Death Cab for Cutie’s frontman Benjamin Gibbard knows what people expect from his debut solo record, Former Lives: the dirt and dish on his recent divorce from the queen of twee, Zooey Deschanel. To wit, he says, over the phone from a tour stop in Big Sur, Calif., plenty of journalists have said to him, "So, this seems like your most personal album yet."
“I find it fascinating with a songwriter that when people listen to music, they assume that the singer, when singing in first person, is telling a story,” Gibbard says. “I haven’t gone on record saying, ‘Yes, this is a very personal album.’ Or, that these songs are all about me.”
For the record, there’s nary a song on the album that directly references a fringe of Deschanel’s trademark bangs or “adorkability.” But there are a number that pay tribute to the desolation and devastation of lost love, and one, “Oh, Woe,” that actually celebrates the sweet freedom that accompanies some breakups. Deschanel is even credited as a vocalist on the countrified, mariachi-inspired “Something’s Rattling.”
“There are things on this record that are very close to me, but I think also, without going into detail, everybody knows the fallout from my personal life and I certainly did not give everybody a roadmap for that,” Gibbard jokes. “People can speculate however they like, and I recognize as a fan that’s part of the fun of it, but I’m certainly not about to take people along ... I’m sure people are obviously going to enjoy the soap opera of it, they’re going to try and get the little decoder ring and try to find out what all the songs are about, but you have to kind of — unless you can kind of visualize yourself within it, the song has kind of failed.”
As a listener, it’s not hard to imagine yourself in the driver’s seat for the majority of Former Lives, and sonically, there’s something for everyone: alt-country, folk, rock and even some Beatles-esque pop. And while the subject matter does skirt around the rougher edges of romance gone awry, there’s only one cohesive theme throughout: sleep. Either abstractly or directly, Gibbard mentions sleep or dreaming in at least nine of the 12 songs.
“That’s not something I was aware of, but it totally makes sense,” he says. “I feel like sleep or the lack thereof or that twilight when you’re just laying there before you actually zonk out is a very telling time.... Sleep and dreams kind of reveal things about us that we’re able to suppress for the majority of our waking lives.”
Not that every dream is a reckoning, Gibbard says. He’s not usually surprised by what these fleeting moments reveal.
“I feel like I’m a relatively self-aware person,” he says, laughing. “I know when I’m suppressing things. I know what my demons are and how to run from them. But they always catch up at some point. I mean, I’ve spent a number of years literally trying to outrun my demons. I’m very aware of them. When they creep in at night or in that unconsciousness, you have to give yourself over to it and recognize what your true feelings on that particular matter are.”
Because the songs were written at random over a number of years, good luck deducing exactly what those demons are, or if any have a name. And Gibbard has specifically declined to indicate the years in which the songs were written. But, in further obscuring the “roadmap,” he forces another possible narrative on Former Lives.
“It’s kind of unfair to the songs to refer to them as, ‘Yeah, they didn’t make it onto a Death Cab record,’” Gibbard says. “The example I keep coming back to, which is a more obvious one because I was playing it so long ago is 'Broken Yolk.' I’ve been intentionally not wanting to date a lot of these songs, but I’ve been playing this song since 2005, so I can’t really lie about when I wrote it. That song was written around the time of Plans, and it definitely didn’t fit on Plans. At that time, I wasn’t able to see that it didn’t play well in the concerts with those songs. It had its strengths, and at some point it would find its own home.”
Former Lives became that home. It’s a collection that Gibbard calls a “pretty disparate group of tunes,” but it’s also something of a fresh start.
“In titling it Former Lives, it kind of justifies them all living together on the same record,” Gibbard explains. “They are snapshots of different periods of my life, and I felt like this was the best way to tie them all with a nice little bow. And, yeah, it certainly does [imply a fresh start]. I’m undergoing a number of fresh starts now, which are all very rewarding, and musically it felt nice to just clear the state of a lot of songs that I’ve been fond of for a while and just have not been able to place them within the context of a record. I hope people like the record for what it is and they can find some joy in it.”
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