**THE MAKING OF GIVE UP BY THE POSTAL SERVICE - FEATURING BEN GIBBARD AND JIMMY TAMBORELLO**

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

The Postal Service formed unofficially in 2001 by Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard. Tamborello had asked Gibbard to contribute vocals to a track for his Dntel project. The collaboration went so well that they decided to continue and form a new project. Tamborello’s friend, Tony Kiewel at Sub Pop, suggested they’d be interested in releasing a full album. After working on instrumental tracks at his home in Los Angeles, Tamborello would mail CD-R mixes to Gibbard in Seattle, who would then add vocals and other instruments. Over the course of a year, they would keep collaborating through the mail, enlisting Jenny Lewis and Jen Wood to contribute vocals. Give Up was eventually released in 2003.

In this episode, for the 20th anniversary, Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello reflect on how the album came together. This is the making of Give Up.

Ben Gibbard: My name is Ben Gibbard and we are talking about The Postal Service record Give Up. It was just so bizarre to be kind of witnessing this reaction of this record we had made that we figured would just be something that maybe some, you know, indie heads would like and that would be that. But it just kind of took on a life of its own. It was as if we had nothing to do with it. So it's become a difficult thing to kind of qualify in my mind, because I'm very proud of it. I think that's one of the best things I've ever been a part of. But it's also very difficult to take credit for its success because it wasn't like we were touring it or promoting it, or, you know, going out of our way to let people know it existed. It just kind of floated off into the world and became this weird phenomenon. It's a weird thing to talk about because every other record that I've been a part of, that has been successful, be it Transatlanticism or Plans or whatever else, you know, these are records that we toured our asses off for. We did interviews and TV performances and radio performances, I mean, we worked super hard for those records to become what they became. But with Give Up, we didn't do any of that, it just kind of happened. So I'm sure there have been records that have taken similar journeys, but off the top of my head, I can't think of any.

In 2001, Death Cab had toured with a band called The Jealous Sound from Los Angeles, and we kind of hit it off. We became friends and one of the members was a guy named Pedro Benito. And he lived in a house in Silver Lake with Jimmy Tamborello and a couple other people. And I had decided to go down for like a long weekend and hang out with Pedro and just kind of bum around LA. And Pedro had said, “Hey listen, my roommate Jimmy does this project called Dntel, you might have met him last year because his band Arca had opened up for Death Cab at Spaceland. And I was like, “Oh, I don't really remember that dude, but okay, that's cool.” And he is like, “Well, yeah, he has this project called Dntel and he would love to send you a track and have you do some stuff on it. And then maybe when you're down here in LA you guys could record the track.” I was like, “Yeah, sure, whatever. That sounds fun and easy.”

Jimmy Tamborello: Hi, this is Jimmy Tamborello. Well, I was working on an album under my Dntel name. It was like a more experimental electronic thing, but I was using different vocalists and I had a roommate that was touring with Death Cab for Cutie at the time and became friends with Ben, and so I connected through them to see if Ben would want to sing on a song. I came out of being interested in a lot of electronic music, but also a lot of, I came out of college radio and indie rock and hardcore and stuff. I was playing in bands that were more up those alleys. I think one of my bands had even played a show with Death Cup for Cutie. So I was in those two worlds and I wanted to kind of put them together. So I was asking a lot of vocalists that were outside of the electronic music scene, I guess, to collaborate.

Ben Gibbard: So he sent me the music for what would become, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan.” At the time, I just had a 4-track, I didn't have a computer with Pro Tools or anything like that. So I just like put the CD, like burned it into a 4-track and then did some vocals on top of it, sent a burn of that back to Jimmy and he was like, “Hey, that sounds cool. Yeah, we can do this when you come down.” So, you know, I went down for this long weekend in LA, spent a couple hours with Jimmy in his room recording vocals for this track, and it went so well and it was such a kind of enjoyable, easy experience that I think I might have at some point over the weekend just kind of mentioned like, “Hey, would you wanna do like some more of this? This was like really fun. Like maybe an EP or something like that.” And in his, you know, subdued way, Jimmy was like, “Yeah, that could be good. Yeah, that'd be cool.”

Jimmy Tamborello: It just worked really well and we got along really well and I think that weekend we started talking about making some more music together and kind of doing our own project. And then talked to a friend of mine from college who had started working at Sub Pop, Tony Kiewel, and we mentioned that we were thinking about working on some music together, and he right away said that they would be up for doing a full album if we wanted to. So we just kind of went straight into making a whole album.

Ben Gibbard: My understanding is that Tony took the song, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” to an A&R meeting at Sub Pop and said, “Hey, these guys, Jimmy from Dntel, Ben from Death Cab, want to do a record of this stuff, would you guys be interested in doing it?” And everybody, from my understanding, was into it. So before we'd even recorded a demo or started working on the songs that would become Give Up, I feel that we were already talking to Sub Pop about doing a record. And I believe that we were, for all intents and purposes, if not signed off of “Evan and Chan,” that was the impetus for Sub Pop to become interested in doing a record. And then once we did a couple songs, I think the first two we did were “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” and, “Brand New Colony.” And once those demos got to Sub Pop, I think that was the point at which they were like, “Oh yeah, totally, we absolutely want to do this.”

Jimmy Tamborello: I think I made two instrumentals to start and I mailed Ben a CD-R with the tracks and then just waited for his response. And eventually he sent back the songs and he had kind of edited them a little so the structure was a little bit different and added the vocals. I think we chose to collaborate through the normal mail just cause it seemed like the easiest way to do it. I think at the time we probably could have figured out some sort of way to email audio, but it would've taken forever. Maybe there was is ISDN lines if we had a lot of money. But yeah, it was just easiest to mail them. We weren't on a deadline or anything. I mean, I think at that time I was probably just getting used to email (laughs).

Ben Gibbard: Because it's such an obvious name, I feel I must have chosen the name of The Postal Service and recommended it to Jimmy. It just seemed so obvious. He would just mail me a CD-R. It would just say like “TPS-1” or something like that. Or he would give the music a nickname, like “Wiggly One” or something like that. And so I would take those CDs. At this point, I had gotten a computer that had, I think like a free version of Pro Tools and I put that in my iMac and kind of imported it into Pro Tools and then start cutting up the song a bit in a way that felt like I could kind of create like a verse, chorus, verse chorus, kind of traditional song structure out of it. And then I would burn a version of that and I would walk around Seattle just listening to it on like a CD walkman, just thinking about what the song could be about. And would come home a few hours later and then kind of start working at earnest on the song. So I would just do these demos in Pro Tools, I would kind of do a bunch of vocals and stuff and add some guitars and maybe little keyboard bits, and then I would just burn a rough mix of it and send it back to Jimmy.

