How do you feel about the general election result?I couldn’t be happier. It was absolutely, hands down one of the happiest days of my life. I never thought I’d see something like that in my lifetime, even as I was watching the returns come back, even when they announced, “Obama is president!” I was suspicious, I was like “Oh come on, really? The good guy never really wins”. But I’m pretty happy about it, I’m more than pretty happy about it; I’m cautiously happy about it. I’m so thrilled I don’t want to jinx it. Everything seems great. We worked hard to do what we could for the election so we were all keeping our fingers crossed. We worked pretty hard back in 2004 for that election too, but we’ve finally seen some good now!
How do you as a band, and as an individual feel inspired or affected by the result?Speaking as an individual, the past 8 years have been pretty dreary. We’ve been in a huge decline, we’re in a huge recession right now, we’re in kind of a war or something going on in the world, no one really knows what to call it anymore. Just a lot of bad decisions have been made in the last 8 years and I really feel like in the world’s standing that America has really fallen. Just touring over the last 8 years we’ve seen journalists and citizens sceptical of the fact that we’re from America. It seems so easy for everyone to demonize George Bush. There’s some kind of global political thing gone wrong that everyone finds it so easy to point their finger at America and George Bush. We’ve brought it on ourselves so I feel inspired that someone like Barack Obama can hopefully turn that around. There’s still a lot of work to be done and it’s not going to happen quickly but I think he’s got that kind of charisma and strength to unify a nation that’s splitting apart in a lot of ways. And as a band we’re inspired because we worked a lot to utilize the youth vote and get them to vote. We took part in ‘The Ultimate College Bowl’, which sounds like it might be a little cheesy but turned out to be a really great competition. It was based around the election and voter registration and it basically encouraged every college in America to get as much of their student body to register to vote and whichever college had the highest percentage of registered voters would win a free show from us. Even if ten people were inspired then that would have been a success but it turns out there were about 150,000. This year I really feel that the youth vote was instrumental in electing a president, and I feel that’s historical in itself, so I’m pretty happy about that.
So it’s a case of Deathcab vs apathy?Yeah sure, as much as we can. It’s a hard thing to not be apathetic and be young. Apathy is a hard thing to fight, it’s true. I find it in myself when you feel so frustrated and powerless when you start thinking about the halls of government and the places that you’ve never been allowed or shown any respect in. You just tend to give up and assume that they’ll never listen to you, so it’s nice to push against that, as much as it is to fight apathy in voters as well as apathy in ourselves. I guess it’s not even apathy its more like pessimism than anything. I can be pretty gloomy when it comes down to a lot of things y’know. Embracing the post-apocalypse and everything. Bring on the zomies man! Let’s just tear it all down! It’s so nice to have some hope again. I feel that way too about Barack Obama. Almost every day after I’ve woken up and thought “you know this really wouldn’t be such a bad place to bring a child into, maybe I could be a dad someday!” There’s a much happier feeling about the future.
So no more complacency?Well, I hope not. I’m going to work hard to not feel complacent. It’s going to be an interesting four years to say the least.
Lucy: I interviewed Chris and Jason earlier on this year in Birmingham and we were talking about the directions DVD. Do you ever think you’ll do anything like that again or do you think Plans was more of an album that was more suited to that?I would love to do something like that again. We talked about the value of doing something like that again on this album. The thing that was so great about that was that it was so different at the time and that it was so different for us. I felt like if we did it again then people would think “Oh, there just doing the same thing again”. It’s funny how criticism works that way. At the time there were people saying “this is awesome” or “this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen”. All those people who thought it was great the first time would think it was crappy the second time because we wouldn’t have any fresh ideas and all we’d be doing is repeating ourselves. It’s the spirit of the project that I love; that you can get video and visual artists and pair them together with us and see that result. I like where different kinds of artistic mediums intersect and what happens when they do; so to facilitate that is really exciting for me. We have some really good ideas; we’ve got one in the works right now but I don’t want to tell you about it just yet, but we’re pretty excited to see how the spirit of it will be preserved when we work on something. We’re not sure if its going to happen on this album or not or whatever but we’ll see. It takes time and its something you can’t turn around that quickly.
Do you think it’s important for a band to crossover into a different artistic medium?I don’t really that its our perogerative to do so, I just think its important to show where they intersect. For instance, I don’t care too much if we’re wildly love amongst film makers, but I do love it when music inspires imagery in people’s eyes. You know, you can close your eyes when you’re sitting in a train or driving in a car or wherever and most people have their own visual thing that happens, whether it’s a movie or a slideshow or something. We’re a generation of music listeners who raised on music videos, whether its MTV or whatever, that’s become part of our experience of music. What I wanted to shake up from ‘Directions’ was that there is more than one definitive visual record of a song, rather than a band just making one video and that’s it. You know, when you think of Karma Police and its Thom Yorke in the back of a car and the fire’s coming and that suddenly becomes everyone’s visual in their mind. I like the idea of taking directions and having different conceptions. I’d love to do something where you have 12 videos for each somg but that’s not economically viable. I do think it’s important nowadays as there’s a certain stranglehold on things where it’s difficult to get your music played on MTV when they don’t even play music videos anymore or on the radio or whatever and having the ability to share your music online is an open playground for new bands and for bands that have been around for ten years like us. You can do whatever you want.
Do you find often that art informs the music or that music informs the art?I don’t know, I think that depends. I think that’s a really good question. We refer to the way we work as a band as ‘periods of input and periods of output’. You’re out there on tour, travelling around and having adventures and stuff and then you’ve got going to see films, going to see other bands and all of these different ways that you live life is the input stuff, and however you react to that and rearrange it in your mind to make whatever it is you make is the output period. But I don’t know what informs what. I think our music comes from so many different places. There are songs that come from really intimate private moments that you could never ever really share with anyone other than through a song and then there are songs that come through shared collective experiences which everyone has some connection to. Some people could argue whether or not what we make is even considered art, but its an expression of some kind so I don’t know.
