It's been eight years since Ben Gibbard recorded Death Cab For Cutie's debut cassette, You Can Play These Songs With Chords, during which time the solo project has turned into a full-fledged band, recorded several slabs of beautiful, earnest indie rock, and steadily built up a devoted fan base (which includes The OC's Seth Cohen). And now, with the release of Plans, the Bellingham, Washington-born, Seattle-based quartet has gone pro.
The move to Atlantic Records has meant a lot to some (mostly longtime fans who, like the band, are old enough to remember the hipster-sellout police of the '90s), but almost nothing to a majority of the people who take Death Cab so personally. Predominantly recorded at Longview Farms in central Massachusetts and mixed at Butch Vig's Smart Studio in Madison, Wisconsin, by guitarist-producer Chris Walla, Plans is the sound of a band settling comfortably into the more subdued space it occupied on 2003's Transatlanticism. Some things about the recording differed from past experiences—it's the first to feature the same full-time drummer on consecutive records, and there's the major-label budget—but in the end, it sounds like a natural progression, so much so that it's probably exactly what the band would have turned in to Barsuk if it hadn't jumped ship. (The Seattle indie is still in charge of Plans' vinyl edition, a two-LP set that includes the bonus track "Talking Like Turnstiles.") The A.V. Club recently spoke separately with Gibbard and with Walla, who announced that he's moving himself and his currently defunct studio The Hall Of Justice to Portland early next year.
The A.V. Club: You know from personal experience, and you even mentioned in Justin Mitchell's tour documentary on the band, Drive Well, Sleep Carefully, that it's possible to make a living on an indie label. So why did you decide to sign to Atlantic?
Ben Gibbard: I think the short answer is that we found ourselves at a crossroads. We could attempt one of two different career paths. The first one is to stay the course and keep doing exactly what we know, and be successful, but not take any real risks, business-wise or anything. As we looked at the situation, especially after the last couple years, we realized that we had all this bargaining power to go to a major label and have every detail fall in line the way we wanted it to—you know, the dream record contract that every band's trying to get at some point. And Barsuk is a wonderful label, they've been amazing to us and continue to be amazing for us, but we made that very un-indie-rock move of actually succumbing to our ambition as a band, and saying, "You know what? I want as many people to hear this band as possible."
AVC: If Death Cab hadn't had the opportunity to sign to a bigger label, could the band have continued at the same pace, or was this business decision necessary to keep you guys invigorated?
BG: Oh, no. If nobody had been sniffing around, I don't think it would have made any of us feel like we weren't accomplishing something as a band. But we had discussions a couple years ago around the time of Transatlanticism: "Well, what's the future of the band?" And it became apparent over the course of that album cycle that—it's a talking point that I've mentioned before, but I think it's applicable in any kind of conversation about this whole move to Atlantic—in 1998, when the first record came out, it was right at the end of that big '90s alterna-boom, where there were A&R reps—even still in Seattle—sniffing around everybody, and all these bands that barely had a show had development deals and all that kind of stuff. And Mammoth Records came to us and was like, "Hey, we heard this record, it's great, maybe we could license it, and maybe we could sign you guys." At the time, we didn't really have anything going—Barsuk and Elsinor really weren't labels at that point. So we talked with them, and they were like, "Well, just let us know what you guys want, and we're going to make this happen."
So we put together a list with the most desirable points you could have: We want to make our own records, we want to be in control of this, we want to be in control of that." And they came back to us kind of scoffing: "Well, I mean, we can't do this—this isn't the kind of thing that labels usually do for bands, and you guys are new, and I'm sorry, but we can't really do these things the way you want to have them done." And at the time, we were just like, "Thanks, but no thanks, we'll just go our separate ways with this thing."
And, not to a tee, but those demands have never changed. And when things started shaping up really strangely, not only for us, but obviously in relation to Postal Service and all these weird cultural things—the Garden States and the OCs, and just this weird kind of rebirth of indie-rock culture on a much larger level the last couple years—we found ourselves being able to go back to some of the same labels that had sent people sniffing around seven years before, or five years before, with basically the same list. And Atlantic looked at it via the lawyers, and obviously there's more to it than that, but in a nutshell, they looked at the same list and said, "Great, we can do this." You know, the record just came out, we're still in the honeymoon phase, I don't know where this is going—time will tell whether this was the right thing for us to do. But I think the most important thing for me now is that I feel incredibly comfortable, and while it's not a family the way Barsuk is a family, I certainly really like the people that are in charge of things for us at Atlantic, and it doesn't feel like that slimy corporate machine that so many bands get ground up in.
But also, and I certainly don't say this to toot our own horn, I feel like we're an exception to the rule in so many cases. When people have come to me talking about, "Hey, somebody just came to our band, a major label wants to sign us," or even some band that we're friends with that Atlantic's been talking to, I feel like I need to always qualify that we're a very special situation in this whole major-label world, I think, because of where we've come from and what we've done on our own with Barsuk.
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