Chris Walla, the guitarist, keyboardist and producer for the rock band Death Cab for Cutie, still feels guilty about something he did a long time ago.
The band was staying in a hotel, and instead of the usual Bible in a nightstand drawer, "there was a book of the teachings of the Buddha," he said. "I started reading it, and I got really into it. I felt like I wanted to keep on reading it." So he took it with him when he checked out and "read it cover to cover three times."
It was "one of the only things that I've ever taken, as in stolen, something that wasn't mine," he added as he sat on the floor of a band mate's apartment here. But unlike most of us who feel sheepish about things we have taken, as in stolen, Walla, 32, had a chance to do something about it. The day after the interview he was scheduled to meet the Dalai Lama, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism. Walla could apologize directly if he wanted. (More on that later.)
His band is named for a 1960s rockabilly parody by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, about a gal, Cutie, who hails a taxi for a fatal night of cheating on her boyfriend. "Baby, don't do it," the lyrics go. "Someone's gonna make you pay your fare."
Death Cab for Cutie is all about paying the fare. On the new Narrow Stairs, its sixth studio album and second on a major label (Plans, from 2005, was the first), the band ponders the cost of giving up on hope and decides that depression is just not worth the sticker price. On the surface this is Death Cab's darkest, noisiest music yet. One love song gets going with the lyric "I'm starting to feel like we're staying together out of fear of dying alone." By the song's end, though, the narrator realizes the problems are his, and fixable. By the album's end the listener will probably realize that hope is peeking out of a meerkat hole.
No Web-Site wonder
The band paid the fare in its career too. Death Cab emerged before blogger buzz could help a nobody get an overnight record deal and a guest spot on Saturday Night Live. The members built an initial fan base the way earlier Seattle bands did in the 1990s, schlepping their way across clubland and honing their sound on indie releases. But a few albums in, blogs and social networks began crossing wires and sparking careers, and Death Cab saw both a boost and a backlash.
Nowadays the second release on a major label is often the end of a plot arc for bands that parlayed Internet buzz into a deal. But there's no flop sweat apparent on Narrow Stairs, an unsettling, confident album that reaffirms Death Cab as an increasingly rare thing: a career rock band.
In a postgrunge Seattle, where eclecticism rules - as if there has been a decree that no unifying trend should ever again emerge and bring national attention and thousands of Los Angeles residents to town again - Death Cab's misty chords and cold steel hooks are as much a musical center as the town has these days. "I marvel at people from other places who identify themselves as rock stars in the press," the bassist Nick Harmer, 33, said. "Because it is an insult - an insult! - to be known that way here."
Ben Gibbard, 31, the band's frontman, agreed wholeheartedly. "You can roll into town and try to be, like, the biggest English rock star ever," he said, "and it's like, 'I don't care who you are, man, your coffee still costs US$3.'"
In Gibbard's artfully decorated apartment, classic Stax soul played as the band, which includes the drummer Jason McGerr, 33, gathered around a big coffee table. Gibbard, a touchstone for bookish hipsters, looks like a cross between the humorist John Hodgman and the actor Rainn Wilson. Walla has a slightly earnest demeanor that offsets the way he looks like Macaulay Culkin's older brother. He's one of the hardest-working men on the Seattle scene; as a producer he's helped shape numerous bands from the Northwest in recent years.
Death Cab formed more than a decade ago, after casual acquaintances in Bellingham, Washington, got together to help Gibbard in a solo project. They came up geeky, wearing their hearts on their sweater sleeves, singing initially about specific places and people in their hometown that somehow spoke to the universal condition of being young and flustered. Tinged with punk rock guitar blare often slowed down to midtempos, Death Cab appealed to the insular yet viral emo scene, as well as the broader indie-rock world.
"Their songs are like the band's name - dark on the far left of the spectrum, sauntering toward smart-alecky, and then they get full-bore whimsical," the comedian Patton Oswalt, a longtime fan, said. "They remind me of how the outer edge of darkness always kisses the cheek of comedy, and the reason we laugh is because we can still feel the dark."
The Shack that inspired Kerouac
Narrow Stairs was largely recorded live in the studio, and in the music you can sense a band in communion with itself. The songs are loping; they take their time. The first single, I Will Possess Your Heart, is more than eight minutes long, and the vocal doesn't begin until halfway. (A shorter, radio edit has also been released.) And the rhythm section shows a new knack for giving slower songs a walloping gravity.
Gibbard wrote several songs in the same shack that inspired Jack Kerouac to create his disheartened late-career memoir, Big Sur. In Bixby Canyon Bridge Gibbard talks to Kerouac, revealing that he too was searching for some kind of transcendent experience there, but that he ended up learning nothing about himself. "It started getting dark," Gibbard sings. "I trudged back to where the car was parked/no closer to any kind of truth/as I must assume was the case with you." The song ends with crashing waves of guitar, evoking Kerouac's "heartless breakers busting in on sand higher than earth and looking like the heartlessness of wisdom." You bring all the salvation you will get, this record seems to say. And you hope that's enough.
Redemption?
Perhaps the album's hard-earned tranquillity made Death Cab the perfect surprise band at a concert and conversation featuring the Dalai Lama. Before its set at Key Arena here last month the members had a chance to meet him. "I don't feel like I'm prepared," Walla said. "I don't feel like I'm ready for it."
Gibbard added: "Whether we'll ever get a chance to play in China now remains to be seen. But I think I'd rather shake the Dalai Lama's hand and not play in China than the other way around."
When it was time, an escort met the band in its dressing room and led the members to a driveway. Suddenly a motorcade swept in, a security team spread out, and a tiny robed man popped out of an armored vehicle. He issued a traditional Tibetan blessing to a group of geeks and rockers forming a crooked reception line, quickly shook their hands and then was ushered into the building. Death Cab for Cutie got handshakes.
It would be a better story if the band had felt a wave of enlightenment immediately after. It would be an even better story if the Dalai Lama told the band they'd fallen off since the awesome songs on Transatlanticism.
But here's what really happened: The band members trudged back to their dressing room and then played a short acoustic set. And Walla probably still feels bad about stealing that book.
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