Jimmy Tamborello: I was always really excited to see what Ben would do to change the instrumentals, to make them work better as songs with his vocals. I have a pretty linear way of making songs where it's just, you know, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, long outro, or something like that. And so he would make these little adjustments where like maybe the end of the verse would be extended a little bit longer, or just things to make the vocals fit on them right. It always made it feel a little less stiff when he would do those adjustments. And then all the instrumentation that he added really added to the final outcome too.

Ben Gibbard: I don't remember him having any strong reactions either way. Not because he didn't like it or didn't have a strong feeling about it, but Jimmy's a pretty subdued character. So he would be like, “Yeah, it sounds good. Cool.” And we just kind of worked like that off and on. He would send me an email or a text and be like, “Hey, I'm putting a couple new songs in the mail.” And I would be like, “Oh great.” And they would show up a couple days later and I would immediately get to working on them.

Jimmy Tamborello: And yeah, we just kept working like that. Every month or two, I'd send him a new batch of songs, usually two at a time. And once we would send the songs back, I would readjust them a little bit and add a little bit. But really just sending them there and back once got them almost to a finished state. So there wasn't a lot of struggle with it. It just kind of came out quickly over the span of a year of just kind of slowly mailing them back and forth. Yeah and once we had 10 songs, the album was done.

Ben Gibbard: I'd never made a record that quickly and with so little second guessing. And I think that might have been due in large part to the fact that I had a limited responsibilities on the record as opposed to Death Cab where I was, for all intents and purposes, writing the music and the lyrics and the melodies. Thee totality of the expressions in Death Cab records and the songs were far more mine than this collaboration, which was like a straight down the middle, 50/50 collaboration. Jimmy makes the music. I write the lyrics and melodies and add little touches here and there. So I think having less work to do on every song, I don't recall any song on the record that I had to rewrite or that I had to delve super deep into edits or anything like that. It just kind of flowed rather effortlessly and very kind of first thought, best thought, stream of consciousness. And yeah, I mean, I think looking back on the record, there's probably some songs I would probably want to take another crack at, at least here and there. But it is a document of how we were making it.

Jimmy Tamborello: When we were recording the original kind of demo versions of the songs, Ben just sang all the backing parts. It was just a bunch of layers of his voice and so he wanted to not have it be like that. And Death Cab was on the same label with Riloy Kiley at the time, Barsuk Records. And so he knew about Jenny Lewis through that and thought she might be a good choice to redo these backing vocals. And so we all met up and it worked out really well.

Ben Gibbard: Jenny Lewis and I had not met when I asked her to sing on The Postal Service record, but Rilo Kiley, her old band, had signed to Barsuk Records, which was the label the Death Cab was on. And I really liked their record Take Offs and Landings. And I don't know exactly why I fixated on having Jenny sing on the record, but I just really liked her voice and I liked her songs a lot. And I knew she lived in LA so I got her email from Josh Rosenfeld at Barsuk Records and just emailed her out of the blue and said, “Hey, I'm Ben, I'm in this band. I'm making a record with this guy, Jimmy, and I'm gonna be in LA next month, we're recording a bunch of the record. Would you want to sing on a bunch of this stuff?” And she was like, “Yeah, totally.” You know, as I said, we haven't met, don't know each other. And I flew to Burbank and she picked me up in Rilo Kiley’s tour van. We went and got Mexican food or whatever, and then we went to Jimmy's house. She dropped me at Jimmy's house and then came over later and we just started working on the record. I still, to this day, don't know why she said yes outside of maybe just like we were young and just this felt like a totally acceptable thing for somebody to kind of call you out of the blue and ask to have done. I mean, there was no money. It wasn't like, “Hey, we're gonna pay you this amount of money.” There was no money (laughs). It was just like, “We're making a record. Do you wanna sing on it?” She's like, “Totally!” And so I had been down in LA for a couple weeks staying at Jimmy's house, which was, you know, in the parlance of its times, you know, kind of like a dirty flop house with like four or five dudes living in it, you know, like a post-collegiate group home situation. You know, I'd lived in those before too, so I'm not knocking it, but it's what it was. So I was just kind of crashing on some couch or on somebody's floor. And we were just living at this house for two weeks while we made the record. And Jenny came over almost every day and did some vocals and we would go get food or go see shows or go to bars or whatever. And it was a really wonderful time. And you know, Jenny has now been one of my dearest friends for over 20 years. And it was, I think, in large part because of this bonding that we were able to do while we were making the record. And we, the three of us, Jimmy and Jenny and I got really tight during that period of time and it became apparent that if we were gonna tour this thing, this record, you know, then Jenny would 100% have to be a part of it because she was kind of making herself irreplaceable as we kind of went along.

"The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”

Ben Gibbard: “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” was kind of the first thing we worked on, and it was in the wake of kind of a difficult breakup that I had gone through with my first like adult girlfriend. I guess at the time I was 25 or 26, but it was the first relationship I'd been in that was like, we lived together and had bills and stuff like that, you know. And it was, since it was the first one, it was pretty painful when it kind of fell apart. And so I kind of decided to write this song about this experience of seeing her. She had moved to DC from Seattle. When Death Cab had come through DC on tour, we were seeing each other for the first time since we had split. And it was just very odd to see this person in this new life that you had no context for, right? This is the first time you're kind of experiencing a partner's new life and what an kind of disconcerting feeling that was for me.

Jimmy Tamborello: I think when I started working on instrumentals for the album, I imagined that it was gonna be a more experimental record. Then I kind of just made the instrumental for “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,” and it just kind of came out poppier than I expected right away. And then he added vocals and then it was like, “Whoa, this is way poppier than I was first thinking.” But then we just kind of went with that direction. That song in particular was definitely Bjork. So yeah, her music definitely influenced the songs on the album. I mean, Bjork had always been kind of my dream collaboration back then, with the Dntel project and one of the few people at the time that was doing, you know, vocal, kind of pop music over more experimental electronics. There wasn't a lot of that to choose from back then. So when I started working with Ben, it was exciting to be working with such a good vocalist. So it was kind of like he was my Bjork.

