We’ve Got A File On You features interviews in which artists share the stories behind the extracurricular activities that dot their careers: acting gigs, guest appearances, random internet ephemera, etc.
A cool thing about Ben Gibbard is how game he is. Got a 100-mile race that cuts through the verdant national forests east of Seattle? He’ll run it, in 27 hours, no less. A lifelong love of Teenage Fanclub spurred him to cover their seminal LP Bandwagonesque in its entirety. When his friend John Krasinski asked him to be in a movie adaptation of a David Foster Wallace short story collection, he just went with it — never mind that his lone scene involved a three-minute, heavily sexual monologue delivered directly to camera.
His openness to possibility is on full display throughout Asphalt Meadows, the surprising new album from his band Death Cab For Cutie (and their tenth since 1998) that finds the indie mainstays navigating a terrain of exciting new sounds. It was clear on lead single "Roman Candle," in which guitars grind like anxious dental drills, and it’s even more in focus on "Foxglove Through The Clearcut," a journey that blends spoken-word passages with thick mountains of their twinkly emo past.
Throughout his 25 years with Death Cab and his highly influential work as half of the electronic duo the Postal Service, Gibbard has established a kind of indie elder statesman identity. It might be strange to see him collaborating with Noah Cyrus, but that’s exactly what someone in his position would be asked to do — and he remains down. Below, ahead of Asphalt Meadows’ Sept. 16 release, Gibbard revisits the highlights of his career, goes long on the legacy of The O.C. as it pertains to his band, unpacks the nostalgia for the Pacific Northwest, and more. Ask him anything. He’s game.
Asphalt Meadows (2022)
Not to start with a complete downer, but when "Roman Candles" came out, you said: "The lyrics were cobbled from a couple of different songs dealing with my general sense of anxiety, the feeling that the fabric that weaves a functioning society together was crumbling during the pandemic." I was wondering if you still feel that way. Has your relationship to that song changed since then?
BEN GIBBARD: It definitely seems that things are not necessarily getting better on a national or global scale. But so much of why I write the way I do and why I choose to kind of take on subjects like I write about on "Roman Candles" is in an attempt to transcend my own anxiety or my own maudlin feelings about a particular subject or situation or person. I would hope that there would be something cathartic about coming to the show and singing along with that particular song, or any of the songs that deal with similar subject matter.
That song in particular, I think the message is really in the chorus is like, I'm trying to let go of all these things that I can't control. One way to do that is to not obsess over the news. Things are hard, you know? It's okay to go a day without being up on whatever insane shit has happened in the world. You're allowed to take a mental health day from the shitstorm of bad news. And that's a hard thing to do, because we're given the impression often that through our actions or through our words or through our social media accounts, we can make systemic change, and I can say that I believe that to a smaller extent, but not to the extent that I think that has been sold to us.
Lance Bangs' video for the song is chaotic but shows a resolve to keep going through anything that's quite literally being thrown at you. How did you and Lance come to that idea?
GIBBARD: It was kind of based on an idea that I had since writing the song, and definitely since recording it with [producer John] Congleton. I just kept coming back to this image of us performing in the midst of dangerous-looking explosions. And we've known Lance for a long time. I mean, as I'm sure you're aware, maybe people who read Stereogum are aware, he's kind of like an indie rock Zelig. He's been in the front row of every show that you wish you could have been at for the last 30 years. Unlike a lot of kinds of people who fall into those places, Lance is just an absolutely wonderful, sincere, awesome human being. I think that's why so many people have given him access over the years. So Lance was the first person I thought of because he'd worked with the Jackass guys for so many years. Our initial conversations were like, "I just want it to be a lot of explosions, we’re playing, it looks really dangerous, maybe it is." And Lance was like, "Okay, I got it." And then I get a call a week later, like, "So are you guys okay with shooting bottle rockets near your faces?" I'm like, "Yeah, that should be fine." He's like, "Okay, talk to you later."
He was checking up with us often to be like, "This is what it's gonna be like, just want to make sure that everybody is cool." He relayed some stories of working with an actor on some project who only found out had extreme anxiety around explosions the moment they were filming it. So he just wanted to be very, very sure that we were going to be cool with it. And he just nailed it.
Were there any unexpected things that happened during the shoot since you were dealing with projectiles and flying materials?
GIBBARD: They've been doing things like this long enough that it's a lot safer than it looks. All of the debris that's flying around is rubber, like foam or something like that. These explosions are the same thing they use in, like, Saving Private Ryan. They're all made to be ostensibly safe, but there is a lot of debris and smoke. We did two takes — [the video] was the second one — and throughout the performance, I was just really struggling to not cough, because I was just inhaling so much, because I was the only one who didn't get a mask.
