2008 has been a huge year for Death Cab For Cutie with the release of what is arguably their most ambitious single to date, 'I Will Possess Your Heart', and number one album Narrow Stairs. We caught up with drummer Jason McGerr during the band's recent visit to Australia.
yourGigs (yG): I hear you're currently in Perth. How's your Australian tour been so far?
Jason McGerr (JM): It's been amazing. Things sold out really fast and people have been really loud and enthusiastic at the shows, and we've been meeting people on the street who are excited for the shows and talking about how great it was. I'm very humbled - we're all super flattered and can't wait to get back here much sooner than later next time. Sorry it took so long!
yG: You play a good mix of older and newer material in your sets.
JM: There's a lot of people that think that Transatlanticism was our first record. And same thing with people who came in at Plans, like that was their introduction and they didn't realise where we came from. I've always enjoyed that discovery as a kid going to shows. Like when you see a band because you're in love with the record and they
play something that would strike a chord with you. Hopefully it opens doors for people.
yG: Your fan base is very mixed. Why do you think Death Cab's music has such a broad appeal?
JM: I was told there is a youthful energy on stage, yet there is a real intelligence and maturity to the songwriting, lyrics and in general it draws from pretty broad background of musical styles and influences. Coming from so many different genres yet having an appreciation for anything from jazz to pop, from the Beatles to Queens of the Stone Age and The Smiths has allowed us all to enjoy making music that hopefully a broad demographic of people will enjoy.
yG: Why did you decide to record Narrow Stairs on tape rather than digitally?
JM: It was a conscious decision to make it a live, loose, organic, warm - and sort of precarious at the same time - sounding record.
The thing that happened with Narrow Stairs was we had been touring for a year and a half on Transatlanticism, then we took maybe two months off and then went right back into recording Plans and then straight into an album cycle. So for four-and-a-half years all we were doing was playing live. We took six to seven months off in 2007 and just reset.
...When we reconvened, the last memory we had was sweating it out on a rock stage. So we approached the record with that same sort of energy - four guys in a room sweating it out just like we're playing a show; not doing multiple takes, just bashing it through and if it feels good you move on. This hopefully will be galvanising and polarising in a way that people will talk about it as something different that we've done in the past.
yG: Is that why you chose to keep the mistakes on the record?
JM: Yeah - 'happy accidents'! I think it's far more interesting to look through a piece of diffused glass than it is to look through a mirror because you know it changes scene every time. So if a record's perfect there are no new discoveries. You know when you hear the breath in between the gasp of air between lyrics? It seems to bring you that much closer to the artist or to the band or to the performance itself.
...If you're cruising across... a glassy lake in the morning [and] if a fish jumps, your eyes go there. You see it, you hear it and it's an 'event'. And I think that the happy accidents create 'events' too. I think it's exciting to hear people take chances and almost come off the rails a little bit but still hold it together. Wasn't there some Olympian, some athlete that won a gold medal recently that won a race with his shoe untied and he set a world record? Like that kind of stuff goes down in history - he didn't need to be perfect. He still had the ambition and it happened, so hopefully our record has those moments for people.
yG: At eight minutes long, 'I Will Possess Your Heart' was an interesting choice of first single.
JM: It's really the epitome of exactly what I've been talking about. It's an entire performance from start to finish, the way music should be recorded. It's loose - it feels like I'm barely holding it together at the beginning and all of us are finding our place on the track.
...It was such a different-sounding Death Cab song from anything in the catalogue that we'd done before and the sort of real close, uptight, dry sound was a different production than anything we'd done before. It just kind of was a statement of "Here is who this band is right now at this moment in time."
Michelle Ho
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