{"id":295,"date":"2026-05-31T12:07:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-31T12:07:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=295"},"modified":"2026-05-31T12:07:06","modified_gmt":"2026-05-31T12:07:06","slug":"ben-gibbard-on-breaking-out-of-lyrical-jail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=295","title":{"rendered":"Ben Gibbard on Breaking Out of Lyrical Jail"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hunger for nostalgia is not unique to the music fan, but the music fan has a tendency to consume as much nostalgia as is placed in front of them, for as long as it is there. If you are Death Cab for Cutie\u2014the indie band that came out of the Pacific Northwest music scene in the late nineties and spent the two-thousands releasing a string of massively recognizable songs, including \u201cI Will Follow You Into the Dark,\u201d \u201cSoul Meets Body,\u201d and \u201cTransatlanticism,\u201d to name a few\u2014you could capitalize off of it to such a degree that you would not need<\/em> to make any new music at all. The band\u2019s catalogue of indie pop from the early to mid-two-thousands contains enough to satisfy both devoted fans and those who maybe heard one of their hits in a movie years ago.<\/p>\n

Read more Marilyn Monroe Made Being Photographed an Art<\/a><\/p>\n

But as much as I, too, revel in the time and place those songs take me back to, I\u2019ve found myself significantly more drawn to the body of work that Death Cab has accumulated since 2015, beginning with \u201cKintsugi,\u201d an album that veered into new-wave territory. Ben Gibbard, the band\u2019s longtime front man, has been writing songs that feel more patient, expansive, and novelistic. 2022\u2019s \u201cAsphalt Meadows\u201d was a high point of the band\u2019s career, building upon the melancholy of their early work while upgrading the romantic confusion and malaise to speak to the middle of someone\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

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\u201cI Built You a Tower,\u201d coming out this month, feels like a spiritual sibling to \u201cKintsugi.\u201d If the earlier album orbited the theme of drifting apart (its title refers to the Japanese practice of repairing cracked ceramics with gold), \u201cI Built You a Tower\u201d asks what happens after the rupture: What do you do with the grief you\u2019re carrying, and the grief to come? How is it possible to feel any individual sorrow in a world that manufactures horrors far greater than your personal ones? Gibbard\u2019s lyrics swerve from resignation to regret to defiance. On the track \u201cRiptides,\u201d he sings of having \u201cseen too many people leaving to take it too hard,\u201d a shrug that doubles as a thesis statement of sorts. One must build a container to compartmentalize one\u2019s pain, and the more pain there is to compartmentalize the larger the container gets.<\/p>\n

Gibbard, who lives in Seattle, turns fifty this year. Between 2023 and 2025, he went through a separation and then a divorce from his wife, the photographer Rachel Demy, who he\u2019d been married to since 2016. At the same time, he was on an anniversary tour playing twenty-year-old records by both Death Cab and his other longtime band, Postal Service. When that tour concluded, the work of making \u201cI Built You a Tower\u201d began. In his free time, Gibbard is an ultramarathoner, running courses that stretch fifty miles or beyond. During a conversation over Zoom in April, we began by discussing movement, aging, and the realities of time. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I was thinking about running as I was listening to the new record, because running is something that helps me check in with myself and humble myself as I get older. More than anything else, it gives me information about who I was and who I\u2019m becoming. And I\u2019m wondering about marathoning as it relates to your understanding of the passage of time, and to loss, both physical and emotional. How does that inform your songwriting?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What\u2019s interesting about getting older, for me, is that I have to put in more to get less back. So, you know, in the case of writing this album, I-slash-we put together, like, ninety-some songs over the course of three or four years. I mean, I don\u2019t know exactly when I started really writing in earnest for this record, but let\u2019s just say it\u2019s 2023. And so I\u2019ve been finding that the longer I do this, I have to write more songs to get less back. So I\u2019m doing more writing than I\u2019ve ever done. But the return, the quality of return, just as a function of volume, is a lot lower. And I think the run this past weekend was a real object lesson in that as well.<\/p>\n

In the past couple years, I\u2019ve started to really slow down. There is no activity that really tells you that you are getting older as much as running does. You can\u2019t lie to yourself. You can\u2019t lean into your ego. You can\u2019t lean into anything. You are being faced with it every day. You know, when we\u2019re playing shows, and I\u2019m looking out at an audience of a fairly wide age gap at this point, the young people tend to be in the front. And looking at them I can feel for a moment, I can delude myself that I\u2019m also a young person. I can delude myself that I\u2019m looking through my twenty-five-year-old eyes at twenty-five-year-olds. But it doesn\u2019t work that way with running. There\u2019s no ability to delude oneself.<\/p>\n

