Death Cab for Cutie
Kintsugi
Stream to March 30
"You sent a photo out of your window of Paris of what you wished that I could see. But someone’s gotta be the lighthouse and that someone’s gotta be me," Ben Gibbard sings on "Little Wanderer," off Death Cab for Cutie’s upcoming eighth album, Kintsugi.
It’s one of the most transparently autobiographical songs on an album that is highly autobiographical, dealing with Gibbard’s relationship with actress/singer Zooey Deschanel, which ended in divorce in 2012. But that’s the most the songwriter is going to spell out for listeners, which, in the end, is a service to an album that ultimately deals with the theme of things breaking apart and being mended back together.
Knowing about Gibbard’s divorce, or the fact that this is founding guitarist Chris Walla’s last album with Death Cab (he announced his amicable departure last summer and was fully present on this album), gives fans greater context, but even without that information, Kintsugi is still relatable. It’s one of Gibbard’s greatest strengths as a songwriter: taking the personal and making it universal.
"I know that people will assume these songs are about certain things, and in some instances they are going to be correct," he said in press release. "But I’m not going to give people a road map."
"If there’s a reason people can relate to my songwriting, maybe it’s they feel like they’re getting an honest, fearless approach to writing about affairs of the heart," he says. "I’m certainly not going to censor that just because people think they know something about my personal life. I would be cowardly as a songwriter and not be true to what I’ve always done if I shy away from these events in my life because I was in a relationship with a public figure."
Whether it’s "Black Sun," which deals with the extreme emotions that accompany divorce ("anger, sadness, finger-pointing, acceptance, forgiveness, understanding," as Gibbard puts it), embracing our flaws, as on "The Ghosts of Beverly Drive," or the inevitability of change that runs through the heartbreaking acoustic ballad "Hold No Guns" ("numbers change and people fall, and friends they always splinter").
It’s where the album title Kintsugi comes from, which is the name given to the Japanese art of fixing broken pottery with gold. In other words, things fall apart; it's only in fixing the cracks and embracing flaws that we're made stronger in the end.
Kintsugi is available March 31. Stream it above in advance, and pre-order it on iTunes.
Kintsugi tracklist:
1. "No Room in Frame"
2. "Black Sun"
3. "The Ghosts of Beverly Drive"
4. "Little Wanderer"
5. "You've Haunted Me All My Life"
6. "Hold No Guns"
7. "Everything's a Ceiling"
8. "Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)"
9. "El Dorado"
10. "Ingénue"
11. "Binary Sea"