Ben Gibbard: At the time. I was writing songs for Death Cab’s, record, Transatlanticism, or what would become Transatlanticism. Yeah and these Postal Service songs were like these little breaks in my writing schedule where, you know, we all wanted to make a great Death Cab record as we want to every time we make a record. But I was very focused on that and really kind of getting into the minutia of writing a lot of songs and being very critical of the work I was doing and trying to, you know, kind of connect things and make ideas work together. And then I would get something from Jimmy that just felt like a vacation from that work. So it became something that I didn't have the responsibility of writing any music, I could just react lyrically and melodically and what have you to whatever Jimmy was sending me. And I found that it took my mind to different places narratively than I tended to find myself when I was writing my own songs. Because when you're sitting with an instrument with a piano or a guitar or whatever, and you're writing music usually alone, and then what you're creating harmonically is going to kind of dictate the lyrical content, I find often. But because I'm not creating any harmonic content, I'm just reacting to what Jimmy's sending me, it just allowed my mind to kind of wander to some places and choose subjects for songs that I certainly would not have chosen if I was writing the music myself.

Jimmy Tamborello: I think “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight,” it was like Bjork and also Lali Puna was a big influence in general. There was this label, More Music, that was doing kind of indie electronic stuff at the time, and all the stuff that they were putting out was a big inspiration for this album. There weren't a lot of choices for a little bit more out there, electronic music mixed with pop or indie rock, I guess even more specifically indie rock, and that was what I wanted to listen to at the time. And I don't think I was even that aware of it at the time. That was exciting that we've found a niche that wasn't already done to death.

Ben Gibbard: Give Up is kind of to me, like an eighties electro pop revival record that came out in a period where nobody was really doing that. You know, there were people making pop music with electronic elements, but it was nothing like it is now or nothing like it was at the dawn of electro-pop. So it wasn't as if we saw, you know, a hole in the music market that no one was making this music and that we should make it and then it will be popular. I think it was just that so much like electronic pop music was stuff that we grew up on and we loved and that, you know, I grew up a huge Depeche Mode fan, a huge Kraftwerk fan, you know, a huge fan of the Pet Shop Boys and Erasure and all that kind of stuff, New Order. And it felt when we were making Give Up that, you know, my kind of pension for electronic pop music and my sensibilities as a lyricist added to Jimmy's kind of palette. We just found ourselves in this place where we were making a record that was not so much unique in the grand scheme of music history, but that no one else was really doing it like that at that time.

"Such Great Heights"

Jimmy Tamborello: Since we were doing it one or two songs at a time. I think once I heard the first two songs and what Ben did with them, that would kind of probably inspire, like I'd take those two songs and say, “What would sound good with those two songs? What does it need now?” And so the next two songs would somehow compliment those and then, you know, that kind of chain would go all the way down til we were finished. So there wasn't some big blueprint from the beginning of what we wanted kind of the range of sounds to be. But you know, as it grew, the previous songs would inspire the next songs. I think “Such Great Heights” was the last song we worked on, and we were kind of wanting one more upbeat song for the album. And we had been working on a cover song that wasn't quite working, but the sound palette was good. And so we readjusted that instrumental and it turned into “Such Great Heights.” And then it was funny cause like, once we kind of made the demo version of it right away, we're calling it the hit from the album cause it just felt like it was even more poppy than the rest of the album.

I mean, the little beeping sounds at the beginning of “Such Great Heights” were just, some version of one of the sounds on the K2000, I think, with probably a delay pedal added to it. Yeah. I mostly just had a (Kurzweil) K2000 sampler synthesizer at the time, and it was pretty powerful for back then. I had like an outboard kind of hard drive and so it actually had a decent amount of sample time that I could use on it. I mean, it was probably just only a couple minutes maximum of sample time you had per song and I was just controlling it with my computer through MIDI. I wasn't recording audio tracks into the computer that much, so it was really just I had eight channels of on the K2000 that I could use to make the instrumentals. But yeah, I used a lot of the K2000 sounds, just mutated versions of them.

Ben Gibbard: Yeah I think by the time we were working on “Such Great Heights,” I was really leaning into first thought, best thought. “Such Great Heights” is probably one of the most, if not the most happy, positive songs that I've ever written. In my own writing, I've often shied away from kind of trying to write something like “Such Great Heights.” At the time I was seeing this woman who I had had a crush on for like a very long time, for like years. It was kind of like a, you know, one of those like people that you would see them around town or you would be out and about and we were friends, there was nothing going on at the time, but somebody, I'd always kind of pined for secretly. And we started dating and I just became this like, just mushy, it allowed me to write something as mushy as “Such Great Heights.” You know, it wasn't a relationship that really lasted very long at all. And you know, it became very clear pretty quickly that we were not compatible, but in kind of the early mid twenties kind of big feelings place where I was at that time, I just find myself like reacting to what Jimmy sent me with like, “Oh, this is 100% just an unabashed love song. There's nothing, we're not gonna try to do anything too heavy with this. It's not going to be a super deep sentiment or anything like that, let's just…” it just kind of lent itself so well to a positive affirmation of love as a lyric. It didn't seem that there was really anything else that could kind of fit there. And also I was just, I was awash with feelings for this person that I wanted to write something for them. And it just so happened to coincide with Jimmy sending me the music that would become “Such Great Heights.” It's a lyric that I've often felt pretty self-conscious about because it is such a unique outlier in my catalog of work at this point. There might be a couple, two or three songs like it, or that express similar sentiments in the last 25 years of writing music. So it's an even stranger phenomenon that became, if there was a hit on the record, it became the hit, you know. Not in any kind of traditional sense, it wasn't like burning up the Billboard charts or something, but you know, in this alternative world of indie rock kind of coming into its own. And I think what was interesting about that time in 2003, 2004, is that indie rock kind of had its moment where it kind of bled as far into the mainstream as it was ever going to get because of The O.C. or Garden State or just this kind of reflection point where college rock, indie rock, whatever you wanna call it, kind of became the dominant force of like rock and roll for a couple years. Or popular music as it pertains to like guitars and keyboards and stuff like that. Pop music was always its own separate thing. So it was a trip for me to have this song that had become, not so much a hit in a Billboard sense of the word, but certainly a hit in the fact that like every coffee shop I walked into, it was playing, every bar, at some point it came on, you know, every store I walked into it was playing. It just became this like ubiquitous piece of music. It was an odd feeling to be on the other side of that to have been one of the people who created it. Not only that, but for it to be such an outlier in my catalog of work that there's this like, very kind of open-hearted, you know, torch song, love song that now is kind of everywhere, you know, in my neighborhood. That was a pretty wild thing to experience.