You all have grown now, as a band. I feel like \u201cmiddle-aged\u201d can sound derogatory, but I mean it in a very complimentary way, your songs are steeped in middle-aged concerns. It also feels like you\u2019re resisting the impulse of the nostalgia trip, of singing directly to the fans who came to your music when both you and they were younger. On this album, specifically, you really do elevate concerns about time\u2019s passage. I\u2019m curious how your heart navigates being grounded in the reality of time\u2019s movements.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to think that one of the primary appeals of this band, and how I write songs, is that there is a level of transparency and authenticity about how I write, that I feel I\u2019ve always written from the place that I was in, rather than some other place. I really feel that people are drawn to this band because there\u2019s an earnestness and transparency in the lyrics. And I think that if I were attempting to rewrite a younger version of myself, or to write as a younger version of myself, for some craven desire to appeal to young people, that would undermine the spirit that the band was started with.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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But there was also this duality when you were writing the album, where you were on tour, playing anniversary shows for two twenty-year-old albums, while emotionally carrying a fairly heavy weight in the present.<\/strong><\/p>\n

What was difficult about that tour was, you know, I was going onstage and existing in this twenty-six-year-old version of myself when I was writing those records. You have to exist in the version of yourself who wrote that too, to really effectively translate it and be in it, and best portray the spirit of the work. And as we\u2019re playing these songs, I\u2019m thinking about the people in the songs. I am thinking about who I was at that age, and I\u2019m doing that for two hours, which is different from a traditional Death Cab show, where I\u2019m existing in my forty-nine-year-old self in one song, and then I\u2019m existing in my twenty-year-old self in the next song. So I\u2019m kind of bouncing around the eras of my life. But what was really trying about that tour was I was going through a divorce at that time, a separation and a divorce. There were some incredibly difficult and painful things that I was working through, sometimes mere hours before I was going onstage in Madison Square Garden or something like that. I\u2019d never experienced that kind of emotional seesaw before, dealing in the present with a situation that I really wish I wasn\u2019t dealing with and then walking out onstage and embodying a version of myself from twenty years prior, and then coming offstage\u2014\u201cthank you, good night\u201d\u2014and I\u2019m right back into that forty-eight-year-old person in the midst of a very difficult and contentious place in his life. That\u2019s just a really bizarre back and forth to exist in. So when I started really writing in earnest for the record, something I was meditating on a lot was how we have to compartmentalize these painful parts of our lives just so that we can get through the work that we have to do or raise our families, or whatever we have to do.<\/p>\n

Spending time with the record made me think about this impulse that I often see people seeming to have, which is an impulse to almost shed grief as soon as it arrives. And I actually found much of this album acting in opposition to that impulse because of how nuanced your writing approach was in talking about the more uncomfortable, and self-aware parts of grief and loss.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Read more \u201cBackrooms,\u201d \u201cObsession,\u201d and Hollywood\u2019s Zoomer-Horror Renaissance<\/a><\/p>\n

Americans, I think Americans specifically, like to show strength. Americans will just kind of push grief down and just try to convince themselves and those around them that they have moved past it, as a show of strength that we are so strong, as a culture, we don\u2019t need to, you know, quote-unquote, wallow in our grief. We put the body in the ground, and we just move on with our lives.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been in therapy for about the past five years, really for the first time in my life, and I really don\u2019t want to characterize this record as a therapy record, in the same way that I don\u2019t want to characterize it as a breakup record, because it is neither of those things. But I\u2019ve done so much work in therapy around holding diametrically opposed emotions, and allowing them space and allowing them grace, and listening to them and what they\u2019re trying to teach me. So I feel as if the writing of this record is certainly a reflection of that in the sense that, for the first time in my life, I\u2019ve been able to sit with the discomfort of grief or loss, and acknowledge that it\u2019s going to stay with you. It is going to exist within you as long as it needs to. And various brands of loss or trauma or heartache or whatever, they might have varying half lives, and you can try to just move past it, but they are going to re\u00ebmerge, often at the least opportune times. And that\u2019s where the central image of the title came from. This idea of building someone a tower\u2014you\u2019re placing that loss, that pain, that grief, or whatever, in this edifice that\u2019s on your emotional horizon, and you can see it\u2019s always there. The contents of that edifice don\u2019t have to be constantly visible to your eye, but you know what\u2019s in there. You know why it\u2019s there, and oftentimes that\u2019s enough.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The lyrical direction of this record intrigued me. You are using language and imagery that could be directed toward another person, but it feels, to my ear, like it\u2019s also you speaking to yourself. You\u2019ve found this conversational balance, where it does not feel like the songs are necessarily an indictment of an other but more a curious exploration of an internal self. How did you build the fortitude to continually, you know, make that mirror and stare into it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if it was built as much as it just arrived. I just felt I wanted to go deeper and deeper into myself, and how I was feeling, and about this situation, rather than do emotional accounting for the relationship as a whole. In \u201cFull of Stars,\u201d the first song, there was a line in the chorus that, I think people can interpret it however they like, but it\u2019s, like, all I need is for you to be kind, and it seems it\u2019s really worth your time<\/em>. I\u2019m singing to myself in that sense, \u201cI need you,\u201d I and you being the same person. I need you to just take a beat, man, and realize that you\u2019re gonna be O.K. Everything\u2019s gonna be fine. But I\u2019m the kind of person who\u2019s just always going. I\u2019m always in motion, literally and figuratively. One of the things I struggle the most with as a person is just taking some time, taking actual downtime. One of my biggest fears as a songwriter or as a human being is losing my edge, you know? If I stop writing that, I\u2019ll die, you know? And in that first song I was just telling myself to slow down, that everything would be fine.<\/p>\n

