A Live Chat with Death Cab For Cutie 

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Listen to this interview:

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While their hairs may have greyed, Death Cab for Cutie still sounds like Death Cab for Cutie. 

I’ve listened to them for years, but had never seen the iconic alt-rock band live until attending this year’s Outside Lands music festival. 

It was magical. And I got to talk to them. 

They opened and closed the festival’s Sutro Stage on Sunday, August 9, and Indy Art Director Xavier Pereyra and I had the pleasure of interviewing them between sets.

We were told to meet bassist Nick Harmer and guitarist and keyboardist Dave Depper backstage, where some chairs were set up for us to sit down and chat. They were happy and down to earth. Instantly, any anxiety I was holding in my chest was let go. 

For background, Death Cab is in its 29th year. Their first album, Transatlanticism, came out in 2003, and their most recent, I Built You a Tower, came out this year. 

“I think we’ve evolved,” said bassist Nick Harmer, a founding member of the band, which was formed in 1997. “I know that personally, I’m a much better bass player today than I was when we first started the band, and so I feel like just by that natural evolution and growth, our music has kind of shifted and grown with us,” he said. 

I went to their first show at 12:30. The show itself was nothing fancy — they don’t need all the bells and whistles. It felt like a Death Cab set, and the crowd was filled with everyone from diehard 40-something fans who woke up at 8 a.m. that morning to younger fans who had to force themselves through a hangover haze to get to the festival before 1 o’clock. 

Death Cab’s solemn, indie-emo sound rippled through the audience, across bubbles and totems and blankets. When the set was over, I heard a few people mumble something about feeling heavy and contemplative, and going to seek a DJ or pop artist to perk them back up again. 

Surprisingly, lead singer Ben Gibbard admitted he had lost his voice that morning. He told the crowd he’d woken up unable to speak, but that the good folks from the festival’s medical team were able to get him right again.

“I think I’ve determined that I like steroids now, and maybe I’m gonna start doing them more often,” Gibbard joked.

 Any vocal struggles he had that morning did not hurt his performance. He hit his clear high notes without missing a beat. The singer flowed through new songs and historic pulls with that conversational, nasally, and melancholic tone that has anchored Death Cab for decades, even as it has matured. Over the years, his voice and lyrics have always sounded more like reciting poetry than traditionally singing. 

I suggested the band’s sound reminded me of something teetering on Midwestern emo, a subgenre defined by soft indie-rock instrumentals and raw, emotional vocals — a conclusion likely influenced by my own listening history. Harmer said he didn’t listen to a lot of Midwestern emo bands growing up. And they aren’t from the Midwest, they’re from Washington. But, coincidentally, the genre was emerging around the same time as Death Cab came on the scene. And it would be hard not to imagine the band shaping the indie-leaning side of modern emo with their confessional, emotionally-charged songwriting. 

Harmer attributed the band’s consistency to Gibbard being the primary songwriter. “He’s always been really open and honest about writing about where he’s at in his life, wherever that is,” Harmer said. In earlier albums it was navigating heartache, and stumbling through the trials and tribulations of youth as they figured out where their lives were going. In I Built You A Tower, however, Gibbard sings about the end of his marriage, self-forgiveness, and grappling with grief. 

“I think our music is a reflection of our growth through life,” Harmer said. “The things that were important to him emotionally or otherwise on our very first record are different than the things that are emotionally impacting him as an almost 50 year old man, and I like that our music and the songs that we make together have kind of evolved with us and our lives.”

He added that while it is “really hard” sometimes to be vulnerable “year after year, record after record,” they just keep doing it, “because that’s the only thing we know how to do.”

But they do it well. All the band’s members, new and old, delivered stellar performances with stoic confidence. Performing live never gets boring or rote, Harmer said. It’s a sacred thing. 

“There’s always just this immediate exchange that will never get old,” he said. “There’s just something magical that happens in that shared moment of community, and to me, it’s as powerful as anything in my life… And you can feel it. It’s a very physical, tactile thing when that connection happens.”

For Depper, who joined the band in 2016, performing “feels like flying sometimes,” he said. He added that currently, the band is playing the best they have ever played. 

“Everyone is the most confident they’ve ever been on their instruments,” he said. “And every single show, whether it’s a transcendent show or just a so-so one, every night I look around and I listen… just like being kind of in awe of what we’ve created together.”

The final few songs of the afternoon were a portal to the past. “Crooked Teeth,” “Brothers on a Hotel Bed,” and “Stability” — all songs released before 2006 — had the crowd head bobbing and singing along. “Crooked Teeth” starts out like a diary entry, calling back to the candid lyrics Death Cab has always been known for. “It was 100 degrees / As we sat beneath a willow tree / Whose tears didn’t care, they just hung in the air / And refused to fall.” 

These songs are Death Cab for Cutie essentials. But decades later, the band still sound like themselves, with some of their newer songs harking back to their beginnings. 

“We’ve been influenced by things along the way, and, at this point, maybe the snake is eating its tail a little bit,” Depper laughed. “It’s all a big cycle, and it’s all a positive feedback loop of influence and giving back.” 

Depper and Harmer said they have long defied trends and kept true to themselves, and they do 

not gatekeep nor judge the industry as it’s evolved, remaining “blissfully unaware of how it all works.” 

The one thing they can control, Harmer said, is the music they make. “And the rest of it kind of sorts itself out.”

“I think any time that we’ve attempted to chase trends or kind of fit in, fans can smell it a mile away, and we already sound so much like ourselves,” Depper said. “It’s obvious when we’re trying not to, and so we just keep our heads down and create Death Cap for Cutie music. And I think fans hopefully have just kind of learned to trust us, staying true to that.”

So what will people think of Death Cab in 25 years? Harmer said he hopes the band acts as a time machine for fans, transporting them back to important moments in their life. 

“I hope they say, ‘I’ve never seen five men look better at 70 than at 20,’” Depper added.