Alphabetical Order: Death Cab for Cutie - 'Transatlanticism'

An album that stirs up feelings from college that I can't quite remember.

Welcome to ZERO CRED, the only music newsletter ever to exist. Alphabetical Order is a project where I go through my record collection and try to make sense of my life, from A to Z.

The whole time I was talking to Ben Gibbard I kept thinking: Wow. I’m talking to Ben Gibbard.

Normally I don’t get starstruck about talking to people, especially not over the phone. And it wasn’t even that I was starstruck, really. It was just his voice. For years that voice had been singing to me. In the car, in my bedroom, on my iPod as I walked around campus. The voice comforted me and promised me beautiful things. The voice told me that someday I will be loved and that I will cross the country alone. And now the voice that had become so familiar was just saying normal-ass things to me. “It’s going good, man. Can’t complain.” Things like that. At one point the voice said my name. Ben Gibbard’s voice said my name to me.

This was 2018. I was doing an interview where I asked him to rank Death Cab for Cutie’s albums in order of personal preference. For an hour we talked about the band’s catalog, joked about becoming an accidental indie rock icon, and lightly shit talked emo. Ben was candid about missteps he’d made in his career and thoughtful about his successes. I’d done a lot of these interviews and thought this one went pretty well.

A few days later it went up on the internet and I was not ready for what happened next. The response was immediate and overwhelming. It was the most popular thing I’d ever published. For several weeks, the comments flooded in. Readers wanted to shout their opinions as loudly as possible. They wanted their own rankings of the albums known. The guy who wrote the albums was wrong, they said, and here was the correct order.

I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of personal Death Cab album rankings. Every opinion and order possible. A lot of times, a band has a clear fan-favorite in their catalog that people flock to. But pick any Death Cab album and there is someone out there willing to defend it to the death.

After reading the opinions of everyone on earth, I realized something about Death Cab for Cutie’s albums. Most people’s favorite has nothing to do with the songs on it or the lyrics or the artistic vision behind it. Most people’s favorite is the one that came out when they were in college.

And by this metric I have a tough choice because over the course of my college years in the early 2000s, the band released three albums. Four if we’re counting Give Up, the lone release by Gibbard’s side project, The Postal Service. A month into my freshman year, Death Cab released The Photo Album. The summer I graduated, they released Plans. And right smack in the middle of those bookends, Gibbard slamdunked two of indie rock’s most beloved records into pop culture within months of each other with Transatlanticism and Give Up.

So I thought it would be pretty easy to sit here and write about the impact of a Death Cab for Cutie album on my life. I’ve been deep in my feelings to the sound of Ben Gibbard’s voice for more than 20 years, with most of those feelings concentrated in college. I figured it’d be as simple as picking one of their records, typing up one of my life’s many truly humiliating stories about having my heart brutally torn apart (but you know, in a funny way!), and calling it a day.

But a couple weeks ago, I sat down to write and nothing came to mind. I tried again last week and again nothing. Right now I’m staring at my computer and still nothing is coming. The cursor is taunting me every time it blinks.

blink blink blink

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I don’t remember much about college. And not in a fun, sexy way. I just didn’t like it there. I never really connected with the people and I didn’t get much out of my classes.

But everything off campus was exciting. There was an indie rock boom going on in New York City then. Today they make books and documentaries about it. Indie rock guys will sit in front of a camera with their salt and pepper hair and talk about how important it all was. But at the time it was just happening. It was just normal.

There were blogs that told you what shows were coming up and what bands were worth checking out. I spent a lot of time in record stores buying new albums that I still call my favorites today. Cursive’s The Ugly Organ and The Weakerthans’ Reconstruction Site and Death Cab for Cutie’s Transatlanticism. I have listened to Transatlanticism countless times and think it’s a flawless record. Again, though, it came out while I was in college so I may be biased. But Ben Gibbard agrees with me that it’s his best work so there’s that.

But I hadn’t listened to Transatlanticism in a while, so today I put it on and took a walk. “The New Year” came on and it immediately felt both familiar and distant. It stirred up feelings but they weren’t tied to any specific moments. Just vague flashes of blurry faces and hazy settings. People I once knew and places I used to go.

So this is the new year
And I don’t feel any different…

I close my eyes when I hear those words and all I can picture are AIM away messages. Did I quote these words there in an effort to seem deep and sensitive? Or was it a friend or classmate who did it? It sounds like something I’d do. But who was I trying to impress? And what didn’t I feel any different about? What the hell was I talking about?

Every line on this album has feelings attached to it but I can’t directly place them. I hear the way Ben Gibbard’s voice bends a syllable when it asks, Can you tell me why you have been so oh oh oh sad? I used to have a million answers for this question but now I can’t think of any. Why was I so sad? Even when he sings about glove compartments and tail lights, it stirs up something but I can’t say exactly what.

