JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Indie rock fans of the early aughts, this song was probably on your playlist.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TRANSATLANTICISM")
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: (Singing) Oh no, I need you so much closer.
SUMMERS: That's Death Cab For Cutie off of their 2003 career-defining album "Transatlanticism." So much has changed since then. The band spent much of 2023 on tour, marking the 20th anniversary of that album and The Postal Service's "Give Up."
BEN GIBBARD: For us to go on tour at this point, we're playing songs I wrote when I was 20 and songs I wrote when I was 47.
SUMMERS: That's Ben Gibbard, Death Cab's front man.
GIBBARD: Playing all that material, I was really taken with how I just don't feel that way anymore, and that if I were to have had some of those experiences, at this age, I would have written about them very differently.
SUMMERS: The band is out with their eleventh studio album. It's called "I Built You A Tower."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I BUILT YOU A TOWER (A)")
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: (Singing) I built you a tower. The tower in my mind, a place than no one else...
SUMMERS: Gibbard started writing the album in between tours when he was also going through a separation and eventual divorce.
GIBBARD: I didn't want to write about it by kind of taking it out and disassembling it in front of the general public. It was far more interesting to just sit with the fallout of it and write about it from a place of trying to make some sense of it for myself.
SUMMERS: When I spoke with Ben Gibbard, he told me, he didn't want to write a breakup album.
GIBBARD: There have been a number of kind of high-profile, quote-unquote, "breakup records" that have come out in recent years, and so many of them are just so breathtakingly poorly written that I just felt like I didn't want to attempt to do an elevated version of something like that.
SUMMERS: Yeah.
GIBBARD: And only because, you know, I think that breakup records also - they tend to be kind of the purview of kind of younger people who are writing from a similar position than I was when I was writing songs on "Transatlanticism." You know, I think that what makes great breakup records is an acerbic kind of quality and an anger that I just didn't feel and I just didn't feel appropriate writing from.
SUMMERS: The opening lyric on your album is, please forgive me, from the song "Full Of Stars."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FULL OF STARS")
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: (Singing) Please forgive me. These nights, my head is full of stars, of constellations, retreating.
SUMMERS: Why start there with forgiveness?
GIBBARD: If I was going to write a record that was at least inspired by and a function of the fallout of a divorce, I wanted to start with something kind, and I wanted to start with something that was an olive branch of sorts. I didn't want to start the record angry or aggrieved. I guess it is rather a melancholic song, but I wanted to start the song with something that felt like an open hand and not something that felt like a fist, if that makes sense.
SUMMERS: Yeah. One of the songs that I really loved on this album was the song "Riptides." You sing about having seen too many people leaving to take it too hard.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RIPTIDES")
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: (Singing) I'm too tired to end the war. And I can't seem to hold it together anymore.
SUMMERS: Tell us about where that song comes from.
GIBBARD: Well, that song is a function of going through something difficult personally while the world seems like it's on fire. And I think we've all been feeling a version of this in recent years, but I feel it really started - at least for me and for a lot of people I know - during the pandemic in which life became difficult, and people were anxious and were struggling with mental health. And yet, there were so many people who seemed to be suffering more that it almost felt one had to qualify their own situation in conjunction with the rest of the world.
And I - and we've all done that. We - I - and I understand why we do that. But I think there is this crippling effect it has upon our own abilities to recognize that, no, we're actually in pain. We're actually struggling. Empathy is not a zero-sum game. We can hold empathy for people who are struggling around the world and going through things that - unimaginable atrocities - and also recognize that we are struggling ourselves and hold space for that.
SUMMERS: Yeah. I want to talk a little bit about running because I know you are also an ultra marathoner, is that right?
GIBBARD: That is correct, yes.
SUMMERS: I mean, for me, I'm also a runner, and I know that running is often the place where I tend to work out my problems, whether it's something going on in my relationship or a line that I can't figure out when I'm writing a story. I wonder if that happens for you.
GIBBARD: I find that running is an opportunity, to me, to be entirely in my physical body and be monitoring my physical self rather than my mental self. You know, I'll certainly go on rage runs and just - you know, I'll thwart all my enemies in my head, you know?
SUMMERS: (Laughter) Yep, been there. Been there.
GIBBARD: Yeah, I'll defeat all of them. And then by the time I get back to the trailhead, I'm like, oh, man, I really solved all my problems out there. For me, the most important, most valuable thing that comes out of certainly the longer runs that I do is that I might leave the trailhead anxious or angry or maybe a little depressed or frustrated. And by the time I loop around and come back to the trailhead, I just - I feel very calm, and I feel as if, at least for the time being, I've re-centered myself. So as a songwriter, it's not so much that I go out and I write songs. It's more so that I get the absence of that time out on the trail. And then I can come back to my work and feel as if I can see it a little bit clearer.
SUMMERS: Yeah. I want to ask you about another song on the album. It's called "How Heavenly A State." And it seems to me to be about loss and going through all of the feelings that come along with it - the anger, the acceptance, the ultimate solace.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOW HEAVENLY A STATE")
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: (Singing) Death lingered in your doorway, awaiting invitation.
SUMMERS: Tell us a bit about the song.
GIBBARD: I had a friend who killed himself some...
SUMMERS: I'm sorry.
GIBBARD: ...Years ago, and I had been having these dreams about him where he would be, like, at the threshold of my house. You know, I would see him, and I would try to invite him in. And as soon as - you know, it was that classic, you know, dream world scenario where you reach for something, and it disappears, you know? Or it's your house, but it's not your house. You know, you're communicating, but you're not. You're - it's - the language doesn't make sense.
And I'd had this recurring dream. And then we were writing songs together. We were doing collaborative writing in the band. And when I received it, it just had this big blast of, you know, direct guitar feedback at the front that was just so just angular and abrasive. And to me, it was like, that was the feeling of seeing a dead person. It was like seeing a ghost.
You know, I had been having these - this recurring series of dreams, and that noise motif at the front of the song - that musically felt like it sat in for that experience. Like, you look over, and you see a ghost, and that's the sound you hear. I just decided that was a good place to kind of put those dreams, so to speak.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Ben Gibbard of Death Cab For Cutie. The band's new album, "I Built You A Tower," is out now. Ben, thanks for talking with us.
GIBBARD: Of course. Thanks for talking.
SUMMERS: And if you or someone you know is in crisis, or if you're thinking about hurting yourself, you can call or text the Suicide And Crisis Lifeline. It's 988.
SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HOW HEAVENLY A STATE")
DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE: (Singing) When there's no making sense... Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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