Ben Gibbard says Death Cab For Cutie are about “different eras of my life”. For the one caughty on I Built You A Tower, that means going deep to reflect on divorce and change. Here, he talks us through his metaphorical city he's built...
Located in Shoreditch, Strongroom Studios’ many entrances, exits and staircases give it the feel of one of those old fortresses designed to bamboozle the enemy with their confusing layouts. That is, albeit, one furnished like a sixth form common room, and where, a blue plaque informs us, the Spice Girls’ recorded their mega-smash debut single, Wannabe.
Whether or not it was recorded in the precise space in which we join Ben Gibbard remains unknown. It’s one of the many functioning studios within the building, though the desk and speakers are truncated in one corner, with far more space given to the sofas we sit on, making this feel much more like a meeting space with a studio in it, than vice versa.
“Do we want people to think this is where we made the record?” Ben laughs of Death Cab For Cutie's 11th album, I Built You A Tower. Not just because of the cheesiness of the idea, but also because an ‘in the studio’ piece would be so ill-suited to its themes.
The album is an opus of sadness, resilience and discombobulation, centring around life in the aftermath of seismic change – in this case Ben’s divorce from his second wife – and the ways we compartmentalise our emotions to function, heal, and move forward.
This morning, 49-year-old Ben, who has a penchant for mountainous ultra-marathons, settled for running 10 miles of pancake-flat terrain up to and around London’s Victoria Park, dodging people walking three abreast, and navigating a “treacherous” canal route. Last night he appeared at a Q&A event for Rough Trade, pounding the pavements of his mind in an interview conducted by his friend and former tourmate Norman Blake from Teenage Fanclub.
Given that we’re raking over similarly soul-baring ground today, does Ben ever have cause to stop and think about the strangeness of these transactions, often with strangers, in which he’s quizzed over personal episodes from his life?
“It’s not as if this is being pulled out of me by journalists,” Ben reasons now with a smile. “I chose to share this. When you choose to share things that are immensely personal, you are opening yourself up to interrogation about it, which is totally fair. But at the same time, the editing process to get to the album that you’re hearing is the culling of 90 different songs about varying subject matter but a lot of it in relation to this chapter in my life.
“The reason we end up with these songs is because we feel there’s a truth in them, or there’s something kind of universal in them. I’m writing about these experiences in a way that’s effective, so that it might resonate with other people, but not so much an autobiographical he-said-she-said kind of situation.”
Indeed, since forming in Bellingham, Washington in 1997, Death Cab For Cutie’s emergence from the underground was made possible by the captivating introspection of their music. A melodic strain of indie rock from when that tag referred to an ethos as well as a sound, it would eventually become (unfairly) a lazy umbrella term for non-heavy bands with reasonable tailoring and expensive hairdos.
The zenith of DCFC’s success came with the release of understated masterpiece Transatlanticism, which, remarkably, was released the same year [2003] as Give Up, the first and to date only album from Ben’s other band, The Postal Service.
In 2023, both DCFC and The Postal Service celebrated the 20th anniversary of Transatlanticism and Give Up, respectively, with months of joint touring, resulting in double duty for Ben. It wasn’t the exhausting endeavour it sounds, though, as Transatlanticism is a relatively restrained record with only three or four rocky numbers. Despite having one foot firmly planted in the past, Ben was also writing the songs that became I Built You A Tower back then, applying the same logic he does to constructing a setlist.
“When Death Cab plays a set at this point, we’ll toggle between a song I wrote when I was 20 and a song I wrote when I was 46,” explains Ben. “I’m just moving through different eras of my life, and to perform the songs properly. To feel I’m really in it, I’m often thinking of the people in those songs, or where I was in my life at that time.”
