How do you keep making hits after 11 years with the same band? That’s what we were wondering about alt-rockers Death Cab for Cutie, who will be performing at A&O’s fall show at the Riviera on Friday night. Chicago is just one stop on the band’s U.S. and European tour, which began early October and has dates scheduled until the end of November. Even though the quartet is busy, we scored a quick chat with drummer Jason McGerr.
So, what’s the band been up to lately?
We just started out on our fall tour again. And before that, for most of September we took a break ’cause we worked right up until the end of August. We’ve been touring nonstop since, I think, May 18. We had our first initial gigs, the US tour, Europe, Japan, and we tried to break it up a little bit, but we’re back up again right now. We just played Radio City Music Hall and then Late Night with Conan O’Brien last night.
How did you end up joining Death Cab?
I’ve known the boys since before Death Cab was ever a band. We were all in Bellingham, Wash. at the same time. Ben and Nick were going to college up at Western, and Chris was hanging out around the city, and I grew up there. And you have college kids hanging out with local kids. There’s only a handful of venues, so you get to know each other. We had a relationship for a long time. I was in a band with Nick for three years before; it was actually 13 or 14 years ago that we first started making music together. As Death Cab’s career went forward, there came a time when they needed a new drummer, and Nick and I had started making music again. So long story short, it just ended up working out.
What’s been the best part of being in Death Cab?
Just being able to travel and see the world. It’s a big group of people; it’s like a class. There’s 14 of us in total who get to go to new places and see new things. We’ve been all over mainland Europe, Singapore, Seoul. I really feel bad for people that never get off U.S. soil. So it’s definitely the best thing, besides just having people show up and be psyched to see a show.
How has the band’s style changed over the years?
Don’t know if it’s changed all that much. With the newest record, you can hear bits and pieces of the first record, and in the second and third records you can hear the future a little bit. We’ve become a little more adventurous musically and less sounding like our influences and more like who we are. It’s hard to draw a line or graph showing the change when you’re in the band. It might be easier for someone on the outside.
What album is your favorite?
Narrow Stairs. It’s a tough call between this and Transatlanticism, my first record. For Narrow Stairs, we did a large part of it in a studio I built, and I never would’ve been able to build it without Death Cab. It was an overwhelming sense of gratification to record in a space I created. It had taken some time before we started recording, with how we were all tour, tour, tour, tour. I think we play the best on Narrow Stairs and sound the most like we do live. Besides the fact that I think it has the best songs Ben’s ever written.
A lot of people have tried to pinpoint your sound, but how would you describe it?
That’s up to the critics and writers. It’s a pop band coming from an alternative vein. You’re into the music from the 60s, 70s and a sort of D.I.Y., loose singer-songwriter feel with full rock-band instrumentation, you would hopefully enjoy what it is that we do.
Some critics have said you’ve sold out. What do you have to say to that?
I feel like anyone saying that has stopped listening to our band a long time ago.
How do you guys go about the songwriting process?
Ben writes the blueprints and the original demos, and we get together as a band. We listen and talk about things that shouldn’t be touched and preserved, and how we can rewrite and revamp other things. A lot of songs go through pretty big transformations, and a lot of songs are just the demo. “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” is a great example of a song that we could’ve added a full band instrumentation to, but it didn’t have the same potency. There are songs like “I Will Possess Your Heart” that barely resemble the demo, but the good thing is that Ben has never committed to a specific demo version that he’s not aware that a total revamp could help the song become better. It’s a case-by-case scenario. Sometimes you set out to do things in the scenario, and it ends up being completely wrong, so you have to try another day. Nothing’s set in stone in terms of songwriting.
What are the challenges with coming up with new material after such a long period of time?
You can’t worry about it too much. You can’t get so caught up in your head with concerns [that] you’re going to repeat yourself ’cause you do what you do and then you’re more likely to get caught in some sort of writer’s block or trap. We try to change a little thing here or there after we record, with the whole studio environment recording process. Plans was a largely digital record, and Narrow Stairs is a live band record out of the room–two pretty big differences in terms of the recording process. At this point in time, we are who we are, we do how we do, and the best thing we can do is to continue to put out music.