I also love that the album opens with the lyric \u201cPlease forgive me,\u201d and then expands from there. You do an incredible job of tone setting, where the line between \u201cI\u201d and \u201cyou\u201d are instantly blurred in this incredible way. The song \u201cEnvy the Birds\u201d has great moments of that as well, and I think there can be times in writing where that blurring is shunned or not looked upon very generously, because people are seeking a clear distinction between the speaker and the person being spoken to. But what I love about the writing on this record is that it resists the idea that everything needs<\/em> to be known, and so it does feel, in some ways, like even though it is a very intimate record there is this beautiful layer of protection around it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think one of the other great appeals of our band is that our personalities onstage and in public are as close as they can be to how they are in our private lives, and who we are as people. That\u2019s how we dress, how we present ourselves, how we talk to people, and it\u2019s reflected in how I write. When we were having conversations about the record and how we\u2019re gonna talk about this stuff, you know, there are people in our circle who were attempting to be very protective around my personal life and what I had been through, although you can go on Reddit and find that out. But at some point, you know, in a conversation about it, I was, like, Let\u2019s just tell people what\u2019s going on. There\u2019s no point trying to be coy or cryptic about this stuff. We\u2019ve always carried ourselves that way, and I think it\u2019s a reflection of our musical upbringing, and the people that were really important to us, and the kind of music that we connected to and which made us want to do this in the first place. It\u2019s been important to me, as a songwriter, to always just be honest and transparent, and if there is a \u201cyou never give all of yourself away,\u201d of course. Maybe that\u2019s that, you know, layer of protection around it. In any relationship\u2014be it a romantic relationship, friendships, or a relationship with an audience\u2014you have to hold something back for yourself. But it\u2019s always been my goal to be as emotionally transparent as possible, and I think that\u2019s both what people love about the band, and the people who don\u2019t like the band, what they hate about the band.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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I really enjoyed hearing you expand upon your image bank as a writer. Like the lyric \u201cMy past is a whiskey glass tipping down a drunkard\u2019s throat,\u201d and then the image of death lingering like a vampire or a neighbor. I know how it can be, to be a writer for a long time and continue to reach for new things. How do you challenge yourself on that front?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You know, I was listening to the latest Cure album last night. My partner and I were making dinner, and I, for whatever reason, wanted to listen to \u201cSongs of a Lost World.\u201d So I put it on, and I was thinking that one of the many things I love about Robert Smith is that he has created a lyrical world that is familiar and comforting, kind of like how a worn-in sweatshirt feels\u2014you just put it on, and you\u2019re in his world. I\u2019m never disappointed if a new Cure song has a lyric that feels like a song that they\u2019ve already written\u2014it just feels like the continuation of a thought, if that makes sense. I think certain artists have a mood that they\u2019ve created, and their whole career has been one complete thought. But for me, in the last couple albums, I started to flag words and imagery that I feel I really overused, and I think there\u2019s something about how I sing, and the sound of my voice, and the fact that I enunciate, arguably too much, means that I can\u2019t get away with the kind of stuff that Matt Berninger gets away with. I can\u2019t get away with the kind of stuff that, like, Thom Yorke gets away with. And I mean that as a compliment to both of those guys. Because the way I sing, the way I write melodies, the way my voice sounds, I feel if I keep repeating myself my voice isn\u2019t enough to carry it, if that makes sense. I\u2019ve been making a conscious effort to break out of a couple of the jails that I built for myself lyrically. I can\u2019t tell you how I did that. I would just write something and go, Nah, that sounds like I\u2019ve written that before. Let\u2019s just start over again. It was just a matter of throwing out a lot. And also, honestly, leaning on Nick from Death Cab. Nick Harmer has been my editor for almost thirty years, and he\u2019s focussed on stuff like that. That second verse, for example, in \u201cPep Talk,\u201d I wrote in the studio. I was, like, Yeah, but I\u2019m probably going to rewrite that. He\u2019s, like, No, no, keep that. Like, I was, like, Really? You understand what I\u2019m saying? He\u2019s, like, No, I one-hundred-per-cent understand what you\u2019re saying. And I\u2019m not sure if he did, but he was, like, I just really liked how it sounds. It\u2019s very evocative, and it\u2019s very poetic, and I think you should keep it, cause it\u2019s not the kind of thing that you would normally write. So I also have the benefit of having an editor in the band who has my utmost trust, to tell me when something\u2019s working, when something\u2019s not working. And I just feel it\u2019s important, as we get older, as artists, to not close off to outside input and constructive criticism, and have people tell you, \u201cHey, man, you can do better than that.