The band focused on capturing the best take of their parts – at times separately, at other times in pairs – and built songs by layering these performances (and other musical ideas) on top of each other. “We’ve deconstructed little pieces of songs before like this,” Walla says. “But we’ve never pulled the thread out of the whole sweater and then made a new sweater out of it. Not like this.”
Codes and Keys immediately makes a statement with the first song, “Home Is a Fire.” Staticky percussion chatters beneath several layers of bustling rhythms and echoing, spooky vocals. The lush instrumentation continues with the title track, on which strings from San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra sway in time with oompah drums and graceful vaudeville piano. The orchestra also adds lightness to “Stay Young, Go Dancing,” an upbeat album-ender that’s as fanciful as Randy Newman’s Pixar movie contributions.
Elsewhere, the New Order-like “Doors Unlocked and Open” has a dense, dark bassline, while the centerpiece “Unobstructed Views” meshes floating-in-space electronic noises with angelic twinkling and strident piano; the effect is a heavenly Explosions in the Sky. “St. Peter’s Cathedral” begins with Gibbard singing a cappella, and gradually blooms into a mournful but somehow joyous song filled with wordless, bubbly harmonies and cinematic synthesized drone.
“With all the songs that Ben wrote, he really experimented a lot with his songwriting,” McGerr observes. “He started to use his voice more as an instrument than just somebody singing lyrics.”
Walla too says he approached Codes and Keys as an experiment, and he’s grateful that his bandmates “were all willing to let me lead them down the rabbit hole on a lot of different songs.” He approached some tunes as if he was a scientist doing an experiment, constructing elaborate gear setups (think a Rube Goldberg machine) to create, manipulate or trigger certain sounds. The result is a complex album whose gifts only reveal themselves with repeated listens. Even Codes and Keys’ poppiest moments, “Monday Morning” and “Underneath the Sycamore,” have dense layers of bustling texture lurking below the surface.
“In the last couple of years I for one have been really moved by a lot of records that have some pretty unconventional palettes,” Walla says. “I’ve been learning that there’s a way to present a song and a way to move somebody with a landscape they haven’t necessarily seen or heard before. I really wanted to try to do that. I wanted to try and make a new visual for the cinema of song.”
Despite the nomadic recording process – and the expanded sonic palette — it’s a testament to the band’s talent and chemistry that Codes and Keys is a cohesive statement, a collection of songs that hangs together as a well-sequenced album. Walla says that cohesion is something he discussed with Codes and Keys’ mixer, Alan Moulder. “I was really interested in making a record rather than a recording,” Walla says. “And particularly when it came to vocal treatments and drawing big, heavy dark lines between verses and choruses and doing that sort of thing, I asked him to be pretty brave and pretty bold with all of that stuff.”
Indeed, Moulder’s deft mixing touches helped Codes and Keys’ nuanced details stand out. “Every song is its own little sonic journey, which is a cheesy way of putting it,” Gibbard says. “He found a place on the shelf for every little sound.”
Adds Harmer, “I’m so thankful he was a part of this process. His mixes are incredible, and he brought something to the band that we’ve never had, just that outside perspective. It was nice to have an editor, for lack of a better word, at the very end of it to be able to sift through all of the ideas and focus in on the things that he thought were the most salient and most important ones to save.”
The attention to detail in the music matches the measured precision of Gibbard’s lyrics on Codes and Keys. Silence is just as important as what words are spoken, and economy of language is prized. “Throughout writing almost all of the songs on this record, I found that I wanted to keep it really concise,” Gibbard says. “I wanted songs to have more hooks, less lyrics, if that makes sense.”
If anything, often the lyrics are the hooks. The verses of “Doors Unlocked and Open,” for instance, are a series of clipped but evocative phrases: “Isolations / Dotted lines / Seas of concrete / With wild eyes / Streaking colors.” On “Unobstructed Views,” the song blooms into a section of stacked, Beach Boys-go-prog harmonies cooing, “New love.”
“This record’s more oblique than the last couple of records were,” Walla says. “It’s really economical, but it’s also not hyper-literal. There are pieces of it that are, but it’s not as plain in story terms — or language terms, I guess, than the last couple records have been. And I for one am really thrilled that I don’t have any idea what like five or six of these songs are about.”
The mystery doesn’t diminish the impact of the songs – if anything, they’re more relatable because listeners can apply their own interpretation of the lyrics. “As a band we’ve always encouraged Ben to write from his heart – what do you know, what are you going through – and that will be the truth,” Harmer says.
As always, that soul-searching guided Gibbard to dark and light places. But while acknowledging that he wrote several songs “with a heavy pen” Gibbard says he’s most proud that Codes and Keys is a “very even, well-balanced record, emotionally speaking.” Indeed, the songs run the gamut from “St. Peter’s Cathedral” – which ends with a gut-wrenching refrain, “There’s nothing past this” — to the title track’s assertion, “We are one, we are alive.”
