Death Cab For Cutie

 Ben Gibbard and Nick Harmer from Death Cab For Cutie go record shopping at Amoeba Hollywood in this "What's In My Bag?" episode. They talk about early influences from Bedhead and Built to Spill, Bill Callahan's earnest songwriting, two iconic soundtracks that epitomize the Pacific Northwest, and the juxtaposition of multiple lyrical viewpoints and narratives within rap groups. Death Cab For Cutie's new album I Built You a Tower is out June 5, 2026 via ANTI-.

Death Cab For Cutie's picks:
• Bedhead - Beheaded (LP)
• Smog - Red Apple Falls (LP)
• Fugazi - Repeater (LP)
• A Tribe Called Quest - Midnight Marauders (LP)
• Angelo Badalamenti - Music From Twin Peaks [OST] (LP)
• Various Artists - Singles (Deluxe Edition) [OST] (LP)
• Slint - Spiderland (LP)
• Talk Talk - Spirit Of Eden (LP)
• Built To Spill - There's Nothing Wrong With Love (LP)
• R.E.M. - Green (LP)
• The Sonics - Here Are The Sonics (CD)

Featured Artist: Death Cab For Cutie

Editor: Brendt Rioux
Executive Producer: Rachael McGovern
Producer/Director: Craig Miller
Assistant Director: Derich Heath
Cameras: Jacob Gray, Derich Heath
Audio Recorded by: Patrick Emswiler
Assistant Editor: Patrick Emswiler

Watch Death Cab For Cutie's "What's In My Bag?" episode on Amoeba.com

Follow Amoeba Hollywood on Instagram
Follow Amoeba San Francisco on Instagram
Follow Amoeba Berkeley on Instagram

Transcript

SPEAKER_08 0:00

Hello, my name is Ben Gibbard, and I'm Nick Harmer. And we are from Deathcat for Cutie. We're here at Amoeba Records to do What's in My Bag.

SPEAKER_06 0:14

And I can't see the holding together and more.

SPEAKER_07 0:26

I can't put it up to speed. There's too many tied to the social too close to you.

SPEAKER_08 0:36

So we have here the bedhead album Beheaded. This band was incredibly formative for us as a band, kind of coming up, and I think the thing that we really connected to both Nick and I and Chris Wall originally was the minimalism that they employed. Each member there would have three guitars and bass, and each one would play just one note and kind of make these interesting chords. And I just really connected to the space in these records. You know, I believe they're from Texas. You know, I'd never been to Texas at that point, and I just kind of felt like this must be what the expanse of Texas must kind of sound like. There's just like a lot of space between the notes, especially the song uh Lairs and Penns. Just the way that song opens up and it's just very minimal with just a symbol just kind of keeping time, and at the very end, the kind of drums come in with this doom doom god. I think you can hear that template in a lot of our the early Deathcap records. There were many conversations we had in the studio about, like, let's play less, you know, instead of playing a chord here, you just play one note, I'll play the other, and we'll kind of create this little spread of notes. The brand of minimalism that they were employing on these records was something that we took notice of and stole a lot of for our early albums. A lot of inspiration. A lot of inspiration.

SPEAKER_06 2:01

Yeah, that's right. I had no words when I had no doubts. Courage was something I could live without.

SPEAKER_09 2:12

Continuing with early Deathcab influence and things that we bonded over in music, smogs, Red Apple Falls.

SPEAKER_05 2:19

Whenever I get dressed up, I feel like the next con tryna.

SPEAKER_09 2:29

The songwriting and the lyricism in this record and in all of Bill Callahan's writing is just so direct, and there's just something really emotionally vulnerable about that and really raw about that. I think for all of us in the early days of the band, you're really connected to that kind of expression of just kind of laying yourself out there bare, dwarfs and all, and letting that be good enough.

SPEAKER_08 2:50

And the earnestness of his lyrics and the way his voice is presented on that record, particularly, is just very front and center. The song To Be of Use is just an absolute stunner.

SPEAKER_05 3:00

To be a view.

SPEAKER_08 3:09

It was incredibly brave to be that earnest and bare in the mid-90s at a time where irony was the currency. Yeah. You know, I took a lot of inspiration from Bill Callahan's songwriting, the sense that he just seemed fearless, and I just felt that it was far more punk to be earnest than it was to be ironic.

SPEAKER_05 3:27

Well, I was worse than a stranger. I was, I was, I was well known.