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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When I was coming up, what I loved about Death Cab songs was this vivid state of catharsis that was propelling them. And what I love about how some of the songs on this album come to life, like \u201cTrap Door,\u201d for example\u2014there\u2019s this tension between active catharsis and then reckoning with the aftermath of catharsis. For example, in the first act of \u201cTrap Door\u201d there\u2019s an image of snowflakes starting an avalanche and then, in the second act, that image shifts to a boulder tumbling down a hill. And those images are doing similar things, but in the latter image you are positioning yourself within it. And so now there\u2019s that tension of, I am at stake, the stakes are myself. I think the easy thing for a writer to do is to say, I\u2019m feeling a big feeling, I\u2019m in the midst of a large feeling. Catharsis all the time. I don\u2019t need to reckon with any outcomes at all, right?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of my personal rules about songwriting is: finish everything. Because you never know. Even if I\u2019m working on something that I know is a piece of shit, I\u2019ll still finish all the lyrics for it, because you never know\u2014there might be something in the third verse, you know, a little snippet of an idea that can be used later. So when we were working on \u201cTrap Door,\u201d Zach had sent me this music, and I had all the lyrics that I\u2019d written for the record in a Word file or whatever. And I had these two kind of related but slightly conflicting images that had existed in two other songs. I just like this idea of, you know, kind of a butterfly-effect lyric of, like, one snowflake hits the ground and the whole hillside just wipes out. And as I was constructing the song, I realized I had these two images, these two ideas that were tangentially related, but they worked really nicely as the conclusion of both the first verse and the second verse. And I\u2019m particularly proud of how I place the narrator in the second verse, in the sense where it\u2019s, like, there\u2019s a boulder tumbling down the hill. And the narrator can get out of the way. They can see it coming from all the way up the top of the hill, and at least the way I see the lyric, you see it: Oh, that\u2019s coming toward me and, well, I better get out of the way. But for reasons that are still unclear, you stay in the boulder\u2019s path. And your fate is determined. You knew what was coming your way, and yet you chose to stay in its path, for reasons that only you know. \u2666<\/p>\n

Read more The Paperboy\u2019s Secret<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hanif Abdurraqib interviews Ben Gibbard, the front man of Death Cab for Cutie, discussing nostalgia, loss, and why he can\u2019t sing like Matt Berninger or Thom Yorke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":294,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-new-yorker-interview"],"yoast_head":"\nBen Gibbard on Breaking Out of Lyrical Jail - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=295\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ben Gibbard on Breaking Out of Lyrical Jail - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Hanif Abdurraqib interviews Ben Gibbard, the front man of Death Cab for Cutie, discussing nostalgia, loss, and why he can\u2019t sing like Matt Berninger or Thom Yorke.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=295\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-05-31T12:07:06+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"18 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=295#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=295\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"Ben Gibbard on Breaking Out of Lyrical Jail\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-05-31T12:07:06+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=295\"},\"wordCount\":3677,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=295#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/05\\\/674053fcfaf265a8d592ba4dabfbe1b8.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"The New Yorker Interview\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=295#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=295\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=295\",\"name\":\"Ben Gibbard on Breaking Out of Lyrical Jail - 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