Jimmy Tamborello: It's really mysterious, especially cause after all this time I don't remember any struggle with making the album. It seemed so just to just come out as a fully fledged album. It feels like such a personal and small lo-fi album, that it's pretty weird that somehow it translated to so many people. I mean, I think a lot of it comes down to like what Ben did to it and his voice on it is what really pulled people in, I think. Even now when I listen to it, it still sounds so homemade.

“Sleeping In”

Ben Gibbard: Oftentimes when I write, I start with a line or a concept and I just follow that through. Some people will write choruses first, and then write the verses to that. Or they'll have a vision of what the song should be. And oftentimes I feel when I'm writing songs, I'm kind of, I start down a particular path and I'm just gonna write it all the way to the finish. So I've always been a big JFK conspiracy buff and, you know, just this thought kind of floated across my mind of like, if you could apply Occam's razor to the Kennedy assassination, like that everything, the simplest explanation is often the correct one. I was just kind of thinking about, “Well, yeah, I mean we just, we get so bogged down in the conspiracy theories around JFK and what if it really, what if it was just Lee Harvey Oswald? What if that was the totality of it?” Which is of course a possibility. I just started following that train of thought and the lyric is kind of silly, you know, like it's, it's kind of a whimsical kind of lyric, but like many songs that I write, I was just following that train of thought and just kind of taking that path as far as it would go. And sometimes I'll take a path like that and realize I have to double back and start over again and or maybe just use a line from something. But I tend to write linearly. So the first verse is, you know about the JFK assassination, odd way to start a song. And for whatever reason I kind of landed on “Don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping in.” And it didn't seem to have too much to do with the verse, with the exception of, you know, having this dream and then like the culmination of it being like, “No, I want to continue living in this dream world. I want to continue living in this space. So don't wake me, I plan on sleeping in.”

Jimmy Tamborello: I remember on “Sleeping In,” a lot of the percussion was like little chopped up kind of, not field recordings, but just kind of daily life type stuff in my house. Little clinks and clangs in the kitchen and stuff. And there's like a little bit of a friend of mine's voice that gets in there into the rhythm. Yeah when I was making the instrumentals, I wasn't thinking conceptually at all or like what, you know, Ben hadn't told me what he'd end up writing about or what he was planning to do or what he wanted to write about. So it was really pretty random what I was throwing together and then it was fun to see how Ben would solve them. You know, what meaning he'd put to them.

Ben Gibbard: That's one of my favorite songs in the record, just because it is, the lyric is unlike anything I would've ever written for Death Cab. And it was because of this like very whimsical, playful music bed that Jimmy sent me.

Jimmy Tamborello: Yeah, “Sleeping In” has kind of a lullaby melody to it. Yeah it does seem like on some of the songs, what I gave him instrumentally was influencing what he would write about on top.

Actually, I'd have to listen again. I'm not even sure on “Sleeping In,” if I did sing on it, on the recording. We definitely do that live, do it as like a, with all of us singing, but I don't even remember if I sang it or not. Let’s say I did (laughs).

“Nothing Better”

Jimmy Tamborello: I mean, the main thing I remember about making the beat for “Nothing Better” was I was really excited with the energy of the beat. I felt like sometimes I have trouble with getting a good feel to a beat and that one just felt really kind of explosive or more dancey and I was really happy with the kind of big bass line, bass melody. It was really exciting to hear Ben kind of work around that bassline with his vocal melody. I really like how that came out.

Ben Gibbard: I was dating this woman named Jen Wood, who's a singer songwriter, originally based in Seattle, and she is such a great singer and just a really great musician and songwriter. And Jimmy had sent me the music for what would become “Nothing Better,” and the idea just kind of crossed my mind of like, “Well, you know, Jen and I are dating and we enjoy playing music together, so why don't I write this as a duet and then Jen can sing it. She can sing the retort.” You know, it was very much modeled after “Don't You Want Me” by The Human League, cause I've always loved that song. I've always loved duets that are a conversation and this bed of music that Jimmy sent me felt like a perfect piece of music to try to do this he said, she said conversation.

Jimmy Tamborello: I think I had all the orchestral samples in there to begin with, but the way that turned into kind of being the intro into the duet part with Jen worked out really well. It really makes sense that it's a duet, but I had no idea he was gonna make it into a duet, you know, when I was writing, we didn't plan ahead to make a duet. Yeah, there's a lot of that, a lot of just kind of buying used dollar records and blindly sampling bits, usually reversing them or doing something to disguise them. Even though I wasn't really thinking about sample clearances at the time, but I was being a little careful so they're mostly disguised. But yeah, like that was the way I came up with a lot of, like some of the more memorable melody lines and moments on the album were just kind of like randomly dropping in bits of old records. Jen Wood’s parts happened in Seattle. Yeah, up there Ben was recording some at home and some with Chris Walla at their studio. They did some of the guitar stuff and a couple live drum parts and Jen's vocals and a lot of Ben's vocals were all done up there.

Ben Gibbard: But that one was really fun to put together cause it gave Jen and I an opportunity to sing together. Jen also sings on “Such Great Heights,” but I'd always loved her voice so much even before, you know, we had dated, and so it was an opportunity for me to kind of get her voice on the record, which I'm really glad it worked out.

There's one part of the song that I feel a little embarrassed about now, and that is just that there's a reference in the first verse to like “a goalie tending the net in the third quarter of a tied game rivalry.” And I needed the rhyme, so I figured I could get away with it, even though it’s, I guess technically a reference to hockey. And in hockey, there are periods, they're not quarters (laughs). And I've had a number of Canadians, or I guess hockey fans or sticklers, hit me with that and be like, you know, “I don't know what you're talking about here, they're not called quarters, they're called periods.” I'm like, “I know, I know. It's artistic license. Maybe poor artistic license, but artistic license nonetheless.”

