{"id":3516,"date":"2011-08-19T18:52:46","date_gmt":"2011-08-20T01:52:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=3516"},"modified":"2011-08-19T18:53:10","modified_gmt":"2011-08-20T01:53:10","slug":"death-cab-for-cutie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2011\/08\/death-cab-for-cutie\/","title":{"rendered":"DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/h1>\n

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE<\/h1>\n

Making beautiful music from \u201celectronic junk,\u201d one note at a time<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Death Cab for Cutie guitarist and producer Chris Walla didn\u2019t want his bandmates getting too comfortable during the making of their seventh and latest album, Codes and Keys<\/em>. 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. \u201cEnvironment is everything with records,\u201d says Walla. \u201cIt\u2019s often overlooked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not much was overlooked during the making of Keys<\/em>. Instead of playing together in the same room, as they did on 2008\u2019s Narrow Stairs<\/em>, the musicians painstakingly assembled the tunes one part at a time. \u201cIt was like taking apart an entire car and inspecting all the parts for 10\u00a0months,\u201d Walla says. \u201cThere were a lot of days that were like, \u2018Dude, that note sounds great!\u2019 Progress reports were\u00a0pretty incremental.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along the way the band transformed frontman and principal songwriter Ben Gibbard\u2019s acoustic demos into atmospheric songs pulsing with rhythm and underpinned with analog synthesizers. It was meticulous, even tedious work\u2014yet Walla, Gibbard, bass player Nick Harmer and drummer Jason McGerr had a blast. \u201cWe\u2019ve never had this much fun making a record,\u201d Walla says. \u201cWe were more on the same page and more engaged than we\u2019ve ever been. We went into it with a plan and a concept\u2014and\u00a0we stuck to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

How did you approach the record?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Every record we\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

What was your vision as producer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m into restrictions and boundaries, so things don\u2019t spin wildly out of control. The biggest restriction for this record was that I didn\u2019t want to end up with a bunch of strummy guitars. In fact, I didn\u2019t want to end up with many guitars at all. It was in part a reaction to the songs that Ben brought in. He\u2019s been writing almost exclusively on his acoustic guitar, and the songs are killer\u2014the best he\u2019s ever written\u2014but they were taking on a very singer-songwriter vibe. And we made a record like that last time. Knowing we didn\u2019t 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,\u00a0bass and drums.<\/p>\n

Why de-emphasize guitars?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019re trying to find ways to present pop music in colors that you don\u2019t normally associate with pop. We\u2019re trying to find other ways to\u00a0deliver a sentiment.<\/p>\n

Did you have particular benchmarks?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d been listening a lot to Low <\/em>and Heroes<\/em> by David Bowie, and the last couple of LCD Soundsystem records\u2014different 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.<\/p>\n

What took so long?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The thing about playing electronic junk, especially from that era, is that it\u2019s tedious stuff to work with, very detail-oriented. It\u2019s slow enough that if it sucks, you stop doing it. It gets boring. You don\u2019t actually get that far into an arrangement if it\u2019s not working. It\u2019s natural and spontaneous for four people to pick up their instruments and play. But when you\u2019re 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\u2019s amazing. It\u2019s yoga-like, it pushes on the impulse of music-making in a way that forces you to think about it quite differently.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve said your role as producer was reining in Ben as a songwriter.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

How important is process?<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2019s a mistake and what\u2019s not. If you make a record on computer, that\u2019s 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\u2019re 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\u00a0with the same people.<\/p>\n

How was the environment this time?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By design, we changed it a whole bunch. We recorded in seven different studios,\u00a0and they were all places I had worked before except for the Warehouse in Vancouver. I\u2019m pretty comfortable at Sound City.\u00a0It has the best-sounding drum room pretty much anywhere, and I love working there.\u00a0But it\u2019s in the valley outside of L.A., and there\u2019s nothing to do out there. It\u2019s very\u00a0\u201970s and dark. It\u2019s like 1:30 in the morning 24 hours a day, and it leads you to a specific kind of concentration. Synthesizer<\/p>\n

tweaking and patience is really rewarded in that studio, as are rock \u2019n\u2019 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\u2014and 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\u2019s just fun.<\/p>\n

\u2013Eric R. Danton<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE Making beautiful music from \u201celectronic junk,\u201d one note at a time Death Cab for Cutie guitarist and producer Chris Walla didn\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[810,1634,970],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3516"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3519,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3516\/revisions\/3519"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}