As the 20th anniversary of landmark albums by Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service approached last year, Ben Gibbard, the singer-songwriter for both projects, came to his bandmates in Death Cab with a question.
“Ben had this idea,” says Nick Harmer, Death Cab for Cutie‘s bassist since 1997 when Gibbard decided to turn his fledgling solo project into a proper band. “It was like, ‘Do you think it’s time? Do you think there’s a world where we sort of combine these things together for a celebration and do this together?’
“I think everyone in the band immediately was like, ‘I absolutely think that’s a wonderful idea,’” Harmer says. “You know, it’s a very unique accomplishment that hardly any other singer-songwriter can claim to have made. We’re all very proud of Ben for that.”
The tour that kicked off in September 2023 with Death Cab playing its album “Transatlanticism” followed by the Postal Service performing “Give Up” got extended into 2024.
But when the two groups play Just Like Heaven in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, that will be the end of the road in the United States for this 20th anniversary celebration. If you want to see both albums played in full, this is likely your last chance without flying to Europe for a final handful of shows come summer.
Just Like Heaven also features indie acts such as Phoenix, the War on Drugs, Metric, Tegan and Sara and more, and Harmer says he and his bandmates are delighted to bring their album to Brookside at the Rose Bowl this year, too.
“We’ve been having an amazing time playing this record,” Harmer says. “I think when we were thinking about a way to sort of significantly mark the 20-year anniversary of ‘Transatlanticism,’ it’s kind of hard to isolate the success of it in 2003 from the success of “Give Up’ that Ben also wrote and released in 2003.
“Those two records, while they’re different projects, and certainly, we’ve done our best over the years to keep them separate in people’s minds as much possible, they still are very much related because of the central mind that they’re coming out of.
“And the response has been phenomenal. I don’t think I quite expected how strong of a response we would get for a record that we made so long ago. But it’s really nice to play this each night and realize how these songs have continued to live and find people over the years.
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Harmer talked about old memories the tour has stirred, the unique blend of Death Cab and the Postal Service on tour as well as the impact of “The OC” television series, which also debuted in 2003, on Death Cab’s rising popularity and more.
Q: Diving back into ‘Transatlanticism’ must have reconnected you to memories. What stands out?
A: Playing this record is as close to stepping into a time machine as I think I’ll ever get in my life. There’s so much that you don’t even think you have in your mind, or that you’re carrying with you, that suddenly a certain phrase in a song or a moment of playing will trigger some buried memory.
It’s been kind of a constant wash of these feelings and emotions and remembering who I was, and who we were when we made the record, and then reflecting on how much growth and evolution has happened since then.
Q: Any specific example?
A: Just like how my relationships to the songs have changed. Take a song like ‘Passenger Seat’ on the album. When we wrote and recorded that song and played it in 2003, that song was very much a love song. A pretty straightforward romantic song about driving with a partner.
But in the fall tour – I have a daughter now who’s 9 – I had this weird feeling where suddenly my relationship with the song, it’s like someday I’m going to be old and I’m going to be in a car and she’s going to be the one driving me from someplace we were together. Maybe a dinner or a medical appointment or something.
My relationship to the song completely changed in an instant, and I was overcome with emotion in a new way that I’ve never even processed. So it’s kind of fun that the songs can change for us as we move along. They’re, in some ways, fixed in a period of time, but they’re also these kinds of living things that ask to be re-interfaced with.
Q: Just to fact check – you made ‘Transatlanticism’ after Ben (and producer-keyboardist Jimmy Tamborello and singer Jenny Lewis) had done the Postal Service record?
A: Yes, he had been writing all of the material for both of the records concurrently. It just so happened that as he was in the demoing process he started mailing stuff back and forth to Jimmy and that record came together first. And then we were recording while they were prepping that record for release.
Q: So when Ben was doing the Postal Service, what was the reaction within Death Cab? I’d imagine some bands might be nervous about their singer-songwriter working on a different project.
A: We were all very cool with it. We had a long history in this band of encouraging members to kind of moonlight and do other projects on the side in between Death Cab stuff. And Ben was always clear with us that this was never going to be something that was going to become his (main group).