"Recycled Air"

Ben Gibbard: “Recycled Air” was written fairly quickly. There's not a lot of lyrics in it. It's a pretty simple song that's kind of entirely kind of tethered to this “ba ba ba ba” kind of no word, chorus kind of thing. And I think in my mind, I had been, since I'd first heard it, I'd been pretty obsessed with this song called “Stratford-On-Guy” by Liz Phair on Exile on Guyville. And I think that that song is one of the greatest songs ever written about being on an airplane. I mean, there've been a lot of songs written about being on airplanes and flying. It's very, at least I find I'm very introspective in that space because you're so vulnerable. Your life is literally in the hands of some person you'd never met, you know, flying the plane 250 miles an hour, 30,000 feet above the Earth. I'd always found the imagery in “Stratford-On-Guy” to be just be so wonderful, such a great song. I don't know if I had recently listened to it or if it was just on my mind, but you know, the music that Jimmy sent me felt so airy and it just conjured up a lot of images of being on an airplane. So I felt that that should be the focus of the song lyrically, to kind of lean into that.

Jimmy Tamborello: “Recycled Air,” I always thought really sounded like you were in a plane, and then his words were about that. I'm not sure what my initial motivation was for the instrumental for “Recycled Air,” I think it was probably a mix of my interest in kinda shoegaze stuff and more ethereal music and then electro. I think the beat has more of like an electro feel. “Chariots of Fire” was one of my first sheet music things that I had when I was a kid, that theme song. Maybe that was the inspiration. I think we added a few other instruments. I had one other keyboard I think at the time, a Nord Modular I think. But yeah, it was mostly just stuff in the K2000, a mix of samples on it and synth sounds.

“Clark Gable”

Ben Gibbard: My impressions of “Clark Gable” or the song that would become “Clark Gable” was that it was kind of one of the more, it's not an aggressive song by any stretch of the imagination, but just in the context of a lot of things that Jimmy was sending me that were a little on the twee side, which I was of course totally fine with, but it was some very kind of softer songs with softer palettes. This one just had a little bit more of a driving kind of thing, especially in the choruses, and it felt kind of anthemic.

Again, this was one of those songs where I just kind of, after I'd made my little rough mix of it and was walking around Seattle, walking around my neighborhood, just listening to it on repeat, this kind of fantasy story kind of started to form in my mind of a person deciding that the best way to kind of make somebody realize that they should still be together would be just to kind of like create a movie of the relationship in question. And I think maybe I'd been really into Delmore Schwartz at that point. And there's a short story he wrote called, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” which is a, he goes into a theater and and is watching a film of his parents' courtship and his parents are in the film and it's this obviously very fantastical thing. And I think when I was writing “Clark Gable,” I was kind of referencing that a bit, that that was a point of reference. I liked the idea of seeing something that was very formative to who you are that had affected you greatly and having it be removed from your head or heart and have it recreated somewhere else that you could kind of look at it from a distance.

Jimmy Tamborello: Yeah, I think with “Clark Gable,” it was probably mostly inspired by the post-punk stuff that was going on at the time, like the new post-punk stuff. I mean, I was, I guess I was into the old post punk stuff, but the stuff that was fresh in my mind was…Was like the DFA stuff going on in 2003? Now I'm not even sure. So yeah, that stuff probably, “Clark Gable” was kind of slightly inspired by that world, like the modern post punk stuff. But I think once like the horns came on and stuff, it kind of veered more into more traditional disco, maybe even. But yeah, it has sort of like a toughness to the beat that feels like post punk. I do remember with Clark Gable, I really liked, I think he really pushed the energy in the right direction with his vocals on top of the music. Like it really made it climactic.

Ben Gibbard: The choruses were kind of connected to the verses, but I found myself, you know, for the years kind of leading into making this record, Conor Oberst and I had kind of become buddies and I often think of Bright Eyes as being as like the same graduating class as Death Cab. And we all kind of came up around the same time and we were, you know, I remember seeing Bright Eyes at a really small venue in Seattle cause we had just heard of them. It was ‘99, 2000 where you probably didn't hear a band before you went to see them. You'd be like, “I heard these guys are good, let's go see them.” And just had our minds totally blown at this kid's songwriting kind of skills. And the chorus is, I kind of wrote them with Conor in mind. There's a line that's like, You know, “I know you're wise beyond your years, but do you ever get the fear that your perfect verse is just a lie that you tell yourself to get by.” And you know, those lines apply to this concept of trying to kind of like create a world that you want to live in or create a world that represents the world that you were in. But I think as songwriters, oftentimes we try to make things in art that we can't have in real life. And so I had told Conor about this years ago, I doubt if he even remembers it, but I remember like he was on my mind a lot at that point. And I kind of wrote, you know, the double chorus that finishes the song kind of was written to him. Those lines of like, “Your perfect verse is just to lie that you tell yourself to get by.” You know, “Are you just creating this world in music because, just so you can get through the day?” You know, which most creative people have those kind of impulses where they're like, you know, I certainly know I do, trying to create a world in music or in art that makes the real world a little bit easier to handle.

"We Will Become Silhouettes"

Ben Gibbard: “We Will Become Silhouettes” is kind of a perfect example of something that I find myself doing a lot, which is kind of combining major key, maybe kind of uplifting music with a very dire, morbid lyric. And I've always liked those juxtapositions. I've always liked, “music is sad, words are happy.” Or you know, “music is happy, words are sad,” and this is definitely the latter of that. It's like the music is upbeat and happy and probably should be about something else. But in this moment I decided that it should be about, you know, nuclear winter (laughs).

Jimmy Tamborello: “We Will Become Silhouettes” was probably a little bit inspired by kinda like techno stuff that was going on then. Like I was into this German label, Kompakt, and I think a lot of stuff that's going on in this, the way that samples are played and stuff maybe had to do with being into that kind of music, although like a faster version of it. I think maybe the cartooniness maybe came more from the lyrics and like the vocals. The instrumental to me feels more kind of lush and pretty. Like maybe it could have, if it was sung in a different way, it would've been more of like a dreamy pretty song. And also I think the video for it really influences how it sounds now to me too. Like I picture us in spandex riding bikes in the desert.