According to Ben, writing a new record is like working out muscles that have experienced atrophy, and accepting that any initial work you do is going to be bad, before imagery and a sense of purpose begin to sharpen. It helps, of course, that Ben writes in a linear fashion, penning one line then another, rather than having a chorus land in his lap and writing around it. You need only listen to Punching The Flowers, the second single from I Built You A Tower, to hear how exceptionally he distills his feelings. ‘In his search for the end of the circle / He kept arriving back at the start / Having fell every hurdle and she tried to make him feel better / But he didn’t wanna feel better / ‘Cause he was living for the wandering / His heart like a dead letter’.
Ben doesn’t recall a precise moment when the metaphor at the heart of I Built A Tower coalesced. He just knows the notion of the tower wasn’t there before, and then it was – large, looming, unignorable – a totemic representation of the place in his mind to contain the pain while also celebrating the person he loved. Because they’re worthy of celebration.
“Of course they are,” exclaims Ben. “Being deserving of it and the fact you’re no longer with that person aren’t mutually exclusive. This was 10 years of my life, and this person is a huge part of the story of my life, so they deserve to be honoured.
“At the same time, in my larger view of this metaphor, there is this emotional horizon that looks like a cityscape, and amongst that cityscape there are all these buildings that have been created to house different times in my life and different people that have meant a lot to me. Some of those buildings house happy memories. Others do not.”
Ben never had a problem with the restlessness of touring. His ease with calling wherever he lays his hat home comes from being the son of a navy man, with constant relocation, including a spell in Japan and Washington DC, a feature of childhood. Ben returned to Washington state in his teenage years, an hour’s ferry ride away from Seattle, which he recalls being “the only place I wanted to be in the world.”
He has happy memories of his front row seat to the explosion of the city’s music scene, as captured by Cameron Crowe’s romantic comedy Singles, which includes appearances from members of Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden. Ben saw the film when he was 16 and now lives half a mile from the apartment featured in it, often running past it. He did so recently, listening to Soundgarden and admits to being stopped in his tracks listening to the lyric ‘And it’s raining icepicks on your steel shore’.
“I mean, we just breezed past that,” says Ben of how underrated he considers the late Chris Cornell as a songwriter. “We didn’t take a moment to recognise how unbelievably evocative as a lyricist he was.”
Ben had the chance to celebrate Seattle by appearing on the song Subterranean from the Foo Fighters’ 2014 album Sonic Highways, as well as on the TV documentary series of the same name that explores the history of the U.S.’ most important musical cities. Ben’s appearance on the latter is notable for a scene in which Dave asks him about Kurt Cobain, a question and answer that prompts tears from Ben.
“I went back to this moment,” recalls Ben, his voice cracking with emotion more than 12 years after the interview. “We were getting ready to go to class. Kurt had died in April of 1994, and a friend of mine came running down the hall and said, ‘You’re not gonna fucking believe this – Dave Grohl from Nirvana’s got a new band, and the rhythm section is from Sunny Day Real Estate’. Then fast forward all those years and I’m sitting across from the guy who was in Nirvana and lost one of his best friends, one of the people for whom that loss was greatest. And this guy’s talking to me about it as if my feelings are as valid as his.”
With our time together nearing its end, we ask about the topic of catharsis, something he has sought and achieved as a songwriter many times over the years. John Lennon once famously said that life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. In that same vein, I Built You A Tower seems to have a central message that catharsis is what happens when we’re busying ourselves looking for coping mechanisms.
“I think there’s some truth to that,” agrees Ben. “When we go through something difficult and our world is shaken, there’s a desire to make it like it was before, not feeling like this anymore. But the older you get, the more you realise there’s nothing you can do other than just walk through your pain. All the coping mechanisms in the world that are employed not to feel pain simply delay the inevitable. If you’re numbing yourself with alcohol or drugs, or you’re trying to fuck your way through it, whatever it might be, you are going to be dealing with it longer than if you just face it and walk through it.
“But even if you’re facing it and walking through it, it’s still not going to be over until it’s over.”
I Built You A Tower is released on June 5 via ANTI-.
