DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

Making beautiful music from “electronic junk,” one note at a time

Death Cab for Cutie guitarist and producer Chris Walla didn’t want his bandmates getting too comfortable during the making of their seventh and latest album, Codes and Keys. To keep them on their toes, he crafted a recording itinerary that took the group to more than half a dozen studios over 10 months. “Environment is everything with records,” says Walla. “It’s often overlooked.”

Not much was overlooked during the making of Keys. Instead of playing together in the same room, as they did on 2008’s Narrow Stairs, the musicians painstakingly assembled the tunes one part at a time. “It was like taking apart an entire car and inspecting all the parts for 10 months,” Walla says. “There were a lot of days that were like, ‘Dude, that note sounds great!’ Progress reports were pretty incremental.”

Along the way the band transformed frontman and principal songwriter Ben Gibbard’s acoustic demos into atmospheric songs pulsing with rhythm and underpinned with analog synthesizers. It was meticulous, even tedious work—yet Walla, Gibbard, bass player Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr had a blast. “We’ve never had this much fun making a record,” Walla says. “We were more on the same page and more engaged than we’ve ever been. We went into it with a plan and a concept—and we stuck to it.”

How did you approach the record?

Every record we’ve made has been a reaction to the previous record, taking the experience of what happened and trying to refine it, make it more musical, more functional and more interesting. It’s how the band operates as a unit. The last record was very much live, on the floor, tracking vocals and everything. It was time to go back to the construction-project world and find new sounds, a new palette.

What was your vision as producer?

I’m into restrictions and boundaries, so things don’t spin wildly out of control. The biggest restriction for this record was that I didn’t want to end up with a bunch of strummy guitars. In fact, I didn’t want to end up with many guitars at all. It was in part a reaction to the songs that Ben brought in. He’s been writing almost exclusively on his acoustic guitar, and the songs are killer—the best he’s ever written—but they were taking on a very singer-songwriter vibe. And we made a record like that last time. Knowing we didn’t want to repeat that left us in a place where we had to rethink our approach to everything. We were going to present the stories of these songs as little movies without just plowing through them with guitar, bass and drums.

Why de-emphasize guitars?

As Ben continues to write and have songs turn up in his solo work, his impulse as a musician is to strum on a guitar and sing a song. That’s a super-awesome way to deliver a song. But as this band evolves, one of the things that differentiates us from what he or any of us do on our own is trying to push the envelope of the songcraft and presentation without making it feel tricky. We’re trying to find ways to present pop music in colors that you don’t normally associate with pop. We’re trying to find other ways to deliver a sentiment.

Did you have particular benchmarks?

I’d been listening a lot to Low and Heroes by David Bowie, and the last couple of LCD Soundsystem records—different versions of rock bands playing with electronics and electronic music, trying to meld those two worlds. We ended up with stacks of monophonic synthesizers and these weird textural tone poems. It was just trial and error, throwing ideas and sounds at songs until they felt like songs.

What took so long?

The thing about playing electronic junk, especially from that era, is that it’s tedious stuff to work with, very detail-oriented. It’s slow enough that if it sucks, you stop doing it. It gets boring. You don’t actually get that far into an arrangement if it’s not working. It’s natural and spontaneous for four people to pick up their instruments and play. But when you’re building things note by note simply to make chords, it really forces you to quality-control stuff all the way along. As an exercise, it’s amazing. It’s yoga-like, it pushes on the impulse of music-making in a way that forces you to think about it quite differently.

You’ve said your role as producer was reining in Ben as a songwriter.

That was true at one point, and it was also his role to rein me in as producer. He and I are both prone to going too far in our respective crafts at the expense of making something that feels good. This record wasn’t so much about that. There was way less digging in terms of songcraft than there has been, but in terms of arrangements, we deconstructed these songs more than we ever have.

How important is process?

Process is everything to me. Everything about how you make a record informs how it ends up sounding. If you make a record on tape, it moves at a really specific pace and you make decisions about what’s a mistake and what’s not. If you make a record on computer, that’s a different threshold and you end up working in a completely different way. If you make a record in a studio without a lounge, you get a ton of weird energy on it because nobody can get away from each other to take a break. You’re in the control room or on the floor, and that provides a particular kind of record. Shaking up processes and methods will lead you to a different result with the same people.

How was the environment this time?

By design, we changed it a whole bunch. We recorded in seven different studios, and they were all places I had worked before except for the Warehouse in Vancouver. I’m pretty comfortable at Sound City. It has the best-sounding drum room pretty much anywhere, and I love working there. But it’s in the valley outside of L.A., and there’s nothing to do out there. It’s very ’70s and dark. It’s like 1:30 in the morning 24 hours a day, and it leads you to a specific kind of concentration. Synthesizer

tweaking and patience is really rewarded in that studio, as are rock ’n’ roll drums. Then we took it to the Warehouse, which is this beautiful, third-floor wall of windows, full daylight, full-service, state-of-the-art, feel-like-a-million-bucks kind of place in the middle of one of the most beautiful cities on the planet—and you make a completely different kind of record there. The biggest luxury of being on a major label is having the budget to be able to spread out, take your time and make considerations like that. It’s just fun.

–Eric R. Danton