Ben Gibbard: “We Will Become Silhouettes” is, I think writing a lot of this material in the months right after 9/11, obviously, you know, it goes without saying what a terrible day that was. But in looking back on writing music around that time, I mean, I don't know if, you know, if people listening might remember or might have been alive or sentient or at that point remembering what it was like. But you know, every day there was just some kind of new piece of terrifying information that was kind of being disseminated into the world. And I found myself on edge all the time for months, you know, the months after September of 2001. And there were a lot of moments where it kind of felt like the world was just ending. Like this was just, that this terrible tragedy was going to be like the fulcrum upon which all these other terrible things started happening that would end in God knows what, right? And for obviously a lot of people, that was the case. But I just found myself kind of experiencing this almost Cold War style anxiety about the end of the world that we would end up like, you know, as, as people had feared they would before, end up in a bunker for long periods of time, you know, waiting out a nuclear winter or something like that. And I must have just been in a head space at the time when that music came through that I felt, “Oh, this really bouncy kind of major key electronic pop song, like, yeah, this should be about the end of the world, that's what this should be about.”

Yeah, it felt like during the pandemic, that song took on another life. I'd written that song from a place of anxiety, but also I think there's a lot of gallows humor in it too. At least there is for me. And I really still feel to this day that, you know, laughter is not the best medicine because medicine is the best medicine. But that bringing some kind of humor, even if it's off color, to scary or dangerous situations can sometimes be very effective at kind of unleashing a little bit of anxiety or feelings of dread. It felt to me as I started to see that song floating around in the world more that, you know, people were kind of latching onto it because it represented maybe people's greatest fears about where this pandemic was heading. At the time I was as anxious and freaked out as everybody else was. But there was a small part of me that was like, “I'm glad that we wrote this. I'm glad that this exists and that we made this piece of music, not for this moment, but this piece of music can represent it and capture it for some people and give them a little kind of break from feeling overwhelmed, hopefully a break from feeling overwhelmed all the time.”

"This Place Is a Prison"

Jimmy Tamborello: Yeah I've always been drawn to real kind of messed up sounds and that one I remember really kind of running the whole beat through a delay pedal and really tweaking it a lot to get it to where it was. That one I can remember also being a real Bjork one, like definitely a Bjork influence to “This Place Is a Prison” and near the kind of the outro section reminds me a lot of The Cure Disintegration album I think was maybe in my head. I don't know if that translates or if that comes across, but that one always makes me think of The Cure and Bjork.

Ben Gibbard: “This Place Is a Prison” is maybe my favorite song on the record because it's so unique amongst the other songs, you know, everything else is kind of high BPM, 4/4, a lot of four on the floor, like a very poppy dancey kind of record. And when Jimmy sent me this piece of music that was like, you know, in 3/4 or 6/8, however you wanna carve it up, I just was so excited about it and it gave me an opportunity to kind of really bring the mood down and do something that I think is a little more, “This Place Is a Prison” is closer to a Death Cab song than anything else on the record. And because it is, it felt like a very comfortable place for me to write in. You know, writing the rest of the record was an exploration in and of itself. But you know, in doing all this work throughout Give Up, that was unique and new for me. It felt very comforting to kind of settle into a space musically and lyrically that was more in my wheelhouse.

Jimmy Tamborello: I just bought some toy accordions downtown in LA at some point and I was using them a lot on stuff I was making back then and for live shows with Dntel. So I wanted to use a little bit of it on the album. So on “This Place Is a Prison,” I played some. At some point, I did actually buy a full size accordion, but I never really learned to play it past like one note at a time. So, It's a simple part on the song. Probably the accordion is the only live instrument that I played on the album.

Ben Gibbard: At the time, I was drinking a lot. I had a lot of time on my hands. As musicians who don't have day jobs tend to have, and the darkness of nightclub culture and being out all the time started to really kind of weigh on me. It was starting to feel not fun and not like a release from normal life, but to become normal life, to become, like being out five or six nights a week and seemingly never not having a drink in my hand was kind of, that became normal, that was just, that was what you do. So, you know, I felt I needed to kind of turn the guns on myself a bit in that song and kind of write about this, you know, this affectation that had started to kind of, not so much take over my life, but certainly started to creep in more and more. And I started to realize like, “Hey, this is getting a little out of hand,” and I let it get out of hand for another five or six years. But that to me was kind of one of the first moments in my life that I was writing about my alcohol intake and that it might not be the healthiest thing for me.

Jimmy Tamborello: Ben added live drums to the end, and that really changed the energy in an unexpected way for me at the time. I remember really being happy with how explosive it gets at the end.

Ben Gibbard: I love that I got to play these drums at the end. Like the drum beat at the end is one of my favorite things on the record because it's like, if there's one thing I love doing more than anything rhythmically is I love making a 6/8 feel, or a 3/4 feel like 4/4. So that beat to me is like, it feels kind of straight, but it's in 6/8, so it drives like a 4/4 beat. But it's not a 4/4 beat. And it's one of the moments in the record that I'm the most proud of.

Jimmy Tamborello: I mean, it was nice that Ben had a way to record live drums because I hadn't been able to do that with my own music at all. I didn't really have access to a real studio. So it was exciting to have the option to have some, some real big drums on some songs.

Ben Gibbard: We recorded some of the drums and piano and other instruments at Chris Walla’s studio, the Hall of Justice here in Seattle. But some of the stuff I just recorded in my little attic bedroom slash studio on Mercer Street, here in Seattle. And I think I probably just started adding drums to stuff because I just wanted to play drums. So one of the great things about making this record was that there were really no rules. Jimmy and I weren’t having in-depth conversations about what the record should be, or what the instruments should sound like. And not to say that in Death Cab there were, you know, like Stalin-esque rules or something like that. But, you know, I was in a band with three other people, we all played our instruments, and the way we created music was based in things that I was writing. But also, you know, we had boundaries around who could do what in the band. And so in making this record with Jimmy, I found myself with this opportunity to play all these instruments that I didn't get a chance to play in my main band. And playing some live drums, like alongside the programming and stuff like that, just seemed like a nice flavor and a way to kind of give the song a little lift at the end. And also just gave me an opportunity to play drums, which I love doing. So most of the drums we recorded, I know for “Clark Cable,” we recorded it at, at Chris's studio, but the drums on “This Place Is a Prsion” were just like a two mic drum sound that I did in my little bedroom. And I'm a terrible engineer, I'm not good at getting good sounds, but for whatever reason it just fit nicely in the track. So I was like, “Well that's the drums. We don't need to redo them.”