I pull a hard drive out of a drawer and look through old photos to remember who I was then and am appalled by how I looked. Most appalling is the revelation that I more or less dressed the same way I do today except everything fit much worse then. Band shirts and jeans that were somehow both too tight and too baggy. And I wore way too many bracelets and ugly hats. Chunky leather wrist straps and jelly bracelets. Trucker hats and that Fidel Castro cap that was popular for a year. Cheap haircuts and bad skin.

I get so desperate for any college memories at all that I start poking around my alma mater’s website. It’s pretty much the same as it was 20 years ago. There are photos of students laughing on campus and looking very smart as they read books on the quad. One woman throws a tiny football and smiles. I click through the photos and suddenly remember the year I spent interning at the school’s marketing office and they forced me to be in one of these photoshoots with a group of other students. The photographer told us to gesture like we were having a thoughtful conversation. But I didn’t know who any of these people were so we just pretended. I think they used this photo in a calendar that year.

This memory does not count. This is a fake memory.

We looked like giants…

Wait hang on. A real memory about this line is coming to me. It’s a tiny one. In senior year I had an art professor named Jebba. He taught printmaking and it was one of the only classes I enjoyed. He used to call me Jasper Johns because whenever he taught us a new process like silkscreening or woodcutting or etching, I wanted to learn it as fast as possible and didn’t really care about what I was making so I’d just make an upside-down American flag. My girlfriend was in the class with me but she usually made prints of vases with flowers in them. Sometimes we’d listen to this song in the car and change the words to “we looked like Jebbas…” and laugh.

Is this something? Is this worth remembering?

You’d skip your early classes and we’d learn how our bodies worked…

I used to quote this line to her too. Mainly in the mornings when we’d skip classes to have lazy sex in her room or watch MTV2 specials about Franz Ferdinand. I’d sing this line at her and she would roll her eyes at me. I am realizing something now that I wish I’d realized back then which is that this woman did not love me or even really care about me very much. And in hindsight I didn’t love her either. But Ben Gibbard’s voice made everything seem so goddamn important. Everything was romance and heartache. Every connection mattered and every moment was the most important moment of my entire life.

But I know it’s too late
I should have given you a reason to stay…

And the voice kept me company when she ended things the week after we graduated. The voice sang to me as I wallowed and waited for the phone to ring. For weeks I waited while the voice sang. And then one day it did ring. She asked if I wanted to come over tomorrow night. It had been a while and she was thinking about me. She sent me a smiley face.

:)

So I drove to her house because I hoped we might get back together. We sat in her bedroom for a while and talked. I tried very hard to emote sad things with my face. I don’t remember what we talked about. I don’t remember anything about the room except for the general layout. I don’t remember what she was wearing or what kind of stupid bracelets I had on. The only thing I remember was the trash can.

She said she had to use the bathroom and while she was gone I noticed there were two empty beer cans at the top of her trash. My mind made up an entire story about the cans. That the cans were left over from a night with another man. That they stayed up drinking two beers and having one sex. That they laughed about me in secret. I ran through the list of men it might’ve been until I saw it all very clearly. I knew who it was and what they did together and I was sure of it.

I slipped out while she was still in the bathroom. Down the stairs and out the front door and into my car. I put Transatlanticism on and drove off. I never saw her again. This is my final memory of her. The official end to my college experience. A few weeks later I ran into her friend at a party who told me that the story my mind made up was true.

All of these moments felt so overwhelming and painful at the time. The pain lasted for months and years and I remember thinking it would never go away. But I guess at some point it did because I can barely recall it now. I couldn’t say exactly when the pain left or where it went. Maybe it just faded over the years. Or maybe new pain eventually came along and covered up the old pain.

So that’s what I feel when I hear Ben Gibbard’s voice. Pain. Pain left over from a past life and fragments of hurt that have dissolved over the years. Joan Didion once wrote that it’s easy to see the beginnings of things and harder to see the ends. I wonder if she ever listened to “A Lack of Color.” I wonder if she heard the voice too.

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While I’m searching my hard drive for more embarrassing remnants of a life that has faded away long ago, I find the recording of my conversation with Ben Gibbard. I listen back to it and hope to discover something buried in there that will explain it all. Somewhere in this hour must be the key to unlocking the truth about pain and where it goes when it ends.

Do we just get farther and farther away from our pain until it becomes so tiny we have to squint to see it? Or do we find places to store our pain and hide it there forever? Does our pain live in our records that we keep on our shelves?

These are the kinds of questions the voice always had answers to. But nothing comes. We just wind down our chat and the voice says more normal things.

“This was a lot of fun,” it tells me.

It was, I say.

The voice says goodbye.

Bye, I say. Thanks again.

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