"Here To Forever" begins with the line about watching older films from the '50s and being overwhelmed by the thought that those actors are dead. Which films or actors were you thinking about?
GIBBARD: I was thinking of, like, Monica Vitti. You know, any of those French New Wave stars. You watch those films, and you think that was such an amazing time, but oh yeah, they're all dead now. Anna Karina, Jeanne Moreau from Elevator To The Gallows. I just love these films so much. You see Anna Karina in an old film, and you’re just like, oh my god, what a stunning person — oh, that person's dead. They're kind of frozen in this time and space. That's one of the many wonderful things about film in particular as a medium is that it kind of freezes people in time. Photographs as well. You see an old photograph, and even if people in those images have been gone for 100 years, there's something kind of comforting about the fact that they get to kind of live forever, at least in celluloid, or whatever it might be. To me, that's a very comforting thought, especially as a musician who I assume will die someday. I don't think in even 50 years people are gonna care about the music that I make. But at least it's there if somebody wants to dig into it, you know?
Speaking of snapshots, in March 2020, you released "Life in Quarantine," which now plays like a snapshot of that particular moment. How much of Asphalt Meadows dates back to that period?
GIBBARD: There's moments in the record and songs that are related to that period, but they weren't written during that period. The first song on the record, "I Don't Know How I Survive," to me is about this crippling anxiety and fear that was deep within me during that time. I mean, we were all there, right? I'm realizing that we were living a lot closer to the bone than we thought we were as far as the tendrils that hold society together. I didn't write it in the midst of that time, but that feeling I got waking up in the night and just being crippled with anxiety was something that I'm sure a lot of people were also feeling. But it became very real for me.
Ben Gibbard: Live From Home YouTube Livestreams (2020)
People could see you grappling with COVID anxiety in real time on your livestreams. But I also think a lot of people felt comforted watching Ben Gibbard play "We Will Become Silhouettes" in an R.E.M. T-shirt in his house.
GIBBARD: Well, it wasn't an entirely altruistic venture on my part. It also allowed me an opportunity to do something familiar, or do something normal. Even though the venue was totally new and uncharted territory for me, it gave me some structure that I otherwise wouldn't have had, especially in those early days where we really weren't leaving our house and we really didn't know what was going on. Coming back around to the record, "I Miss Strangers" was a phrase that I remember hearing [from] a friend in the depths of the pandemic. I think that one of the things that I love about being in the world that I only realized was really important to me when it was taken away was being alone with everybody. Being in a restaurant by myself, or a bar, or an airport, or waiting for public transportation, or whatever. Just doing normal shit, and you're getting that din of people speaking and the sound of life existing and people conversing and interacting with each other. I think only when it was gone, a lot of people realized how important it was to their sense of being alive.
At that time, how strenuous was it to put on a concert every night, even one you were doing in your own home?
GIBBARD: It wasn’t strenuous, and honestly, I really appreciated the kind of sense of purpose that it gave me. I think because I'm in my mid-40s, I lived very little of my life with social media. For young people or young artists, it's just not even a big deal to just to open your life up to almost egregious levels. You need to be sharing everything in your life all the time. Talking with strangers for hours on end, or answering questions, or putting up parts of songs that you're writing as you're writing them — this is just totally anathema to how I came up in the world and who my heroes were. Most of my heroes were mysteries. Part of the appeal was that you didn't know much about them.
For me to enter this arena where there are people talking in real time about what I'm playing, and are they going to be nice? Are they going to be mean? Why are they here? Who are they? I can't see them. Are they enemies? Are they friends? Are they trolls? Are they fans? It's kind of silly to say it now, but as someone who had very little interaction in that arena, it was kind of stressful at first. But once I did a couple shows, I was like, it's not that dissimilar from doing a show in front of a paying audience. People are tuning in because they like what you do. They want to hear your music, and so just have fun with it. And once I was able to settle into this little community that was forming and realize that it was just, you know, all people who were feeling somewhat similar to how I was feeling in that uncertain time, it really allowed me to kind of open myself up in ways that I certainly wouldn't have done.
An easy highlight for me was when you played "The Bones Are Their Money." What made you honor that particular request?
GIBBARD: There’s a woman named Natalie who's worked for the band. She's toured with us a number of times, and when I Think You Should Leave first came on, I think we were on tour together and we were bonding pretty heavily around how much we loved that show. I would pass by the production office and I would just stick my head and go, "The bones are their money, so are the worms." It became this whole thing. So when she said, "Play 'The Bones Are Their Money,’" I’m like, alright, fucker, I'm gonna do it. You think you're kind of pulling one over on me, but I'm going to do it.
Acting In John Krasinski’s David Foster Wallace Film Adaptation Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (2009)
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