SPEAKER_08 3:39

This is uh Fugazi's repeater. I don't think it's possible to have come up in punk rock or independent music circles as a Gen Xer and not have Fugazi one of the most important bands. This record in particular was the first one that I bonded with when I was a teenager. It's just phenomenal. And in recent years, I really rekindled my love of this bands. They kind of came back into my life a couple years ago, and in the writing of this new record, I was really drawn to how Fugazi arranged their songs. These arrangements were fairly minimal, but everybody was playing something incredibly interesting and vital, and there's just not a lot of overdubs.

unknown 4:21

You will have the stand to use.

SPEAKER_08 4:40

They were a real unicorn band in that sense, where it didn't seem like it was possible to recreate that moving forward, but we could be ethical about our decisions, and that's something that we tried to take from this band.

SPEAKER_07 4:49

Never mind wasn't selling it's what you're buying.

SPEAKER_09 5:14

Back in the day, we were big fans of rap groups. Tribe Called Quest, All-Time Frame. Alltime.

SPEAKER_08 5:23

This cover is so iconic. And to be able to go through and see who you could name on the cover, you know, without having to check your work was kind of like a clout game.

SPEAKER_09 5:32

Yeah, lyricism, production. There's so much playfulness in these records, and the lines are infinitely quotable.

SPEAKER_10 5:38

Trini Gladiator, anti-hesitator, Shahid Bush Deveda, from here to Grenada, Mr. Energetic, who may sound pathetic. When's the last time you heard a funky diabetic?

SPEAKER_03 5:48

What do you think that you guys liked about rap groups more than say an individual MC?

SPEAKER_09 5:53

I guess we should I shouldn't say we like them more. I mean, we just in the end, like we kind of came up with Beastie Boys, NWA, Public Enemy, Day Lost Soul, Tribe Cold Quest. I just really liked that sort of evolving narrative that happens when you have multiple points of view coming in and trying to tell their version of a collective story. The songs could be heading in one way in one verse, and then a new MC gets on the mic and suddenly it veers slightly off topic, if that's where it was even headed, you know, and then you bring it back around for the hook or for the chorus.

SPEAKER_04 6:20

I learned how to build mics in my workshop class. So give me the solo and let's not make it the last.

SPEAKER_09 6:39

And that doesn't really work in rock music.

SPEAKER_08 6:42

You know what I mean? Like if I'm writing a song, you know, about a trip to San Francisco and then and then Nick hops in and starts talking about like the car he just bought, like it's just gonna, it's just not gonna work, right? But in hip hop, that somehow kind of works, you know?

SPEAKER_09 6:54

And like guesting on top of that in like the scenario or any of the stuff where you just had like people coming in, and you're like recognize their voices from other things, and they're adding to this narrative that's unfolding, like theater or something.

SPEAKER_02 7:05

Powerful impact, boom from the cannon, never again, try to reap a mind, just imagine.

SPEAKER_08 7:14

I also just prefer groups and bands to solo performers. Your focus shifts. We can sit there and debate like who's better, you know. I mean, Wu-Tang, you can talk about that forever, but it's like, yeah, but with Tribe, it's like, oh, Pfeifferly takes this song, but Q-tip's verse on this song kind of kills.

SPEAKER_09 7:30

Like, you cannot have public enemy without Flavor Flav. I mean, like the chemistry of it all works together.

SPEAKER_08 7:36

I was listening to Fear of Black Planet like a couple of days ago. Brother's Gonna Work It Out comes on, and that song is just so fucking powerful.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Teach a man how to be a bother, to never tell a woman you can't bother. You can't say you don't know what I'm talking about. But one thing, oh just trip, all the brother's gonna whip it out.

SPEAKER_08 7:53

And you're like, this is the greatest song they've ever made. And then it goes into the 911 as a joke. Like, this is the greatest song they've ever made.

SPEAKER_01 7:59

You better wake up and smell a real flavor, because 911 is a flame lifesaver. So get up and get down. 911 is joking, no doubt.

SPEAKER_08 8:08

Next we have the Twin Peaks soundtrack. So this is one of, I think, our favorite shows. It is such an important part of our cultural identity. I watched this show when it was on TV. I'm from the Seattle area, but we were living in Virginia, about to move back to Seattle. This show had started in the months leading us up to us moving back to the Northwest. And this show just kind of set the stage for me being ready and comfortable and excited to move back to the Northwest. But I think that Laura Palmer's theme is something that I hear in my head often in the dire, wintry, rainy months of the Northwest when I'm driving on the freeway through the mountains or whatever, and clouds are kind of unfurling over the evergreens and everything like that, and you hear this like there are a lot of times when there are TV shows about places and everyone watches them and they're like, it's not really like that.

