Everyone has them. Memories from your youth, when the future was so bright you had to wear shades, as if anything was possible if you could only find the words grand enough to express your ideas. When it seemed as though you had to do Big Important Things Right Now.
And most of those memories involve a girl. Or a boy. They are exactly the kind of recollections that pop into your head when you listen to the lyrics of Death Cab for Cutie.
Take "What Sarah Said," the song that serves as the unofficial theme of the group's latest album, "Plans" (Atlantic, 2005). The song, inspired by a conversation between DCFC songwriter/singer Ben Gibbard and a friend of his named Sarah (duh), considers the proposition of loving someone so much that all you can think about is the moment you'll have to watch that person die. Gibbard strips the song down to its most basic elements and teeters on the precipice between controlled grief and utter insanity.
It's the kind of song that makes you embarrassed for the guy singing it - we want to scream at him to put the guitar down, to keep it in check, to shut up. We don't want to face mortality. But inexorably, he goes on, and he takes us down that path, and like bystanders at the scene of an accident, we can't look away.
It's been a long time since a rock 'n' roll song really did that well. And then there's "Soul Meets Body," the perfect walking-in-a-park kind of tune, where you can choose either to see leaves softly falling from a tree or buds gently sprouting. Love and death, death and love - Death Cab's music gives you both in equal measure.
Death Cab, which hails from Bellingham, Wash., is a favorite among the too-hip indie-rock set and mainstream radio programmers - an epic balancing act in popular music if there ever was one. When the group signed to Atlantic after selling more than 300,000 copies of 2003's transcendent and groundbreaking "Transatlanticism" on indie label Barsuk, nearly every music magazine and Web site all had one big, burning question: "Will Death Cab Sell Out?
" Gibbard has talked a lot in interviews about how it's a slightly ridiculous question to ask, but you can tell he feels funny and a little bit apprehensive admitting that. It's like he wonders if he's doing the wrong thing, if fans will desert the band. But there's another, stronger part of him that probably wonders what the fuss is about.
Isn't a band supposed to want people to hear its songs? Wasn't that the point behind writing them in the first place? A lot of the criticism that independent bands face when they jump to major labels "has to do with how much further being DIY [do it yourself] will get you in this day and age," said guitarist/producer Chris Walla.
Bands in the '80s could be signed to independent labels and scream DIY all they wanted, Walla said, but there was still only so far they could take their careers with long-distance phone calls and postcard mailers. Thanks to the Internet, cheaper and easier recording technology, and better indie distribution deals, that's no longer the case, so fans question the need for corporate bankrolling, he added. "You can do well for yourself on your own," he said.
"So the jump to a major label is less of a relief and more of a chance for somebody to screw up something already going well. People freak out about whether a band's integrity or sound is going to change, because major labels are notorious for getting in and changing a band's sound." Death Cab had been courted for quite some time by major labels before eventually signing a deal with Atlantic, Walla said, and when they did sign, they made sure they would retain control over their own music.
"We waited for the right deal," Walla said. "We were very clear about what kind of relationship we wanted with the label. We've been really happy with Atlantic.
It's going very well." In fact, most things have been going very well for Death Cab. The band has toured fairly nonstop since the release of "Plans" and has been one of the most name-checked bands on "The O.
C.," the Fox television show that has become the "Beverly Hills, 90210" for Generation Y. It's a strange fit for Death Cab, considering Death Cab's members still drive beat-up old cars and are, you know, normal.
"The only time I ever actually think about 'The O.C.' is when somebody asks me about it," Walla said.
"I think I've only watched half of the episode we were on, and that's the only piece of the show I've seen." It's not really surprising that the members of Death Cab come off as a bit uncomfortable any time they're expected to act like "rock stars." When the band recorded "Plans" at Longview Farms in rural Massachusetts (the same place where Phish recorded several of its albums), Gibbard remarked that he felt completely out of place, as if the studio was built for bands with big Rock Star Issues such as heroin or cocaine.
Death Cab drummer Jason McGerr stayed in a room that Keith Richards once inhabited during the Rolling Stones' practice sessions for "Tattoo You" - a room completely devoid of windows or natural light. Walla - who's produced all DCFC's albums - said he relished the isolation, which gave him time to absorb every nuance of the process and create an environment of intense concentration. However, he said there are a few people with whom he'd consider producing the next Death Cab record, including Tucker Martine, who served with Walla as co-producer on The Decemberists' new record, "The Crane Wife.
" "But I might end up doing it myself again," Walla said, laughing. "But working with someone else might also be super liberating. We've done a couple of things now with other engineers and producers and I find that I get to concentrate on playing guitar, which I also really like.
It's a trade off, just like anything is." All this lack of artifice leads to the assumption that Death Cab's members are supersensitive males, the kind Arnold Schwarzenegger probably would have labeled "girlie men" back when he wasn't fostering the idea of bipartisanship. Then again, being labeled sensitive all the time can really hurt a guy's feelings.
"It's really difficult to be sensitive in a rock song at this point in time, particularly 50 years into the pop song idiom when so many have been written already and written really well," Walla said. "I sound like an old man when I say this, but everything's gotten so loud," he said. "I don't know if that's a symptom of the times or if it's just that everything moves so fast and we're so fragmented, but it's a way more USA Today world than it is a local neighborhood paper/morning coffee sort of world.
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