Ben Gibbard on The Postal Service’s Give Up at 20: “This Record Has Really Found a Home in People’s Lives”
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The post Ben Gibbard on The Postal Service’s Give Up at 20: “This Record Has Really Found a Home in People’s Lives” appeared first on Consequence.
If you’re at all plugged into the indie music circuit, you’ve heard about (and likely attempted to get tickets for) Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service’s upcoming co-headlining tour. Both fronted by Ben Gibbard, 2023 sees both acts celebrating the 20th anniversary of a landmark album in their discography. For The Postal Service, Gibbard’s collaboration with producer Jimmy Tamborello and fellow vocalist Jenny Lewis, the anniversary happens to be of their only album: the indietronica masterpiece Give Up, released on February 19th, 2003.
Two decades in, the widely successful one-off project retains its endearing appeal. Tamborello’s electronic compositions, still engaging to this day, suit Gibbard’s highly melodic brand of indie songwriting as well as any of Death Cab’s rock tunes. Throw in the nostalgia of songs like the skittering “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” or the ubiquitous pop perfection of “Such Great Heights,” and it’s no wonder Give Up has maintained its relevance despite no proper follow-up and 10-year gaps in touring.
But before Give Up became a canonized work of the genre and Sub Pop’s second-best-selling release of all time (only bested by Nirvana’s Nevermind), it was simply the melding of a few friends eager to work together, following creativity as it came to them. It was the product of personal development, band dynamics, and a restlessly prolific period all aligning for a brief but potent time.
“Death Cab had kind of a reckoning on Halloween in 2001 where we almost broke up at the venue we were playing out in Baltimore,” Gibbard tells Consequence over Zoom about the period leading up to The Postal Service. “One of the things that I think we all realized was that we were just really burned out,” he continues, “At the risk of losing momentum, we realized we really needed time away. And it was that time away that allowed my mind to wander and kind of just be a person in the world and not necessarily a songwriter who’s actively trying to write a record because we have to be in the studio in a month. It just gave me a lot more room to experiment and fuck around.”
Being the sole songwriter for Death Cab at the time, part of that fucking around led to the demos that would become Transatlanticism. Another side to that fucking around, though, was allowing someone else in on the writing process.
“Everything that got written for Postal Service was a direct reaction to the music that Jimmy was sending me,” Gibbard recalls. “[It was] Jimmy sending me a CDR with some music on it, me putting it into Pro Tools, cutting it up, and writing specifically to that. There was never a moment where I was sitting on some brilliant song and thinking like, ‘Wow, is this gonna be a Postal Service or Death Cab song? Who’s gonna get this one?’ It was always like, ‘Jimmy sent me this music, and it seems to fit.’ The things he was sending were so evocative that it just allowed my mind to wander to places that it tended to not go when I was just sitting by myself working on music.”
The duo had already proven their creative chemistry on “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” for Tamborello’s Dntel project, so by the time they were working on a full-length collaboration, it was time to make good on that proof of concept.
And make good they did, pulling in Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley to provide additional vocals and coming through with stories of heartbroken self-reflection (“I was the one worth leaving”), the absence of heartbroken self-reflection (“You’re getting carried away feeling sorry for yourself with these revisions and gaps in history”), and surprisingly hopeful sounding existentialism (“We’ll become silhouettes when our bodies finally go”). Backed by instrumentation that swings between digital iciness and sample-based symphonies, the result is a record with an utterly enveloping mood, undeniable character, and can’t-get-it-out-of-your-head hooks.
“When I was writing both of these records, it didn’t feel like a lot of work, which is a weird thing to say,” Gibbard says. “Looking back on it, this was undoubtedly the most fruitful period of my creative life to date, that I was able to write both [Transatlanticism and Give Up] at the same time. I’m not saying that to be self-aggrandizing. I was young and didn’t know any better. I just thought, ‘I can do both, it’s fine. It’s totally doable.’ And sometimes, it’s just the unfounded confidence of youth that allows you to kind of put yourself in a situation to take on two projects at the same time and then not feel as if one is compromising the other.”