“I didn’t necessarily know it at the time, but I was writing Narrow Stairs in a very dark period of my life,” Gibbard says. “I had lost control over a lot of things that I should have had control over, and I needed to make a lot of changes in my life. The record is a very dark album in a lot of ways. And after we finished making that record and I was listening back to it, I had this realization that I don’t want to write this record ever again. I don’t want this to be the thing that I write all the time.”
Change is certainly something that the members of Death Cab for Cutie experienced in the years between recording Narrow Stairs and Codes and Keys. McGerr now has two children, Walla ended a long relationship and moved away from Portland and Harmer got married. Gibbard’s own life changes, in fact, inspired one of the recurring themes of Codes and Keys – musings about the search for (and idea of) home.
The lyrical phrases in “Home Is a Fire” display a certain anxiety – “Bricks make me nervous,” “Plates they will shift/houses will shake” – and ends with the resigned realization, “Nothing’s the same.” The album’s first single, “You Are a Tourist,” makes the insightful observation, “And if you feel just like a tourist in the city you were born, then it’s time to go/And define your destination: there’s so many different places to call home.”
“I feel like if there is a theme of home throughout the record, it has as much to do because of the changes that have happened in my life,” Gibbard says. “I’ve moved from Seattle to Los Angeles, I’ve gotten married, I’ve rediscovered what the definition of home is.” The latter discovery spurred Gibbard to reflect on and revisit – intentionally – some of his past lyrics.
For instance, the line “Life is sweet in the belly of the beast” on “Stay Young, Go Dancing” softens the staunch anti-California sentiments on The Photo Album’s “Why You’d Want to Live Here.” The bird metaphor of Narrow Stairs’ “Talking Bird,” meanwhile, is now turned around and applied to the protagonist of “Monday Morning.” “There is a re-engineering of the lyrics in a handful of spots on the record,” Gibbard says, “just because I want to reclaim sentiment that I wrote about and re-evaluate it and re-present it.”
Indeed, Codes and Keys’ lyrics are very much focused on the here-and-now, which is something Harmer admires. “I’m really happy that his songs are at a maturity level and have a level of wisdom that reflect his age and his adventures,” he says. “They ring true with me in that sense.”
Walla agrees. “I’m so into this record and connected to this record lyrically in a way that I have only been in pieces for the last couple of records,” he says, citing the “invitation and celebration” of them.
In conversation, it’s obvious that the members of Death Cab for Cutie are still each other’s biggest fans. More important, they genuinely enjoy making music with each other and being in a band together. Their only motivation is to create music they like – and to impress and satisfy each other. Theirs might not be a controversial rock & roll story – but it is one rooted in stable, supportive brotherhood.
“We left college and spent years in a van together, and we’ve spent all of this time learning from one another and growing emotionally and otherwise over the years,” Harmer says. “The fabric of our relationships is very complex and certainly something that is very important to me, and probably to everyone in the band. We are a support network for each other; we are so much more than four guys who get together and play music.”
Three and a half years in the making, the efforts of writing and recording THERE IS NO ENEMY led Built to Spill founder Doug Martsch to wonder whether this would be the last album he ever makes. As his wife, I watched him work, pouring hour after hour , day after day into writing. Song lyrics were labored over then thrown in the trash, guitar parts revised again (and again). A musician and artist like Doug edits far more than he keeps.
For over twenty years, Doug Martsch has been writing and recording music. Built to Spill members Brett Nelson (bass), Scott Plouf (drums) Jim Roth (guitar), and Brett Netson (guitar) have all been musicians for two decades. That adds up to more than a century. Doug’s strong aesthetic combines with the band members’ mix of approaches to create an aural topography. Doug sets course and navigates. Each member of Built to Spill comes to the music with a different set of expectations and ideals.
With the complexity and variety of music they have created, Built to Spill endeavors to make songs interesting to themselves and their audience. They hope that the band will remain special and that people will discover the music for themselves. Year after year, new fans show up. Just like the band members, listeners come to the music with expectations and ideals. They make up their own ideas about the songs.
I once overheard Doug on the phone being interviewed. He sounded almost stand-offish in not “telling” an interviewer the meaning of a song or describing its origin. Doug and I have speculated about this sometimes: meaning (whether intended or not )is not inherent in lyrics or in any art. Listening, looking closely, and responding with one’s feelings, thoughts, and senses transforms. Doug simply does wish to disrupt any meaning someone else has found.
I can barely repress the urge to tell you what THERE IS NO ENEMY means to me. When making the new record, Doug literally lived in the studio. To be able to work all day and all night. To spend hours and hours laying down guitar tracks he realized he couldn’t use since the first live takes had the best tone and feel. To undigitally remix the record. With so much work behind the band, the record is here. Now comes the album’s journey into the world. This venture Built to Spill does not map out. The record is yours to respond to.
When I listen to songs Doug writes and the whole band plays, I think, “How can people make music this good?” Even though I witness and minorly assist, I still do not understand how theirs or any beloved music comes into the world. To me, the process and result are magic.
BUILT TO SPILL
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