Superlatives
A Vulture series in which artists judge the best and worst of their own careers.
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Lets get this out of the way:The Photo Albumis far fromBen Gibbards favoriteDeath Cab for Cutie album.
Its kind of a cheesy analogy, but records are like my kids.
I dont have any children, so theyre kind of my contribution to the world, Gibbard says.
You love them all, but you might see how ones going to struggle to keep a job.
The other ones going to maybe go off and become a doctor, right?
you might see them very clearly, certainly as you get older.
Our profile just shot up in that year, year and a half, Gibbard says.
YetThe Photo Albumis also the album that made Death Cab for Cutie what the band is today.
As the bands arrangements got bigger and more sweeping, Gibbards poignant lyrical vignettes became tighter and more refined.
(Summers review: Its like one guitar and a whole lot of complaining!)
1 albums and licenses.
To celebrate the albums 20th anniversary earlier in October, Death Cab released a 35-track deluxe of the album.
Gibbard also recently spent some timereflecting on the album and its legacy with Vulture.
Its a trip that its been 20 years, of course, he says.
It wouldnt seem appropriate now either.
I wouldnt say that its one of my all-time favorites or anything like that.
You said its a new song, and be like, Oh, thats called A Movie Script Ending.
I love that one.
Is that going to be on the next record?
To this day, my favorite is still A Movie Script Ending.
So playing songs from the first three records, we have limited space in the set to do that.
A Movie Script is one that we rotate in.
It was a song I wrote about Bellingham, Washington, after we moved to Seattle.
Bellingham is where we started.
It was a song just for us.
B side that couldve madeThe Photo Album
There really isnt.
The short of it is that you have your whole life to write your first record.
And then the third record, youre starting from scratch.
You have nothing to pull on from the first couple records.
Theres a reason thats a trope, right?
It tends to be true almost all the time.
It was an incredibly stressful record to make because every song had to work.
The ten songs we had bookmarked for the record all had to make the record.
We had a longer version of the original version of Stability that was called Stable Song.
That was all we had.
So when I think ofThe Photo Album, I dont think of it having any proper B sides.
Everything that we recorded for that record made the record because we didnt really have any more material.
Its just very simple chords.
It didnt really need to say anything more.
Theyre kind of 1A and 1B.
Coney Island maybe could have used one little extra section, something else to happen narratively or whatever.
But, you know, hindsights 20/20.
Its a perfect snapshot of where we were at that time.
If I can be so bold, I tend to be kind of cinematic at times.
It would be like if somebody usedWhat Sarah Saidin a hospital scene.
Thats pretty on the nose.
That was one of the first licenses we ever got for TV of any note.
They would help us pay our rent, and it was a big deal.
For us, I would definitely say for the better.
Most emo song
Its interesting, Ive always thought of us as being like, emo-adjacent.
People would be like, Do you like emo music?
I was like, Oh, you mean like Afghan Whigs, like emotional?
Hes like, No man, like the Get Up Kids and the Promise Ring.
I had not heard any of those bands.
We always turned that stuff down because we felt like, thats not how we want to be perceived.
If people used the termemoto describe our music, we never got mad.
We werent like, Fuck you, were not an emo band.
I want to be abundantly clear, I have nothing but respect for all those bands that I mentioned.
That is a scene that is certainly having a renaissance.
It wasnt something that I listened to, and therefore we didnt want to lean into the association.
The first three records are very guitar-forward.
Chris and I would weave our parts together, almost a deconstructionist approach to arranging music.
I did not want to play chords.
; these stories that conflict creates great art.
In my life and my career, that has been proven to be entirely false.
At least, we felt that at that point.
So, there was the pressure of that.
We werent getting along very well when we made that record.
I mean, that was the best record we ever made.
Like I said,Photo Albumis not in my top-three Death Cab records.
But I love it.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
