Indeed, since forming in Bellingham, Washington in 1997, Death Cab For Cutie’s emergence from the underground was made possible by the captivating introspection of their music. A melodic strain of indie rock from when that tag referred to an ethos as well as a sound, it would eventually become (unfairly) a lazy umbrella term for non-heavy bands with reasonable tailoring and expensive hairdos.
The zenith of DCFC’s success came with the release of understated masterpiece Transatlanticism, which, remarkably, was released the same year [2003] as Give Up, the first and to date only album from Ben’s other band, The Postal Service.
In 2023, both DCFC and The Postal Service celebrated the 20th anniversary of Transatlanticism and Give Up, respectively, with months of joint touring, resulting in double duty for Ben. It wasn’t the exhausting endeavour it sounds, though, as Transatlanticism is a relatively restrained record with only three or four rocky numbers. Despite having one foot firmly planted in the past, Ben was also writing the songs that became I Built You A Tower back then, applying the same logic he does to constructing a setlist.
“When Death Cab plays a set at this point, we’ll toggle between a song I wrote when I was 20 and a song I wrote when I was 46,” explains Ben. “I’m just moving through different eras of my life, and to perform the songs properly. To feel I’m really in it, I’m often thinking of the people in those songs, or where I was in my life at that time.”
According to Ben, writing a new record is like working out muscles that have experienced atrophy, and accepting that any initial work you do is going to be bad, before imagery and a sense of purpose begin to sharpen. It helps, of course, that Ben writes in a linear fashion, penning one line then another, rather than having a chorus land in his lap and writing around it. You need only listen to Punching The Flowers, the second single from I Built You A Tower, to hear how exceptionally he distills his feelings. ‘In his search for the end of the circle / He kept arriving back at the start / Having fell every hurdle and she tried to make him feel better / But he didn’t wanna feel better / ‘Cause he was living for the wandering / His heart like a dead letter’.
Ben doesn’t recall a precise moment when the metaphor at the heart of I Built A Tower coalesced. He just knows the notion of the tower wasn’t there before, and then it was – large, looming, unignorable – a totemic representation of the place in his mind to contain the pain while also celebrating the person he loved. Because they’re worthy of celebration.
“Of course they are,” exclaims Ben. “Being deserving of it and the fact you’re no longer with that person aren’t mutually exclusive. This was 10 years of my life, and this person is a huge part of the story of my life, so they deserve to be honoured.
“At the same time, in my larger view of this metaphor, there is this emotional horizon that looks like a cityscape, and amongst that cityscape there are all these buildings that have been created to house different times in my life and different people that have meant a lot to me. Some of those buildings house happy memories. Others do not.”
Ben never had a problem with the restlessness of touring. His ease with calling wherever he lays his hat home comes from being the son of a navy man, with constant relocation, including a spell in Japan and Washington DC, a feature of childhood. Ben returned to Washington state in his teenage years, an hour’s ferry ride away from Seattle, which he recalls being “the only place I wanted to be in the world.”
He has happy memories of his front row seat to the explosion of the city’s music scene, as captured by Cameron Crowe’s romantic comedy Singles, which includes appearances from members of Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains and Soundgarden. Ben saw the film when he was 16 and now lives half a mile from the apartment featured in it, often running past it. He did so recently, listening to Soundgarden and admits to being stopped in his tracks listening to the lyric ‘And it’s raining icepicks on your steel shore’.
“I mean, we just breezed past that,” says Ben of how underrated he considers the late Chris Cornell as a songwriter. “We didn’t take a moment to recognise how unbelievably evocative as a lyricist he was.”