Sound interviewed Ben Gibbard and Chris Walla a couple weeks ago about the making of Death Cab for Cutie’s new album Narrow Stairs, which hit stores yesterday. A full article will appear in our June issue, but this week we’ve been publishing some excerpts from the interviews here on our website. (Yesterday we posted our interview with Chris Walla; the day before, a review of Narrow Stairs.) Here’s part of our chat with Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard:

SEATTLE SOUND: Do you do other writing at all, aside from songwriting?
BEN GIBBARD: No. I don’t even really write in notebooks or anything like that. I only write lyrics or songs, and I only write lyrics specifically to music I’ve written. Every once in while I’ll come up with a lyrical idea and kind of jot it down or text it to myself, but for the most part I only—every attempt that I’ve made to do any other type of writing whether it’s prose or poetry or whatever else, I just don’t feel comfortable. I feel like after 10 years of writing songs, I like to feel like I’ve got this down as good as I could and that I don’t have 10 years of trying to write novels behind me at this point. Every time I’ve attempted to try any other type of writing has always seemed kind of feeble and I kind of like be angry at myself that I took a couple hours away from trying to write songs to like, write a story or something. I’ve always really liked the concise nature of songwriting, where you have a relatively limited amount of space to say what you need to say. I guess, depending you can kind of make it as short or as long as you need to make it to get your point across. One of the songs “You Can Do Better” on the new record, in the beginning the song had another verse and another chorus and as we were sitting around in the studio Chris just said to me, “Why don’t you just get rid of that second verse and that second chorus? They’re completely unnecessary. You say everything you need to say in the verse and chorus.” And it’s a relatively heavy thing to say, but when it kind of breezes by in one verse and one chorus and you come to the conclusion that you’re better off with this person than without them, that’s about as long as that thought would go through your mind anyways. So just keep it short.There’s no reason for a second verse. In those kind of instances, a song can be as short as a minute and a half.

SS: When you’re writing songs, do you usually start with just fooling around on the guitar or do you start with some sort of melody in your head and build from there and then add lyrics from there? Or can you even generalize like that?
BG: I’m pretty methodical. I wish I could be the kind of person who could say those kind of esoteric things like, “I just heard this melody in my head and I had to find an instrument and write it down really quick.” I’ve never been that person. I always kind of—everything I write starts with me sitting at an instrument and trying to make it work, like I was a mechanic trying to fix a car. “Okay, well I know this thing is supposed to make sense, so I’m going to kind of bang on it a little bit and hopefully if I kick it just right it will start up and start making a sound. I always start songs with some simple piano or guitar base part that kind of leads into a vocal melody which then leads to a lyric. It’s weird, I’ve never really attempted to come at it from another angle, more just ’cause I tend not to be inspired that way. I tend not to be inspired to write a guitar part after I hear a melody in my head, even if I were to have heard a melody in my head. It’s a pretty unglamorous process, I guess. But it works for me, so I have to kind of give it some props.

SS: I think a lot of people listening to your music or writing about it focus on your lyrics, just because they are important to the music. That’s cool that it starts with just sitting down and writing out some chords.
BG: It’s always weird. I’ve never really understood how people could have notebooks full of lyrics and then spend their time trying to put them into a song. For me, I like to pride myself on sort of the cadences I sing with because the lyrics are written specifically for the melody. Whenever I’ve tried to write lyrics and then put them into a song afterwards it just never seems to fit ’cause the lyrics aren’t written for that cadence and for whatever neurotic reason I kind of like to have the lyrics be somewhat kind of complete sentences and you can read them on a page and they make sense. They’re not like Michael Stipe lyrics circa ’83. Which are some of my favorite lyrics, but I just don’t write that way. For me, I’ve never been able to do it that way. The lyrics are always the last part. And also, whatever tonally a song—the melody and the piano part tend to set the tone for what the song should be about anyways. It’s almost as if they guide where the lyric goes after the music is written.

SS: When you’re listening to music do you find yourself attracted to or driven more by melody and the musical part of songs moreso than lyrics?
BG: It’s weird, because I have the hardest time remembering lyrics to other people’s songs. I’ve on multiple occasions recorded the wrong lyrics for songs, like when I’m doing covers or stuff like that. For whatever reason I just have this inability to remember lyrics that I haven’t written. That’s not meant to sound in any way egotistical. Lyrics and names escape me all the time. I can meet somebody 30 times and not remember their name. It’s a horrible thing, it’s a horrible personality flaw that I have, but for some reason it just goes in one ear and goes out the other. I can’t do it. I remember people’s faces like the back of my hand and it’s the same way a lot for songs that I hear. I can pick out a song and hum the melody after hearing it once, but like I was on the flight home last night and not singing along loudly but just kind of quietly humming along to songs I was listening to on my iPod, to songs I’ve heard a thousand times and I couldn’t—I just didn’t know what the next lyric was coming. I find myself not necessarily as much studying—there will be a turn of phrase somebody will throw out there that I’ll be like, “That’s a great line,” those will stick out, but remembering the song as a whole is always really difficult for me. But I tend to be attracted to the melody first anyways. I was brought up with pop music. I tried being a punk rocker in high school and that didn’t fit. I was just all about pop music. I love melody. It’s probably the reason I find myself leaning a lot more heavily on my LP collection these days than on the blogosphere.

SS: That must make karaoke difficult.
BG: Yeah, a little bit. But that also presupposes that—I don’t tend to spend too time singing karaoke. I feel like I get enough singing time in with the band. There’ll always be a Beach Boys song in there or something.

SS: You guys just played that show in Bremerton, you’ve had a few shows. How was that show, in particular? Did you enjoy doing it?
BG: I did. It was a little rough. It was our first show back since we finished the Plans tour in Seattle in December 2006. We were as well-rehearsed as we could be, it’s not like we didn’t remember the songs, we spent the last few months playing together, but nothing kind of compares to being up in front of people for the first time in a year and half. I think the show went really well. It won’t go down in the annals of the greatest Death Cab shows ever, but I certainly think it was a really good show and people that are close to us, close enough that they never lie to us all seemed to say about the same thing—it was good, really good show … We were playing a lot of new songs on this trip down the West coast to Coachella. We’d play four or five old songs and kind of start to fall into the old patterns and the old familiarity of these songs and then hit a new song, it was kind of like hitting a speed bump at 70 miles per hour. It was kind of like, wait a second, we’re not so comfortable with this song yet. By the time we got down into California and we had two or three shows under our belt, it all started taking focus and feeling really good. It started to be familiar and comfortable and really enjoyable. I’m just really excited for this record to come out. It’s felt like the longest limbo time between finishing the album and having the record come out that we’ve ever had, I think. I’m just kind of anxious to have this out in the world and have people hopefully find some things to enjoy about it.

Narrow Stairs was released May 13 on Atlantic Records. For more on Death Cab for Cutie, see their official website. And stay tuned to Sound for some more Death Cab-related goodness. In our June issue we’ll have a feature on DCFC and the making of their new album.

Photo courtesy of Atlantic Records.