SPEAKER_09 9:18

But Twin Peaks, they got that right.

SPEAKER_08 9:20

I mean, not to say that the Northwest is like the 1950s. No, in the way that it is on Twin Peaks. No, no, that's true.

SPEAKER_09 9:24

But like the spookiness and the eeriness of it, to me, the soul of that show, the storytelling, and then obviously the music too, all of that comes together and paints, I think, a pretty accurate picture.

SPEAKER_07 9:34

Yeah, I always say so too. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 9:36

Is there's this dark, eerie feel to the Northwest that I love. And I think that Battlemente just did such a great job capturing that.

SPEAKER_09 9:54

To keep with the uh Northwest soundtrack theme, singles, this looks really great. I don't actually have this, so I'm excited to kind of crack into it because there's apparently a zine in here that I'm looking forward to looking at.

SPEAKER_07 10:11

Let's take another somewhere.

SPEAKER_09 10:15

The 90s in Seattle growing up in the area, it was like unfathomable that bands from our area could be worldwide icons and success stories. If you wanted to be a successful band, you moved to Los Angeles or New York or someplace other than the Northwest. Suddenly, bands that we knew and the bands that we'd been talking about in school and passing tapes around and all that stuff, they're making movies about our city with bands that we know as the soundtrack. For me, it was just a moment where I felt like as a kid in the Northwest, there was a way to do what you love to do, and it would matter, and people could see it. There was such a community around that in Seattle, and there still is to this day, that we get to sort of be a part of now, and that's something that I know we both don't take for granted for a second.

SPEAKER_08 11:09

I rewatched singles not that long ago, maybe a couple months ago, and I was just filled with an enormous amount of nostalgia for that time. Yeah. I mean, I was 15, 16 years old at that time. We were not active as a band. We did not know these people at the time, but so many of them were our heroes.

SPEAKER_09 11:35

Growing up in Seattle and seeing this happen, this was just a wild thing. To be able to drive by, like Ben lives near here. I'm not gonna say exactly where I live.

SPEAKER_08 11:43

Uh button was I, yeah. I live in the vicinity of the singles building, so I drive past it all the time. And I can always tell if I'm in the car with somebody who's cool, if I go, hey, there's the singles building, and they go, Fuck yeah, you serious? Like they're really excited about it. If they're like, What's the singles building? It's like, not even that. I don't know what's going on. I I was just uh nowhere near your neighborhood. It's a Seattle that has long since been destroyed and rebuilt. It's a little bittersweet because the city is such a different place now than it was then. This is Slint's Spider Land. I really can't impress upon everyone what an important record this was. There are records that you hear and they just immediately kind of change your brain chemistry almost, and this record was one of them. A friend of mine had played it for me and and first put on the song Washer. I'd never heard anything that slow in my life that was that compelling.

SPEAKER_06 12:45

I won't be back here. Though we may meet again.

SPEAKER_08 12:56

I was immediately immersed in it. It was so powerful and emotional. Brian's singing on that song is just so delicate. And this record immediately became one of my favorites and became not so much a template for our band because we don't sound like Slint, but there's so many things in this record that have influenced our music throughout the years. The song Good Morning Captain is one of the most powerful things ever recorded. Something that struck me years later is when I was listening to this record when I was 18 or 19. And at that age, I assumed that this record had been made by men, by big men. Strong men with beards. It just didn't it didn't feel like the kind of music that young people could make. And then I ended up seeing Lance Bang's documentary about Slyn. And there's a scene in that documentary where they are in a practice space and they look like they're 15 years old. It had never occurred to me, I never looked up how old these guys were when they made this record. It again rewired how I saw them because I just assumed well that this music is so sophisticated, but lyrically, it's so good. This music has to be made by people who've been making music for decades. There's no way that this could be made by teenagers. And basically it was. That made me feel not great about where I was at 19. Uh, but this this record uh to this day is something I never fail to find inspiration in.

SPEAKER_09 14:34

Talk talk spirit of Eden. This was the first compact disc that I ever purchased when compact discs were a new format in the audio listening experience. Really great reissue as far as record presses go.

SPEAKER_08 14:45

You got me a copy of it. Give me a copy of it.

SPEAKER_07 14:48

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_09 15:01

A little bit of history, synth pop band in the 80s doing their synth y thing, and then decided, you know what, we've got a couple records left on this record contract that we're not particularly happy with, but we're going to make the records that we want to make and make the music that we want to make. Their last two records, Spirit of Eden and then the last record that they did, Laughing Stock. Masterpieces. Masterpieces, but the time they did not know what to do with them commercially or otherwise. A lot of people interpret these as kind of like a way that they were sort of giving a middle finger to their record label, like, eh, do what do something with it. But it's not that. It was to me a testament to bands sticking to their guns and just saying, This is our expression, this is what we're gonna stand by, and this is what we believe in. These aren't middle finger records. These are incredibly complex, wildly unexpected journeys.

