Death Cab for Cutie: The campaign trail

Death Cab for Cutie has the facts and it's pushing the vote

By Mike Prevatt

No one expected many of the concertgoers attending the liberal-leaning Vote for Change shows to still be unsure whom they'd pick for president on Nov. 2. But as keyboardist/guitarist/producer Chris Walla discovered while his band, Death Cab for Cutie, participated in the VFC tour, such voters--mostly security guards working the shows--were bountiful at stops like Redding, Pa., and Grand Rapids, Mich.

"You hear about these undecided voters, and I'd personally started to think of them as some rare insect or plant that you couldn't possibly ever make contact with," says Walla. "But I've made contact with them and they're a very strange species. It's very bizarre. There are so many people that really haven't made up their minds."

The musicians of Death Cab for Cutie, however, know exactly which lever they're pulling come Election Day; to paraphrase the title of their second album, they have the facts and they're voting for John Kerry. They have vocalized their support so much that they sought out an artist campaign that would help spread the word--hence their involvement with the Vote for Change tour, during which the indie rockers found themselves playing arenas with fellow Seattle act Pearl Jam.

"Like so many other bands, we've been complaining and wondering if there's anything we could do this election year," says Walla. "The way the whole tour came together, and the way we got involved, was just sort of asking questions and seeing what was going on and [saying] that if there was a tour, we would want to be a part of it."

Vote for Change--and the handful of dates scheduled throughout October and November--make up the final leg of a year-long tour that has seen Death Cab go from being an underground fave to one of the most beloved acts in modern rock. Its acclaimed 2003 album, Transatlanticism, has sold roughly 200,000 copies--huge for an independent label act--and it has been featured prominently on MTV2, Fox's "The O.C." and HBO's "Six Feet Under." And yet the band hasn't undergone any radical changes or had any issues dealing with its growing popularity.

"[Singer] Ben [Gibbard] had to unlist his phone number," says Walla. "That's probably the biggest one. This whole thing we've been doing, we've been doing it for seven years, and the whole trajectory of our career has been so slow and linear and everything we've done has made sense. There are probably weird things happening because it's part of the ever-changing life of a band now doing well for itself."

And how did a contemplative and relatively mellow act like Death Cab do so well for itself? For one, its success is an outgrowth of its cultish fan base, whose word of mouth tends to be highly passionate. The comparable commercial success of Gibbard's side project, the Postal Service, surely provided a boost. Also, Death Cab has been associated with a movement of other newly ascendant alt-rock acts, such as Modest Mouse, Interpol and the Shins. And, as Walla points out, there are more avenues than ever exposing new artists to music fans.

"It's perfectly valid for someone in the middle of the country without a Net connection and a college radio station to watch a commercial and discover the Shins, and then go out and buy their record," says Walla. "That's one of many examples of how people can discover new bands. It's made the majors and the broadcast companies to look and see that there's another way to exploit bands."

Death Cab's success means that, though it has reached the end of touring for this album cycle--it will record a new album early next year--it's in no position to coast all the way home. Besides, that would just bore the musicians anyway.

"The tour we did a year ago, we had sold a tenth of the amount of copies of Transatlanticism as we have now," says Walla. "The sheer number of people coming to these shows is so much bigger than a year ago. There are a lot of people coming to see us for the first time. It's new for a lot of people, but we're making it new for us, too."