Whether Gibbard’s youthful confidence was unfounded or not, his work with Tamborello and Lewis speaks for itself. The record and its accompanying singles crept up the charts as the act set out on a tour that proved to be much too modest for how immensely popular the band quickly became. Years on, “Such Great Heights” remains a go-to track everyone can agree on; both the pretentious indie kids and mall-shopping normies found something to love.
Anticipation for a follow-up to Give Up was almost immediate, and with how commercially successful the record was, it seemed inevitable. Yet, as the years passed, that sense of inevitability slowly started to fade.
“When Jimmy and I tried to start working on a second Postal Service record, it was also the time I was writing songs for Plans, and there was a lot of pressure with that record because we went from this small indie band to everything happening with Transatlanticism and Give Up and The OC and all that shit,” Gibbard explains. “And so all of a sudden, there was not the carefree environment in which to write two records. The pressure of following up both of those records, there was no way to ever follow up either, let alone both.”
Which is not to say they didn’t try. The Postal Service was, by all measures, just as invested in new music as their fans. They just happened to set the bar as high as possible on their first try, and nothing they came up with seemed to clear such a great height.
“I was migrating a bunch of files from one drive to a new drive, and I came across a folder of Pro Tools sessions for Postal Service demos in 2007,” Gibbard tells Consequence. “And I put those on and was like, ‘Yeah, there’s a reason we didn’t make a second record, these are not good.’ And I don’t mean like, ‘Oh, you say it’s not good, but really there’s something cool there.’ No, these are not good. I always felt kind of relieved, in a way, that we had not attempted to push through and make that [second] record. It wouldn’t have been what it needed to be.”
The absence of Postal Service’s second LP, however, did nothing to affect the new crop of indietronica fans that now had an appetite for their style of music. And with an open market, other bands influenced by the sounds and impact of Give Up started to find similar success — some even facing criticism for recycling a little too much air.
Gibbard, for his part, harbors no ill will for any artist tagged with the label of “Postal Service rip off.” “I don’t see Give Up as being a very groundbreaking record,” he says, listing several influences including The Notwist’s Neon Golden. “There’s very little difference between what we were trying to do and what the Human League, Depeche Mode, or [Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark]. It’s really just a continuation of that melding of electronic and pop music, right?”
“It’s also not like we made this record, sold no copies, and somebody went and stole our sound and went triple platinum, right? We’re doing just fine. We were able to buy houses off of this record,” Gibbard continues. “And, look, I hear all the influences of everything I’ve ever stolen from as an artist myself. Our first Death Cab record sounds like a Built to Spill genre study, right? I can’t really turn around and give someone shit about lifting elements of the Postal Service record, which is inevitably a number of other-sounding music, too.”
Though Gibbard might downplay it, the past two decades have solidified Give Up as a crowning achievement of the genre. Look no further than their upcoming reunion tour for evidence, with shows selling out and additional nights added at venues like Madison Square Garden and The Hollywood Bowl.
As the record’s birthday renews interest in Give Up and the story of The Postal Service, it increasingly feels like a project that will just always be around — a comforting thought. Regardless if people know the names Gibbard, Tamborello, Lewis, or even The Postal Service, they’ll know the chorus to “Such Great Heights.”
“I’m just really humbled and moved by the fact that the record still means so much to people,” Gibbard reflects. “One of my favorite quotes on this kind of similar thing is from William Gibson, where he’s talking about the Neuromancer trilogy, and somebody asked him what’s it like to have these books that became these touchstones of cyberpunk. And he’s like, ‘I think of my books like they’re like my children who went off in the world and had great adventures.’ It’s a very apt observation about what it’s like to make a piece of work that leaves you. It enters the world, it’s released, and then it really no longer belongs to you and becomes the property of the listeners.”
“It’s really a testament to how this record, for whatever series of reasons, has really found a home in people’s lives,” he continues. “And you can only take so much credit for that.”
Grab tickets for Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service’s upcoming co-headlining tour here.
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Ben Gibbard on The Postal Service’s Give Up at 20: “This Record Has Really Found a Home in People’s Lives”
Jonah Krueger
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