a whole was the first record that we tracked more live as a band, like, everyone was playing at the same time as if it was a show and I think that it’s a whole different energy that’s captured. It’s not like it’s a novel idea, I mean, bands have been doing it for years, but it’s really easy in this day and age where people have computers and digital recording software to do individual performances, cut things and edit things, copy and paste them and sort of make a ‘surgical record in the box’. But this record was very much all of us playing live in the room and ‘I Will Possess Your Heart’ is a good example, because that was like the fourth time we’d played it through and it was just one performance from everybody for the whole eight and a half minutes, which is something that you have to be a good band in order to be able to do. This is much more of an organic, live, loose record than anything we’ve done in the past. It’s also all on tape, which is something we haven’t done on the previous album, so we went back to tape which is a warmer, thicker, more saturated sound.
I was first really introduced to your work when I was in America a few years back, and I’ve been a massive fan ever since. ‘Transatlanticism’ seems to be the album that really stepped you up as a band, achieving a great level of commercial success, and also receiving a lot of TV airplay on various soundtracks. Were you surprised to receive so much attention as a result of this album?Yeah, it was a massive leap; I think that the records that we made before hadn’t sold more than 50-60 thousand copies, but when Transatlanticism came out it went Gold, which over here is over 500,000 copies. I think it had something to do with timing; you record a record and depending on what else is happening in society, people coming out with other music, whatever’s on TV, whatever’s on the radio, your record has to hit people at the right time. I think Transatlanticism came when the industry saw the indie labels as true contenders; a lot of people were sourcing out indie-rock records. We happened to be a band that was sort of already in the machine; we were touring, we’d been navigating the indie-rock route for five years already when that record came out, so I guess we were already in motion and fortunately, we had a really great record come out at that time, so I think that’s why Transatlanticism did as well as it did.
Probably a lot of our readers will have first come into contact with Death Cab through the bands’ association with The O.C., where you had the auspicious honour of being Seth Cohen’s favourite band. I guess this made a big difference to sales – was this association influential in your move to Atlantic Records in 2004?Well it didn’t really have a big sales bumph, and if you look at the numbers, when the music was being used on The O.C., it was just as steady as when it came out, but it did expose people who didn’t normally listen to indie radio. In the States, music television is so saturated, and it’s more to do with reality TV shows than music videos, and radio stations can play the same old shit a lot, so you need to find other avenues for your music, or other avenues to market and advertise your music, so sometimes television commercials, movies and TV soundtracks are often better ways to hit people with your music. Thankfully, there are a bunch of people that select good music for them, like, Modest Mouse was on The O.C., Beck was on The O.C., My Morning Jacket and a lot of other bands, so it definitely helped us get our music out there, but it didn’t influence our move to a major label whatsoever. Like I said, we’ve been navigating the indie waters for years now on our own time and our own dime without a major label, so it was more about seeing a glass ceiling and wanting to open our world a little. Our indie label, Barsuk was great for us in the US, but as soon as we went overseas, it was a tiny label with a total of six labels throughout mainland Europe. We had all these different records with different territory marks on them, like, we’d go to Spain and only have French albums left, so you couldn’t sell them there. Trying to do all the coordinated efforts with press and stuff like that is really difficult when you’ve got to work with six different companies on one continent! That was probably the biggest reason we moved to a major label.
I really enjoyed your 2004 documentary ‘Drive Well, Sleep Carefully’. It gave a great insight into what life is like on the road for you guys. Then in 2006 ‘Directions’ was released, which was a collection of 12 short films inspired by your ‘Plans’ album. Obviously film’s an important medium for you as a band – is this likely to continue in the future?Yeah I hope so, I mean, we learnt a lot from the Directions project – mostly that there are a lot of really creative people out there that want to cut their teeth on some sort of project – and if anyone that likes our music, especially if they have the right skills and connections, wants to film a video for you, then you should totally seize that opportunity. There was a time when we needed to film a video and we were like, “where do we go, what do we do?” and what we didn’t realise was that there was a massive wealth of directors and creative people out there that were wanting to submit treatments who were already listening to our records. I think that Directions has helped us in a way – here’s an analogy; I think the way we made Narrow Stairs is the best possible way of recording something as a band and I think that whenever it comes to filming videos and putting out the ‘Calling all Directors’ bulletin, asking for ideas was really the best way of doing it, as we learnt from Directions. You don’t want to just go to one director who directed your favourite video and think that he’s gonna do the same for you, it might be someone more unknown. Nick’s so much better at answering these questions because he’s taken such a vested interest in videos himself, so we have a lot to thank him for.
You’re named after the song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band, which was featured in the Magical Mystery Tour in the 60s. I read that you were influenced by The Beatles, but what are your other influences as a band? Erm, Ben is a really big Superchunk fan, both Ben and Chris are huge Red House Painters fans, Nick and I both have in our Desert Island records list an album by Talk Talk, called Laughing Stock. Chris and I are both Can fans, the German band Can. Really we’re all fans of the Beatles, we’re fans of the Who, Blur, Led Zeppelin, The Smiths. I’m a big jazz guy too; I’m a big fan of Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
You recently opened your own recording studio in Seattle, is that right?Yes, I did. It’s great because it’s been busy and there’s been a lot of British bands who have come over to record, like Sky Larkin - they just recorded there. Also, Fight Like Apes from Dublin and a band called Underground Railroad. We started Narrow Stairs there and spent five weeks there; I just wanted a place to practise, but I knew that I’d be on the road for seven or eight months of the year, so it might as well be a commercial studio when I wasn’t there. It’s called Two Sticks Audio; I just kind of fell into it because I have a whole lot of equipment, a really big drum collection and drums take up a whole lot of real estate! I don’t really have room for them at home. I also admire the knowledge that Chris Walla has about production and engineering, so I’m into that too. I also like to collect microphones; I’m a big gear junkie, so like I said, someday hopefully that’ll be my office, you know, that’s where I’ll go all the time.
Latitude’s building up a great reputation, and is fast becoming THE festival here in the UK. I think it’s probably the great mixture of live music, theatre, the arts and poetry. It seems like the ideal festival for you guys. Are you looking forward to it? I am, it sounds like the best UK festival, I mean, I shouldn’t say that yet, because I haven’t been there and obviously Reading and Leeds hold the crown, but it sounds like Latitude is a great one to be at. I think Franz is playing too, aren’t they? So I’m excited to see what they have to offer with all their new material. I’m looking forward to it big time; we’re all really excited about it.
Ben Veal
Catch up with Washington’s finest at the UK’s finest festival, Latitude, from the 17th-20th of July. Tickets for the festival are already sold out, but for a bit more Death Cab appreciation, read the extended version of this interview on Outlineonline.co.uk