Ben Gibbard On The Death Cab/Postal Service Anniversary Tour
Ben Gibbard has spoken to NME about the Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service joint tour, which hits the UK this week to celebrate the 20th anniversaries of the albums Transatlanticism and Give Up.
Gibbard, who is frontman of both acts, reflected on how it felt to reconnect with the old material. “Once we got going, it was like riding a bike”, he said. “Death Cab being an active band, all that material from Transatlanticism has been peppered through our sets for 20 years, but getting the Postal Service machine up and running took a fair amount of work in the front end.”
“I’ve never really had a gauge on what Give Up and Transatlanticism mean to the greater public, specifically in the UK.”
Gibbard also compared the current tour to the last time he took The Postal Service on the road, back in 2013. “This time, it has felt even more pronounced. There are assuredly people who were too young to see the 2013 shows, who are seeing The Postal Service for the very first time. Looking at the audiences – of course, younger people tend to be in the front – there’s some people in the front row singing along, who were 100 per cent not alive when this record came out. The snowballing enthusiasm around these different people who formed a relationship with Give Up has made these shows utterly bananas.”
He went on to explain why there was never a follow-up to The Postal Service’s beloved – and only – album, Give Up. “I think the main reason that a second Postal Service record has never come to fruition – and will never come to fruition – the time commitments that Death Cab ended up taking, which really started with ‘Transatlanticism’, haven’t really ever let up. There’s just not enough time, let alone creative juices flowing, to make a suitable follow-up [to ‘Give Up’]. I think anything that we would attempt to make at this point would be thoroughly disappointing.
“The stakes are just lower [in Death Cab] when you’re putting an album out every two to three years. If people don’t like this one, there’ll be another one later. But after 20 years, there is no way we could ever follow that up in a way that would be satisfying to people. I would rather have all my focus on Death Cab than be watering both projects down. I just don’t have the capacity to do both. Some might argue I barely have the capacity to do one!”