On being able to walk away

What does your work entail on a day-to-day basis?

I am, obviously, primarily a singer-songwriter. I kind of live my creative life by a mantra which I heard my friend Britt Daniel [of Spoon] say some years ago, which is that inspiration likes to find you hard at work. I don’t believe in writer’s block; I don’t believe in divine inspiration. Writing is a muscle that you have to kind of exercise or it atrophies. So for me, when I’m in the process of writing, I spend three to four hours a day, Monday through Friday, in my studio. Usually starting around, like, 1:30 in the afternoon. I like to have my morning. I have breakfast, coffee, listen to records, exercise, run, do whatever errands I need to do, have lunch. And usually take a half-hour nap, then fire up a cup of coffee and have what I call “second morning,” where I’m kind of starting the day over again, but I’m starting it in the studio.

How has your creative process has evolved as you’ve grown as an artist—specifically between your last record and this one?

The pandemic put a dent in everybody’s normal M.O. of how they worked, I think. And certainly, as a band, we’re not the kind of band that gets together and jams out songs. You know, we don’t write together. Throughout the history of the band, the overwhelming majority of the material has started with me—I’m writing a song and I’m bringing it to the band. During the pandemic, we were doing some more writing together. We employed this method where we would take a piece of music and send it around. Everybody sends it around during the course of a work week. Everybody got a day with it, so by the end of the week, we’d have some semblance of the song.

I think probably what changed the most for me, going into this record, is that I started writing to my own drumming again. What I mean by that is, in the early days of the band, a lot of the songs stemmed from kind of a power trio setup in the writing, where I would write a drum hook that you could kind of sing. For example, “Punching the Flowers” on this record has that beat that’s going boom, bop, boom, bop, boom, bop. But it’s kind of a hook. You can sing it. And then I would write a guitar part and a bass part that would kind of link in with that… It was not a lead line, but everything kind of just weaved together in this nice way. Over the years, I got away from that. I did that a lot on the first three records or so, because I kind of had to, because I was recording analog. I was reporting on a 4-track. I didn’t have a computer to record with, for the early records, because we’ve been doing this so long that we started without computers.

Now that we’re in the world, now that we can use computers to generate so much of the basis of music, I started to get away from that methodology. So for me, that was the biggest change going into this record: I was writing to my own drumming. When I was writing to the hooks that I would write on the drums, that would make me play in a way that would write guitar parts and bass parts, or whatever else I needed to write in a manner that was more akin to how I used to do things.

This record touches on how we compartmentalize grief in order to keep moving forward. When you’re writing, does that same sense of distance help you shape the work?

I always feel like I write better from a position of distance and time. Primarily because the more distance there is between an event you’re trying to write about and the time when you’re writing about it, the more creative license and fictionalization can enter the chat, so to speak. The further distance you get from an event, the less you remember it. Not necessarily the way it happened, but the way you think it happened. From a creative perspective, I think that’s really beneficial, because it allows some plausible deniability in your fictionalization of a particular event or series of events. It allows for this dramatization that removes it from the actual event, in a way that makes it its own story.

It can be said that there’s no such thing as nonfiction, because once you’re trying to tell a story, you’re automatically changing it and telling it from a particular perspective. I think that’s a similar mentality to what I have going into the work.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how everybody has their own version of memory and their own version of reality, and how that shapes both our relationships and the creative process.

We also require each other to fill out the gaps of the story. If you have an experience with three of your friends and 10 years later you’re recounting it, everybody’s going to have a piece of that story that the other person doesn’t have. Not so much to give it accuracy, but to give a more well-rounded perspective on what happened. And then if somebody shuffles off the mortal coil, or just leaves a friend group, or isn’t in the room when you’re telling that story, you’re not getting that piece of it anymore. I just find that really fascinating.

As far as your creative work is concerned, how do you define success versus failure?

I almost have to answer that question in the negative, in the sense that I don’t consider success to be something that involves a marketplace. It’s not about how the record sells or whether a particular critic whose approval I desire likes it. It’s more about feeling that I’ve done the best work I can with what I have in front of me.

There’s a really famous quote from Itzhak Perlman, the violinist. He’s doing this concert and breaks a string, then breaks a second string, and he’s trying to finish the piece with two of the four strings left. Afterward, somebody asks him what that experience was like, and he says something along the lines of, “Sometimes it’s the artist’s job to determine what they can make with what they have left.” As I get older, that quote resonates with me more because I put in a lot more work to get a lot less back. As long as I end up with 10 or 11 songs every three or four years, that’s really what matters to me at this point. It’s not even about being prolific. I’d rather put out a really good record every 10 years than constantly put out material just for the sake of putting out material. When I feel I’ve done the best with what I have left and what I have in front of me, I consider that a success.

I think that’s so important because when your creative work becomes your career, it seems like it’s easy to lose sight of the part that’s actually fulfilling for you. It seems important to keep that as your North Star, no matter how successful you get.

I would also say that I didn’t choose to make my creative work my career. It just kind of happened. The people I admired most growing up weren’t really career musicians in the traditional sense. They might have been able to eke out a living if they toured enough and sold 10,000 or 20,000 records, but the idea of it being a stable career was laughable. So I kind of came up in a culture where the idea of being a professional musician was a real pipe dream.

When you revisit some of your older work, do you see it as a reflection of where you were at that time? Do you ever feel the urge to change it?

Oh yeah, of course. At this point, Death Cab is playing songs I wrote when I was 48 and songs I wrote when I was 20. I’ve been in this band since I was 20 years old. Because we’re not playing those songs in chronological order, I’m bouncing around between songs I wrote when I was 35 and going through one thing, or when I was 40, or during the pandemic, or when I was 20 and got my heart broken and everything felt very simple.

