Review | Death Cab for Cutie’s ‘I Built You A Tower’ Tour

On a Monday evening so humid I felt like I had run a marathon once I’d reached the venue, I attended my very first concert at the Greek Theatre where the line for the women’s restroom was shorter than the men’s.

It was for Death Cab For Cutie, a show I decided to go to with my boyfriend, having only checked out their record “Plans” on CD from the library when I was in middle school. I didn’t really remember much of the record, but seeing the album cover when I pulled them up on Spotify made me feel that feeling again, where every lyric of a song opens up a new part of the world to you, because your life hasn’t really happened yet.

Death Cab for Cutie is a rock band formed in Bellingham, Washington in 1997 with members Ben Gibbard (vocals, guitar, piano), Nick Harmer (bass), Dave Depper (guitar, keyboards, backing vocals), Zac Rae (keyboards, guitar), and Jason McGerr (drums). After coming up in the Pacific Northwest independent music scene, the band rose to prominence with their alternative indie rock sounds and pensive lyrics.

They started off the night with “Full of Stars,” “Riptides,” and “Roman Candles,” all three of which earned an excited “yes!” from many in the audience. This continued for almost each song of the set, with my personal “yes!” being for “The Ghosts of Beverly Drive,” a song I didn’t even realize was the band’s. I recognized it from the radio on car drives, and felt that same happiness again from the synth and infectious chorus. “I don’t know why, I don’t know why, I return to the scenes of these crimes.”

They also played some of their bigger tunes, including “Cath…,” “Soul Meets Body,” and “I Will Possess Your Heart,” an eight minute ode of obsession with lines like “there are days when outside your window … we’ll be lovers, lovers at last,” and “you reject my advances and desperate pleas, I won’t let you let me down so easily.” The tune is so long that when my boyfriend mentioned his weekend plans to a client, they said “I love their song ‘I Will Possess Your Heart,’ but it’s so long they probably won’t play it.”

Towards the end of the show, the band left, then came back for an encore of “Title Track,” “A Movie Script Ending,” “Marching Bands of Manhattan,” and “Transatlanticism.” The one other time during the night when the band members left the stage was for Gibbard to sing “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” solo. “This is the part of the show where the singer asks you to do my job for me,” Gibbard joked, as he asked the audience to sing the final chorus. The audience then sang every word of “if there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I’ll follow you into the dark” into the open air.

The words felt like they were opening up my mind back up again. But this time, so much of my life has happened since then, it felt more that I was looking backwards. It made me miss the days when life was only ahead of me.