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In Issue 1053, Ben Gibbard talked with Jenny Eliscu about Death Cab for Cutie's leap to the majors for their 2005 album Plans and his love of Elvis Costello, as well as the band's latest album, Narrow Stairs. The singer-guitarist also mused on indie rock's new role in the music business and looking to R.E.M.'s career for guidance:
How different is the audience for Death Cab now than
when you first started putting out albums?
There are choices now for people to find out what they like. They
don't have to like what the major labels put out there in front of
them. If people hear Death Cab, they don't have to buy Death Cab
— it's not the only option they have for melodic indie rock.
But I think if this was 10 years ago and you lived in Boise, Idaho
— like, I think that's the closest thing that I like, so I
buy that, you know what I'm saying? Everybody votes with their
dollars now. They have an infinite number of choices, they don't
have to take whatever the major label hands to them anymore and I
think that's fucking great!
And there seems to be more room for "challenging,"
different-sounding music as a result.
As ubiquitous as Dark Side of the Moon is, it's a pretty
crazy record. And that record is the number-one selling record of
all time. There's always gonna be room in the public spectrum for
really interesting, challenging music. It's just that those things
used to come so few and far between. I think we are in a situation
now where we are able to give [the audience] more credit, allowing
them to make more decisions. Up until the last couple of years, you
had what was on the radio, you had what was on your college
station, you have whoever's older brother that maybe has Who
records that your friends are able to steal a couple and put on
tape.
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If you give people a series of choices, they may or may not sell, or they're not going to sell 60 million records. But it's like, there will be room for 100 bands of a similar ilk to at least be able to have enough money to pay their rent and to make another record. At the end of the day, everybody that I know that played music, that's all they ever wanted. That's all any of us ever wanted — was just to be able to make enough money to continue doing this. I still have friends who have been slogging around for 10 years who are playing to 600 people at a club down the street and they're fucking stoked. I highly doubt that anybody who comes from this culture of indie rock, when given an opportunity to make a living and play to hundreds if not thousands of people in the bigger cities is going to be bitter that a band like us or the Shins or Arcade Fire are playing to 4,000 people in particular cities. It's hard to kind of complain about the demise of the music industry when there are more bands out there on the road playing shows and people are patronizing them than before.
Do you have an artist who you at crossroads moments you
think "What would so-and-so do?"
I guess in a way we do. For all of us, it was always R.E.M. It was
always like, "What would REM do in this situation?" The antiquity
that R.E.M. existed in that took them through the IRS years onto
Warner Bros. and then onto international superstardom — it's
neither possible or even relevant today. When we sat down and
thought about signing to a major label, we could either be every
indie band ever and wait another record to sign to a major label
when it's not the right time or try to do what R.E.M. did. And we
were like, "Let's try to stick to the R.E.M. model of sign while
the getting's good." But it's also not applicable. I remember there
were moments along our radio push for Plans when we'd end
up in really compromising situations and I'd be asking management,
"Is this what R.E.M. had to go through in ?88?" And they're like,
"No. You can't even make those comparisons." There will never be
another Elvis Costello. Never be another R.E.M. Because so many of
the perceptions of those people's careers are based in the time
period which they were making music. I mean, Conor [Oberst] was
getting all that shit with like, "He's the new Bob Dylan!" No, he's
not. There's not going to be another Bob Dylan. Conor is one of the
most genius songwriters I know. But there's no such thing as the
next Bob Dylan. No such thing as the next Beatles. These are just
foolish things to throw around because they don't have any
merit.