Listen: Death Cab for Cutie's Atmospheric Ballad 'You Are A Tourist'

Death Cab For Cutie have promised that their forthcoming seventh album Codes and Keys – in stores May 31st – will emphasize vintage keyboards and electronic textures, but "You Are A Tourist," the record's first single, signals that longtime fans shouldn't worry about the group abandoning the tuneful rock that made them famous. "You Are A Tourist" isn't much of a departure at all – if anything, it's less a step toward the electronica of frontman Ben Gibbard's side project the Postal Service and more a jump in the direction of U2's more recent material.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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