Having such a strong following in Britain, would you say that there’s anything intrinsically British about Deathcab?I wouldn’t say we do have that strong a following in Britain but if you’re saying it then OK! I don’t know if there’s anything intrinsically British. The name of our band clearly is, a lot of our shared influences are. We all grew up as Beatles kids first and foremost, then Britpop kids. I still think that musically there’s always been a lot of exciting things happening with bands in England and we’ve always drawn inspiration from that in some ways. But I don’t know. I mean you say we have a strong following but we’ve always felt like the underdog in England and everywhere outside of the US. For better or for worse we’ve never had the NME come up to us and say “we want to do a big photo shoot with you!”. There are all those bands that kind of have that splash explosion, they have that fashionable kind of quality. Maybe they never last but it remains to be seen whether we will or not. Maybe if it’s a quicker spike up then it’s a quicker fall down. We’ve always found our fans over here to be more on the cult side of things rather than mainstream. Well, at times, obviously, you know there will be a bunch of kids who heard about us through some TV show or whatever, but I’ve never felt like we were the ‘it’ band. Even when we come over and see our friends in bands, a band like Fleet Foxes who are selling a tonne of records and everybody’s talking about Fleet Foxes, but there was never a moment when everyone was talking about Death Cab For Cutie. Never like with Interpol or The Strokes or any of these bands that are contemporaries of ours whom we have a lot of respect for. They always get offered these bog headlining shows at festivals and we always get this little side stage, which we happily accept. I’m not sad about it, I’m very comfortable with where we’re at. I think that people that find us and connect to our music will stick with us for longer than a magazine cover’s length. I don’t think that there’s anything quintessentially English or American about us, I think that the way we are is just as musicians who ingest a lot of different tastes and just express them. If you want to get stereotypical then I think there are definitely more aspects of us that are similar with bands from England than with bands that have stereotypically come out of Seattle. We’re not a grunge band; we sounded more like Oasis than we ever sounded like Nirvana.
We’ve been able to maintain a sense of integrity with what we do and the way we do things, and we get to go on tour with bands that we like. We don’t have to go to lame places and hang around with lame people. We just show up, keep our heads down and play shows and that’s fine. I’d rather play in front of 500 than have to go and play a bunch of political music games. You know people saying “you need to go to this place and hang out with these people and go and have this photoshoot with this person because its super-important. We’d rather just avoid all of that and play for whoever is really interested in our music.
So you’ve never seen yourselves as becoming a stadium band?No, not at all. The thing is we would always have been happy with becoming an accidental stadium band, but it’s never been a priority to go out and grab that. Being Coldplay doesn’t sound exciting to us. What seems exciting about it is that none of those guys are ever going to have to work another day in their lives and that’s pretty awesome but that’s about it. I mean, there’s so much more pressure out there everyday that a lot of people get to avoid. I’m sure a lot of people say this but I’m completely envious of the career that Radiohead has been able to carve out for themselves. They really seem to be able to do whatever exactly it is that they want to do and people will still follow them, they’ll always have that dedicated hardcore following. And they’re so good at it that it drives me crazy. They’ve made awesome become boring. Everyday there’s a news item about Radiohead doing something new and exciting and you’re just like “Oh! It’s just awesome! God! When are they going to not be awesome?”. Everyday is like a race, you ask yourself “alright what can we do that Radiohead isn’t about to finish?” We need a spy in house over there, it’s just ridiculous. But hats off to them, its not really a race it’s just so inspiring. They’ve got the infrastructure and ability as a band to be able to do that sort of stuff and do it well. It can be argued that they haven’t always had success at it but they keep trying and pushing in really interesting ways. Living as a band in this world which is half technology and half experience, you look to Radiohead as a band who have completely mastered that. Any band would kill for that financial freedom as well as the creative freedom and those two things are often at odds which other.
Having been such a tightly knit group for such a long time, how would you say that the way you interact or work with each other has changed or evolved?Our communication now is much more subtle than its ever been. I can look at Jason when we’re playing and if I flash him a certain look then he knows exactly what I’m saying. We can have conversations with each other in the blink of an eye; with those sort of tacit looks of whatever we can pick up on stage. That’s certainly rare; that’s something that you get with family members and people that you’ve been in relationships with for a long time. I’m really thankful that we have that strong kind of communication. The other thing is just about giving each other space. There was a time when you knew that if someone was having a bad day then you learn to back off and give each other space. We went through those big bad ego years in the beginning when there were some struggles about the band and all that kind of stuff. Over time we were able to balance all of that out, and thankfully we were able to get through it when nobody was really watching. I feel bad for bands nowadays but that’s just the way that it is. I wonder how bands cope when they start out without even a debut album and then suddenly the entire world is paying attention to them right away. There seems so much more of a magnifying glass on them to figure everything out in front of everyone. A lot of bands go through that sort of shift over time, but I’m just glad that we were able to solidify our working relationship during a time when not a lot of people were really paying attention to us. Then when they finally did we were just like “yeah, we’re good, we’re solid, we’re comfortable, thanks”.
So no Spinal Tap arguments about the size of bread or anything?Well, you could argue that our drummer issues over the years have been very Spinal Tap. Thankfully, that’s been fine since Jason joined before Transantlanticism, unless he spontaneously combusts.
Interview by Andrew Trendell
Photographs by Lucy Bridger
www.flickr.com/lucybridger
Interview by Andy Trendell