Jimmy Tamborello: Yeah I kind of forgot, I was listening back and kind of forgot that we even had live drums on the original album. I thought in my head that was something we added for the live show, but I was wrong.

"Brand New Colony"

Jimmy Tamborello: Kinda the video game sounds make their way into a few of the songs on the album, but at the time, I mean, I always have been into video games, but I don't think I was really, I think I was more referencing some of the electronic music that I was into at the time. For “Brand New Colony,” it just right away kind of sounded like a toy to me. The instrumental, like even the beat, the way the beat sounds kind of like miniature or something, and I think I added the windup sound to the beginning of it after I made the instrumental cause it reminded me so much of like a toy. But again, also it was probably real inspired by Squarepusher and Warp Records and people doing kind of crazy drill ‘n’ bass type video gamey sounding music.

Ben Gibbard: “Brand New Colony” is one of my favorite songs on the record, and I think I should come clean a bit about that song, in the sense that I have been and always will be a huge Magnetic Fields fan. And there's a song on their record Holiday, called “Desert Island,” which uses a lot of similar kind of imagery in like the, “I'll be this, I'll be that,” and in the first verse of “Desert Island,” there's a couple, like, “I'll be this, I'll be that.” And I just kind of, I guess, stole that idea from Stephin Merritt and just ran with it. And I was like, “Okay well, I love that song so much, I want to make something that's kind of like that, but instead of just doing a couple of these metaphors in the first verse, it's just going to be the whole song. Like the whole song will just be like “bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, all the way to the end.” To me, it's like I was so influenced by Magnetic Fields and specifically that song, “Desert Island,” that I felt I wanted to make something that was kind of similar. And maybe having just exposed it, I've ruined it for people, but hopefully that will make people go back and listen to “Desert Island” and realize what a great fucking song that is. But I think if no one's put it together, put that comparison together til this point when I'm telling people about it, I'm sure it probably wasn't as similar as maybe I thought it was. Or maybe it is, I don't know.

As I said, I write everything linearly, so I was looking at all the lyrics and I have this kind of virtual stream of consciousness of metaphors through all of the verses and, you know, the structure of the song is a verse and a break and a verse and then a chorus. So it's not a traditional structure, pop song structure, and the chorus is like, there's a lot of words and there's a lot of imagery and it's just kind of coming at the listener like, you know, “I want to take you far in the city of this town, and kiss you on the mouth.” It's just going and going and going. And I just wanted something just very simple to add at the end because the song is just so lyrically dense and there's just so many ideas in it, arguably too many, but there's a lot of ideas in there and you know, I felt that it needed just a very simple sentiment to kind of wrap it all up.

Jimmy Tamborello: I think the “Everything will change” coda at the end of the song, really satisfied like the emo part of me, like that part of my musical interests.

Ben Gibbard: I don't think it's a coincidence that I was writing songs for Transatlanticism at the same time because in the song “Transatlanticism,” the verses are very dense. Lyrically there's a lot of ideas in there. It just ends with this very simple coda of “I want you so much closer.” And I don't think I wrote “Transatlanticism” on Monday and this on Tuesday, per se, but these songs were all being written at the same time. So I was finding that using very simple language after an entire song of a lot of ideas was a really effective way to kind of just like, tie everything up with a nice bow. And yes, of course, if all of these things in the song happen in this fantastical scenario, then yes, everything would change, right? And it just felt like a nice sentiment to end on, like an optimistic sentiment versus maybe some other moments in the record that were a little less so.

Jimmy Tamborello: It feels really emotional, and it took kind of really like an even bigger life as like the last song we'd play live too, just with that being shouted out over and over again.

Well, it took about a year to finish and when I listened to it, I had no idea how people would take it. It didn't really seem like something that would be for a big audience at all. And I mean Death Cab for Cutie already had a decent sized audience for back then, and so I knew it would probably get more attention than anything I'd done before. So either way, that part was exciting. But yeah, definitely I had no idea what we were in for with it.

"Natural Anthem”

Jimmy Tamborello: “Natural Anthem” was probably the closest to what I imagined the whole album was gonna be like when we started it. I'm glad it's not, I'm glad we didn't go too wild. And it was definitely inspired by, there's one group called Third Eye Foundation and there's this whole kind of scene of real distorted kind of jungle drum and bass stuff mixed with almost like shoegazey stuff. So that was definitely an inspiration on that song.

When I sent Ben the instrumental, I had no idea what he was, like how he was gonna deal with it, or if there would even be space for vocals.

Ben Gibbard: “Natural Anthem” was probably a later thing that he sent me probably in the last two thirds of whatever he sent me. And I remember like getting it and putting it on and oftentimes with the music that he would send me, it became clear pretty quickly, “Oh, that's the verse. That's the chorus. I'm gonna nip that a bit.” The arrangement was always one of the easier parts because he was, Jimmy was doing such a great job of creating song structures that maybe were not the structure that ended up being on the record, but it was very easy to cut four bars here, two bars there, make this twice as long. It was very easy to do all that because of the stuff that he was sending me. But when he sent me “Natural Anthem,” it felt like a song that should have been on the Dntel record. I mean, it's a pretty experimental kind of angular piece of music that, you know, felt like it belonged on a different record. But as I listened through it, I was kinda like, “Oh, I don't know what I'm gonna do with this. There's really nothing, I don't know, I can't add anything in this increasingly kind of distorted, almost Squarepusher-y kind of like noise. And then it, everything dropped out and there's this period where there's like a more traditional kind of chord progression. And I was like, “Oh, okay, great. Well this is going to be just, the end of this song will be the only lyrics in this thing. There'll be no other instruments, no other, I'm not going to add guitars, I'm not going to add drums, I'm just going to do just two quick vocals.

Jimmy Tamborello: Yeah it was nice to be able to just kind of leave it to him to solve those problems. I always knew he'd figure out the right way to use the instrumentals. So I like kind of how it became just like this little epilogue song.

