Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard Resists Stagnation

The lyrical direction of this record intrigued me. You are using language and imagery that could be directed toward another person, but it feels, to my ear, like it’s also you speaking to yourself. You’ve found this conversational balance, where it does not feel like the songs are necessarily an indictment of an other but more a curious exploration of an internal self. How did you build the fortitude to continually, you know, make that mirror and stare into it?

I don’t know if it was built as much as it just arrived. I just felt I wanted to go deeper and deeper into myself, and how I was feeling, and about this situation, rather than do emotional accounting for the relationship as a whole. In “Full of Stars,” the first song, there was a line in the chorus that, I think people can interpret it however they like, but it’s, like, all I need is for you to be kind, and it seems it’s really worth your time. I’m singing to myself in that sense, “I need you,” I and you being the same person. I need you to just take a beat, man, and realize that you’re gonna be O.K. Everything’s gonna be fine. But I’m the kind of person who’s just always going. I’m always in motion, literally and figuratively. One of the things I struggle the most with as a person is just taking some time, taking actual downtime. One of my biggest fears as a songwriter or as a human being is losing my edge, you know? If I stop writing that, I’ll die, you know? And in that first song I was just telling myself to slow down, that everything would be fine.

I also love that the album opens with the lyric “Please forgive me,” and then expands from there. You do an incredible job of tone setting, where the line between “I” and “you” are instantly blurred in this incredible way. The song “Envy the Birds” has great moments of that as well, and I think there can be times in writing where that blurring is shunned or not looked upon very generously, because people are seeking a clear distinction between the speaker and the person being spoken to. But what I love about the writing on this record is that it resists the idea that everything needs to be known, and so it does feel, in some ways, like even though it is a very intimate record there is this beautiful layer of protection around it.

I think one of the other great appeals of our band is that our personalities onstage and in public are as close as they can be to how they are in our private lives, and who we are as people. That’s how we dress, how we present ourselves, how we talk to people, and it’s reflected in how I write. When we were having conversations about the record and how we’re gonna talk about this stuff, you know, there are people in our circle who were attempting to be very protective around my personal life and what I had been through, although you can go on Reddit and find that out. But at some point, you know, in a conversation about it, I was, like, Let’s just tell people what’s going on. There’s no point trying to be coy or cryptic about this stuff. We’ve always carried ourselves that way, and I think it’s a reflection of our musical upbringing, and the people that were really important to us, and the kind of music that we connected to and which made us want to do this in the first place. It’s been important to me, as a songwriter, to always just be honest and transparent, and if there is a “you never give all of yourself away,” of course. Maybe that’s that, you know, layer of protection around it. In any relationship—be it a romantic relationship, friendships, or a relationship with an audience—you have to hold something back for yourself. But it’s always been my goal to be as emotionally transparent as possible, and I think that’s both what people love about the band, and the people who don’t like the band, what they hate about the band.