Death Cab for Cutie will possess you

(Credit: Autumn de Wilde)

For everyone who discovered Death Cab for Cutie from watching “The O.C.” or falling in love with frontman Ben Gibbard’s adorable little electro-pop side project, the Postal Service, the lead single from their new album “Narrow Stairs” may come as something of a shock. Clocking in at over eight minutes, with sociopathic lyrics and a long, hypnotic intro that sounds like something out of ‘70s krautrock, “I Will Possess Your Heart” may be the creepiest thing the band has ever recorded. “You reject my advances and desperate pleas,” Gibbard sings, playing against type and using his winsome tenor to chill rather than warm. “I won’t let you let me down so easily.”

It’s a bracing reminder that for all their recent success, Death Cab remains, in many ways, a refreshingly weird little indie band that’s just managed to crash the mainstream party.

Between tour stops in northern California, Gibbard called us on his cell phone to discuss the band’s unusual choice of a lead single, the challenges of headlining festivals, and the relief he and his bandmates felt over putting “The O.C.” behind them.

What do people at the label say when you announce that the lead single is going to be the eight-minute song with a four-and-a-half-minute intro?
I should preface my answer by saying that, in the same breath that we were saying we had an eight-and-a-half-minute single, we were also telling them that we would be doing an edit for radio. In that sense, it has become this kind of nice card for the people at the label to play as much as it is for us…they [get to] talk about how much they love the eight-and-a-half-minute version as they’re also servicing the short version to the radio. We’re not stupid. We want to sell records. As long as the full version stays intact on the record and on the stage, that’s kind of the important thing.

Of all these things that you’ve compared yourself to in your lyrics, which would you rather be: a kaleidoscope, a phonograph or a war of head versus heart?
At this point, I’d rather be a phonograph, I think—just because in my own music-listening ventures, in the last year or so, I’ve been almost exclusively spending my time in old dusty record shops buying vinyl.

Ah, so you’ve become a vinyl junkie.
Yeah, I’ve always kind of a danced with it, but it’s really over the last year that it’s kicked into high gear and it’s become kind of obsessive. I’m finding myself spending 60 dollars on eBay for the fourth Emmett Rhodes record that came out in 1974—[and] the only reason it’s 60 bucks is that it’s me and four other nerds that are trying to get it. So I would definitely choose the phonograph, just because it’s in line with how I want to enjoy music these days.

Now that “The O.C.” has been cancelled, is there another character that you’d like to see take Seth Cohen’s place as television’s biggest Death Cab fan?
I don’t think so—I think we got enough mileage out of that. I think the telling element is that that show is off the air and we’re still here. Clearly we’ve been able to transcend the chapter in our band that was so closely tied to “The O.C.”

You think more was made out of the connection than was really there?
It was just part of the story. All of that stuff happened between albums, so when “Plans” came out, it became very apparent very quickly that the story that everyone wanted to talk about was the jump from indie to major [label] and “The O.C.” and how those things were related and yadda, yadda, yadda. At the time, talking about that five times a day was pretty unnerving. But we were saying amongst ourselves at the time, “I’m really excited for this to be a chapter in the band, not the whole story.” It was interesting—when the last Shins record came out, I was noticing how similar a lot of their press was to ours, but you just insert “Garden State” for “The O.C.” And I was like, “OK, we’re not the only one.”

You played a lot of big summer festivals this year. Do you feel like you have to change your style of playing when you’re in front of 30,000 people compared to when you’re in front of 1,500?
A little bit. We tend to lean a little bit more on the rock songs than we do on the quieter stuff, [which] has a harder time translating in a field in Tennessee. But I don’t think we make so many concessions that it becomes a drastically different experience. Also, the audience is there to see all the bands. We’re not gonna pull out the deep album cuts at a festival.

Right. For all you know, half the crowd may be, say, Jack Johnson fans.
Exactly—who maybe know two or three of our songs they heard on the radio or at a friend’s house. You know, the smorgasbord aesthetic of festivals basically means that you have to lead with your best stuff. You want to roll off the really delicious hors d’oeuvres to get them to stay for the meal.