Ben Gibbard: You know, in hindsight, I think it must have been one of the last songs that we did, because the lyric kind of encapsulates a lot of the album in the sense that the lyric is basically saying like, you know, “I'll write you a song and, you know, I've changed all the names.” Oh, what, what are the lyrics? Oh yeah well now I'm remembering. I haven't, we haven't started rehearsing this tour yet (laughs), so I haven't really listened to this record in a while. Oftentimes when I write songs, I am writing about a version of a person that I know, or myself, a version of myself. And I kind of liked the idea of having a song that was basically saying that to end the record, I think because the music was so barbed, it felt like there should be, you know, that the lyrics should be a little bit, have some teeth and kind of end with like, you know, “But at least I spelled your name right.” And that was one of those things where like, as soon as I listened to music, I was like, “There's no space for me here.” And then hearing the very end, I was like, “Oh, there we go. This will be more of a, more of an instrumental with a little bit of vocal, and by the time people are wondering like, ‘What the fuck's going on here? Is this, what this is? Oh, there he is.’ Now I'm singing at the very end.” And there was no question as we were putting together the running order, that it would be the last song on the record.

Jimmy Tamborello: I mean, the mixing in general for the album was maybe the slowest part because I was doing it all on an actual physical mixing board and recording into a computer, so I couldn't change the faders and stuff on the board until we finished a song's mix, cause if we like moved on to another mix, all the information from the old mix was gone. So I had to wait until we had a totally finished mix before I could move on to the next song or do any other work. So when we were trying to like do that through the mail, it was hard cause I'd have to mail Ben a mix, wait for him to say what sounded good, what didn't sound good, and then just like, you know, turn up one knob or like add a little more delay, remix it, mail it. So it was a real slow process. So eventually he flew out and we finished mixing it together so we could work a little a little faster.

Ben Gibbard: When we finished the record and I was playing the songs for friends of mine, I've noticed in my career that there are times when your friends or people that you kind of confide in play music for, play rough mixes, you know, test stuff out on them, those people always tend to be at bare minimum supportive. So if you play them something and maybe it's not hitting for them, you know, they'll say something like, “Oh, I really like that lyric in the second verse. That's really cool. Or that guitar part in the chorus is cool.” You know, they're giving you compliments and if you're asking for constructive criticism, they'll give you that too. But for the most part you can tell that like, “No, they're not anti this, but this isn't really hitting with them.” And I started to notice with playing stuff off of Give Up for my friends, that it was clear that they really liked it. They were like, “Whoa, no, this is really good. I mean, yeah, I mean I like Death Cab, but I really like this.” And you know, I just took that to being like, “Oh great, okay, cool. Well we made some stuff that doesn't suck and that people hopefully will like.” And when the record came out it started to get pretty good reviews, which was great to see. But you know, my understanding was I think at that point, I don't know how many records Dntel tell had sold, but I think the last Death Cab record had been The Photo Album. And I think that had sold around like 50,000 copies or something like that, which, you know, for an indie rock band in 2001, 2002, I mean, we had struck gold. I mean, we were playing the Bowery Ballroom and we were, you know, we were set. We didn't think there was anywhere, anywhere else to go really, you know? And so I remember hearing that Sub Pop was thinking like, “Yeah, we might sell 15 or 20,000 copies of this record. People who know Death Cab and they know Dntel or they know Rilo Kiley, like there might be this crossover where people will find out about this record and we'll put it out and we'll just, you know, you'll do some interviews, you'll do a short tour and that'll be kind of that.” That was my expectation is that we went out and did a tour in spring of 2003. You know, small clubs, venues, I mean, not a lot of people. We started the tour in San Diego and we did a loop around the states and we were ending the tour in Los Angeles and over the course of that month that we were on tour, I think the original show was supposed to be at The Smell, which is like a really small DIY venue in la and it kept getting moved to like bigger venues. And by the time we were showing up in LA, we were playing the Palace Theater, which maybe holds 1400 people, but you know, sold out. We had gone from expecting to sell 200 tickets in LA to selling 1400 tickets. And even at that point I just thought like, “Oh cool, well people in LA like the record, that's great.” But as Jimmy and I and Jenny all went off to our day jobs and Death Cab was, you know, at that point kind of finishing up Transatlanticism and getting ready to release that, Death Cab was in Australia for June. We just kept getting these reports from Sub Pop that the record was just like selling. And it was like, “We sold 50,000. We sold 100,000. 200,000.” It’s a record that we made and were very proud when we made it and we thought it was good. But the adventure this record has been on for the past twenty years was so outside of the realm of imagination even.

Jimmy Tamborello: Like I’m used to like maybe DJing a bar or playing a show for like 50 people. And then every ten years, I have to go and play (laughs) shows for thousands of people. It’s pretty weird but doing it with Ben and Jenny makes it easy cause they’re good at it. The experience of making Give Up and everything that happened after is a high point in my life and really changed the course of my life and led to so many experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. It’s nice that it’s all tied to like this friendship. Like making the record and even the first tour, I felt like when we were kids, was just such a magical, kind of the last time I had the feeling of making a new friend or something, I don’t know. So it’s nice that it’s all tied together into this thing that actually had such a big impact on my life.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about The Postal Service. You’ll also find a full transcript of this episode and a link to purchase Give Up. Instrumental music by Synthetic Lover. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

"The District Sleeps Alone Tonight”

"Such Great Heights"

"Sleeping In"

"Nothing Better"

"Recycled Air"

"Clark Gable"

"We Will Become Silhouettes"

"This Place Is a Prison"

"Brand New Colony"

"Natural Anthem"

All songs programmed by Jimmy Tamborello (Dying Songs, BMI)

Lyrics by Benjamin Gibbard (Fake Songs, BMI)

Written, recorded and mixed at Dying Songs (LA) and Computer World (Seattle) by The Postal Service

Guitars on 1, 2, 3, 5, and 9, drums on 6, and vocals and piano on 4 recorded by Chris Walla at the Hall of Justice, spring 2002.

with Jenny Lewis on vocals on 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, and 9, Jen Wood on vocals on 2 and 4 and Chris Walla on piano on 4.

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“On Letting Go” by Synthetic Lover from Big Movement.

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam