DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

Crack­ing The Code

With a inim­itable seven-album deep back cat­a­logue of stu­dio records, cul­mi­nat­ing with the release of this year’s stel­lar Codes And Keys, alter­na­tive rock titans Death Cab For Cutie have strangely enough gained the title of fes­ti­val giants the world. Thought the brood­ing, affect­ing brand of song­writ­ing has earned the band a hefty font size on many a fes­ti­val poster, they still man­age to forge a sense of inti­macy in the world’s per­for­mance halls. Bassist Nick Harmer lets us in on craft­ing his sonic out­put in such envi­ron­ments, as well as recount­ing the lead-up to the just-released Keys And Codes remix compilation.

You’ve always had a fully-realised sound on your records, how did the idea for a remix EP come about?
We’ve seen a lot of bands that we really admire that do remixes or have had their work remixed over the years. We’ve always been fans of rein­ter­pre­ta­tions of music, and we’ve kind of kicked the idea around for a while. We never really felt that the mate­r­ial would kind of lend itself to some com­pelling remixes. I think this time we were look­ing at the songs when we were fin­ished and thought that there was enough room for inter­pre­ta­tion, musi­cally and oth­er­wise, and we thought it would be fun to see if any­one would be inter­ested in putting their spin on it. It kind of just came about as a reac­tion to when we fin­ished the album, just try­ing to have some ideas lis­ten­ing to the music and just see where it can grow and explore into some­where we hadn’t tried before. It seemed like a good time to try it.

Ben’s voice lends itself well to the dance for­mat. Has there been any thoughts on shift­ing into that sort of direc­tion?
Who knows, it will be inter­est­ing to see. Thank­fully there’s the Postal Ser­vice album out there in the world, and I think peo­ple have heard Ben’s voice in more elec­tronic and kind of cut up beats and sounds before. So there’s the famil­iar­ity in that. I don’t know how much more we’d incor­po­rate into the sound of the band, but I think in the future we’ll still be really excited about try­ing to do this again. I think it’s always a really excit­ing moment when we fin­ish an album, just hav­ing another col­lec­tion of songs. Just see­ing where the songs can and will live, whether they’re remixes by other artists that are really great at remix­ing things, to being used in film and video projects, con­cepts around that. We’re always curi­ous as to what’s around the next cor­ner, where our music can live and where it can be intro­duced and fur­ther explored. This was a really fun project, and it will fig­ure into future plans in some way. We just don’t know how.

It seems like your bass grooves have been placed more at the fore­front of recent releases.
I think that over time we’ve all sort of alter­nated in the long his­tory of the band, and we’ve all had our moments of being able to step for­ward and step back. When the song’s appro­pri­ate and when there’s a need for a bassline that pushes it into that ter­ri­tory, then I’m happy to sup­ply one [laughs]. It’s cer­tainly not some sort of work­ing phi­los­o­phy that we’re try­ing to bring to the fore­front in any way. It’s really a song by song need. We really just take it as the music wants it. I like to think there’s some really great basslines on this album – not that I even wrote all of them, there’s a cou­ple Ben wrote and I just ended up play­ing them. There’s some cut out of my brain as well. It’s all part of this col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing expe­ri­ence which hap­pens to us in the stu­dio, and how that comes together.

Has it got to the stage where you’ve per­fected your bass sound?
I don’t know if I’ve per­fected it, but I’ve got­ten bet­ter at know­ing what I don’t like – what I don’t think works, what I don’t think sits in the mix right. An exten­sion of that just comes from lots and lots of tour­ing and live shows, really learn­ing how my bass fits in as an instru­ment into the band and the live pre­sen­ta­tion. That really comes back into the stu­dio. But like I said, I don’t think I’ve per­fected a sound nec­es­sar­ily – I don’t have my bass setup the same for every sin­gle song. But I have com­po­nents I like which I’m really focussed on, and like I said, at this point I know what doesn’t work for me [laughs].

How about tour­ing, what’s your setup like there?
I have a sin­gu­lar bass setup for tour­ing. I play Lak­land basses, and they’re pretty much just Fender Pre­ci­sion Bass copies, for all intents and pur­poses it’s just like a P-Bass. I have some really nice vin­tage P-Basses, but I don’t really feel com­fort­able tour­ing with them, just because the road is kind of a weird place, and things can hap­pen in the mid­dle of a sweaty show, and you don’t wanna break an instru­ment that’s irre­place­able. The Lak­land is just sort of a mod­ern ver­sion of the P-Bass, it’s really well-built and sounds excep­tional for what we do live. I take out a few of those. I’ve always played Ash­down bass amps, and some speaker com­bi­na­tion. Right now, for the last few years I’ve been using cab­i­nets full of 15” speak­ers rather than eight 10”s like a lot of bass play­ers use. I think that’s pretty much a sim­pli­fied ver­sion, I don’t use a lot of effects and ped­als live, I have a dis­tor­tion I use. In the stu­dio, that’s where we get a lot more crafty. I’m chang­ing amps per song, the bass gui­tars them­selves shift a bit – I have a hol­low body bass that I play, and I have a cou­ple of old Fender P-Basses kick­ing around that we use. As far as the sound palette goes, that’s always been up to Chris [Walla] our pro­ducer. He’s really good at build­ing bass sounds which really fit into the mix of the song. He carves out enough space for the bass to live, but also leaves enough room for the other sounds to come. It doesn’t take up too much room, I guess is the best way of putting it. Hon­estly, every song is a grab-bag, which is excit­ing. You never know exactly what you’re going to get.

Codes And Keys and the Keys And Codes remix EP are out now through Warner.
Death Cab For Cutie will be tour­ing the coun­try along­side their appear­ance at Perth Inter­na­tional Arts Fes­ti­val this February.

Feb­ru­ary 17–18 – Perth Inter­na­tional Arts Fes­ti­val, Perth WA
Feb­ru­ary 20 – HQ, Ade­laide SA
Feb­ru­ary 21 – The Palace, Mel­bourne VIC
Feb­ru­ary 24 – Enmore The­atre, Syd­ney NSW
Feb­ru­ary 27 – Tivoli The­atre, Bris­bane QLD