It’s not so much that I’m embodying the version of myself who wrote that song for three minutes on stage, but while I’m singing those songs, I do remember what it was like to be the person who wrote them. Sometimes I’ll think, “I probably would have said that differently if I wrote it today,” because I’m a different person now. I like to think I’ve grown emotionally and developed more emotional intelligence as I’ve gotten older.

It’s enjoyable to toggle through those moments in time. It’s like opening up a photo book that’s out of order. You’re not looking at your life chronologically from birth until now. You’re jumping all over the place, and that’s kind of fun. But I never feel the urge to change the work itself. I really take offense to artists or bands who decide they’re going to go back and remix their catalogs or something like that. You make a creative statement in the moment you’re making it, and you cement it in time. That’s what it is. The idea that you can go back and start fucking around with it because you have better recording equipment in 2020 than you did in 1998, or because you can fix something in the drums with Ableton, feels pretty unethical to me.

We’re also in this wider cultural moment where so much is a remake or sequel, and we’re constantly revisiting old material and updating it. I like that you see your work more as a capsule and an opportunity to reflect on how you’ve changed.

We’re living in an incredibly postmodern time, and it just seems to be accelerating. I would never say we have no new ideas anymore, but somebody much smarter than me once said that in times of creeping authoritarianism and fascism, we lean further into nostalgia. We want to remember a time when things felt simpler. We want to watch the TV shows we watched as teenagers and listen to the records we listened to when we felt more innocent. So culturally, there’s this impulse of, “Hey, remember that movie you loved 30 years ago? Well, we’re doing it again.”

What do you do when you feel creatively stuck? Are there things you return to when you’re trying to get moving again?

At this point, if I get stuck, I just walk away. I’ve been doing this too long to think the way to get unstuck is to keep hammering away at it. Creatively, we all hit impasses where we don’t know what to do next or how to solve a problem. Most of the time, I find the best salve for that is distance.

I’ll close the laptop and go do something else. Maybe I tidy up around the house, take care of another project, hop on my bike and ride for a while, or walk to a coffee shop. Sometimes I’m just done for the day. I’ve definitely had days where I planned to work for three or four hours and spent 45 minutes in the studio before realizing I just wasn’t feeling it. At this point in my career, I may have the luxury of being able to walk away in a way that other people don’t. But since I do, I take advantage of it all the time.

How do you approach digital spaces? What’s your relationship like with social media and other online distractions?

Like everybody else, I have a little bit of a scrolling problem. But I don’t post on anything, and I have reasons for that. At this point, my algorithm is more comedy and joy than outrage, so I’ve somehow gotten it pretty dialed in.

I’m old enough to have come up in an era where I didn’t know a lot about my favorite artists, and I liked that. I liked being able to listen to The Cure and imagine Robert Smith living this mysterious life somewhere, sleeping in a crypt or making something amazing. I’m not saying I know Robert Smith, but I also know he’s probably just watching football or bumming around the house. I really feel artists need to reject the impulse to be on a virtual stage all the time.

The more time you spend curating a social media feed, finding things to post about, or chiming in on every political event happening in the world, the less time you’re spending actually making the thing people know you for. The less time you’re spending creating value and beauty in the world. There’s increasing pressure from labels, publicists, and digital marketing people that relevance means staying in people’s faces all the time. But I really believe that if you make good work, it doesn’t matter whether you’re posting or not. Frank Ocean made one of the greatest records of the last 10 years, and we haven’t heard a word from him. PJ Harvey swoops in, drops an amazing album, then disappears again. If I could be so bold, that’s how I’d want to live my life.

What does your curiosity look like? Can you explain how you explore things?

I really enjoy a personally curated rabbit hole. For example, I’ll be reading nonfiction or a biography of somebody I admire, and they’ll reference another book I’ve never read. Recently, I was reading this old biography of Jack Kerouac that mentioned a couple books from the early ’50s, and I immediately wanted to go find and read them. I’m always keeping mental notes… The same thing happens with music. I’ll hear a record and notice who produced it, then go look up everything else they’ve worked on.

I’m not really a joiner. Some people go to a reputable music website and let it tell them what they should be listening to. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve always preferred carving my own path toward the things that inspire me. I’ll also admit I can be a little bit of a hater sometimes. If everybody is suddenly obsessed with something, it makes me less interested in engaging with it because I know I’m immediately expected to form an opinion on it. Somebody will ask, “Have you seen this new show?” and suddenly I’m not just watching it for enjoyment anymore. I’m watching it while trying to decide how I feel about it. I’d rather discover things on my own terms and enjoy them for what they are, not because I’m expected to have a take on them at a dinner party.

How do you know when something is finished? Is it a feeling, a technical decision, or just a point where you decide to let it go?

There are a lot of different levels of “finished” in my work. If I make a demo at home where I write some music and put melody and lyrics on it, there’s a point where it feels finished enough to send to the band. At that stage, the harmonic information, chord changes, melody, and lyrics are all basically there. Things might still change slightly, but the core of the song exists. Then, if the band decides to arrange and record it, that process happens among five people.

When we make an album, we usually go in with 16 or 17 songs and trim it down to 11 or 12 that feel like the most concise and definitive statement of that batch of material. The longer we’ve done this, the more motivated I’ve become by a “get in and get out” mentality. Less is more at this point… At this point, we’re not making records as an addendum to touring. I never want making albums to become purely a financial driver. It has to be because we genuinely want to do it. There’s really no other reason anymore.