Death Cab’s always been Ben’s sort of vehicle. It’s been his center. So there was no world where the Postal Service suddenly was going to be his new thing and Death Cab wasn’t.
The fact that (‘Give Up) went on to be a runaway hit I think surprised everyone, including Ben. Certainly there was some adjustment period where some fans were coming to Death Cab shows expecting to hear Postal Service songs and couldn’t quite get their heads wrapped around that we were separate bands. We didn’t even know that material, but that kind of faded and it was fine.
Q: Why do you think ‘Transatlantacism’ connected so strongly with fans and propelled Death Cab to the next level?
A: Some of it was a result of just the years we had put in on the road and with the previous three albums. But I think that record sort of really started to connect and take off because there was kind of a cultural shift that was happening in 2003-2004. You had Modest Mouse’s ‘Float On’ suddenly being a huge radio hit. You had the Shins showing up in major motion pictures. You had licensing opportunities for bit TV shows suddenly coming to a lot of bands that were our peers. That we had been touring with in relative obscurity for a while and suddenly were a little bit more of the musical conversation.
Q: I have to ask you about ‘The OC’ – your songs weren’t just in the background, the character Seth was a huge Death Cab fan and the band eventually played itself on the show.
A: It was just kind of surreal. It was this time when things were starting to happen, like I said, for bands of our ilk. The Shins had ‘New Slang’ in a McDonalds commercial. And there was luck. All of these opportunities that were coming our way. So it started with, ‘Hey, can we use a snippet of one of your songs in a show,’ and we said sure.
We didn’t know they would take the creative license to write us into the scripts. I think at first we were sort of like whatever. Then there was a moment when we were all a little bit slightly nervous about it. We would run into people that would be like, ‘Oh, “The OC” made you, you were nobodies until “The OC.”‘
But this was kind of concurrently happening with the rise of the internet, and so I think pretty people figured out our story and could understand what had happened. The thing that I think probably surprised us the most was just the reach that show had internationally. We showed up in Singapore and there are thousands of fans in Singapore suddenly. They’re like, ‘Oh, (we) saw you on “The OC.””
Q: How does this tour work? Does Death Cab always play first and then the Postal Service?
A: Yeah, it works out that way mainly because of the scarcity of the Postal Service touring and playing shows. They’re a bit more of a draw in that way, the valuable commodity. But also just the tone of that record is more upbeat and dance-centric in some ways, and the Death Cab record is a fairly moody journey from start to finish.
I think there was some question of whether or not Ben was going to be able to do it and what that would be like for him. Just sort of more psychologically. Physically, and having the stamina to pull that off was never in question because it kind of falls within our normal show length that we’d been doing for years.
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Q: So when Death Cab finishes ‘Transatlanticism’ what do you and the the guys do when Ben goes back out for ‘Give Up’?
A: When Death Cab is on stage, we’re all in black. We’ve committed to a certain color palette in the lights. And then when Postal Service comes out they’re dressed all in white and the lights switch to a different color palate.
Dave (Depper) who plays guitar in Death Cab switches and plays with Postal Service as well. Jason (McGeer, Death Cab’s drummer) jumps up and plays on a couple of Postal Service songs live. And Zac (Rae, Death Cab’s keyboardist) and I, we switch clothes to white and we all come back at the end.
Q: It sounds different, but fun for you, too.
A: It has been fun for me, because, you know, I was the first tour manager on the very first national Postal Service tour years ago. So I have really fond memories of driving around in a van with Ben and Jenny and Jimmy. This is before the record even really started to hit. We’re playing these small little clubs.
And now it’s just been so fun to watch the show every night and watch all these people just have these really powerful emotional experiences with that record and those things. It’s a different form of nostalgia for me. I’m not actually playing music, but I can also track growth from the beginning until now. That’s nice, you know?
Just Like Heaven
When: 12 p.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday, May 18, 2024
Where: Brookside at the Rose Bowl, 1133 Rosemont Ave., Pasadena
How much: $199 for general admission, $379 for VIP, and $659 for clubhouse.
For more: See Justlikeheavenfest.com for the lineup, set times, and ticket information.