SPEAKER_07 15:45

Is there a so much money to stay?

SPEAKER_09 16:00

A band that we have bonded over a number of times.

SPEAKER_08 16:03

In the original, you know, the early lineups of the band, obviously Chris Walla, Nick, myself, whether it was, you know, Nathan playing on the first record, but certainly Jason McGurr, who's been our drummer since 2002, when you get four or five people in a room who are very opinionated, it's virtually impossible to find something that we could all agree on to listen to in the van. Yeah. I think Talk Talk might be the band that every member of Death Cat for Cutie unanimously loves. And there's never pushback. There are always moments in the van where somebody would put in a record that they were really vibing on, and at least one other person would be like, this fucking, you know. But you know, every time somebody put on Laughingstock or Spirit of Eden, everybody's like, oh hell yeah, yeah, let's go with this. We really can't talk about Deathcap for Cutie without talking about built-a-spill.

SPEAKER_07 16:59

Won't you let's be last night heard what the big dipper said to me.

SPEAKER_08 17:10

Deathcap for Cutie basically started out as a built-spill cover band, so I think we can admit that now. From the moment I was 15 or 16 years old when I first heard Tree People, which was Doug Marsh's first band, I was hooked. Those Tree People records felt like they had been made specifically for me. We all have those records where we feel somebody made them just for us. It really opened up for me the possibilities of what I could do with the voice that I had, which was kind of reedy and small. And when Doug left Free People to do Built to Spill, Ultimate Alternative Waivers, I love that record. But when There's Nothing Wrong with Love came out, this record is a true revelation. The songs are so good, it's they're so beautiful. I defy anybody to hear the song Car and not think of like the love of their life.

SPEAKER_06 17:58

I need a car, you need a guide, you need some map. If I don't die or worse, I'm gonna need a map.

SPEAKER_08 18:11

Over the years, we've gotten to know Doug and play shows with Built Spill, and there have been these moments in our career when we've been able to play with or get to know the people that made the records that made us want to do what we do. Getting a chance to feel in some kind of twisted way that we were compatriots in this has been a true highlight of our musical lives.

SPEAKER_09 18:54

We have an infinite argument happening in the band about their best records. They have such a long career of incredible output. The best problem to have is to have too many great records. To rank them is a fun exercise that we we endeavor to do maybe twice a year.

SPEAKER_08 19:10

I think we all agree that Life Page is their best record. We think that's the best record. And then we start to kind of break off around two or three. And I'm not gonna call out anybody in the band specifically Dave Depper, but Nick and I strongly feel that Green is a top three REM record.

unknown 19:27

Follow me, don't follow me.

SPEAKER_07 19:30

Got my spine, I've got my orange crush.

SPEAKER_09 19:35

When I was a kid, it was like orange crush and all of the louder rock songs, and now I just I like the mandolin jams. I like Mike and Hair shirt.

SPEAKER_08 19:49

Solomon said before. It does kind of bridge these two worlds of the IRS years and what would come later as things got a little crisper and kind of more refined and uh automatic for the people and those kind of errors. But this record is just so goddamn. I I will go to the map for green.

SPEAKER_09 20:06

Again, REM changed our lives, so yeah, of course. 100%.

SPEAKER_07 20:10

Very scary for this world. Very scared for me.

SPEAKER_08 20:19

Okay, last one. It's been said that there are no firsts when it comes to music. When people are trying to tell you what the first metal band is, you know, these are very difficult to really define. But I will go to my grave saying that the Sonics were the first punk band.

SPEAKER_07 20:32

I know what's up!

SPEAKER_08 20:43

This record in particular is just so unbelievably raw and unlike anything else that was coming out at the time. They hail from Tacoma, Washington. I was fortunate enough to see them a few times when they reunited about 10 years ago. They sounded amazing. They made a great record, which is crazy to make a great record 50 years after your last record. That doesn't happen that often. I need to put this hot take out in the world that the Sonics were the first punk band, and if you claim any other band was, you're wrong. So smoke on that.

SPEAKER_07 21:35

Thank you guys so much.

SPEAKER_09 21:37

That's so fun. That's so funny. I have nothing to say on that. I'm like, let's step out of the way.

SPEAKER_07 22:01

E pá.