Ben Gibbard fronts Death Cab for Cutie, a band from the Pacific Northwest whose moody, rigorously introspective music rose up in the patch of scorched earth left by ’90s alt-rock behemoths Nirvana and Pavement, coming into play as a sort of post-millennial soundtrack for young people. After releasing several successful records on indie label Barsuk, they made the decision to enter the major label arena in 2005, releasing the wildly successful Plans on Atlantic Records. Gibbard also shares songwriting duties with laptop innovator Jimmy Tamborello in the Postal Service.
Wayne Coyne has been, for the past quarter-century, the central creative force behind the Flaming Lips. Their most recent album, At War with the Mystics, finds them at war with contemporary popular music, as they retool and reverse-engineer the form with an invigorating recklessness. The Lips’ determination to make music as vast and cataclysmic as a Venusian storm front will not surprise auditors of albums such as In a Priest-Driven Ambulance, Clouds Taste Metallic, or The Soft Bulletin, but the crazed vocal harmonies and startling atmospheric flourishes of At War with the Mystics remind us that we haven’t yet mined a fraction of what’s possible in rock.
The following conversation occurred by phone; Coyne sat in a hotel room in San Francisco, having just taken part in the Noise Pop festival. Gibbard had just arrived in Austin as part of a tour of the Southwest.
I. ARENA ROCK
WAYNE COYNE: Hey, Ben. I’m sitting here in San Francisco.Where are you at?
BEN GIBBARD: We just pulled into Austin about fifteen minutes ago. We’re in the midst of our first full-production, arena-style tour. We’re carrying a PA and all that kind of stuff, and we’re co-headlining with that band Franz Ferdinand—
WC: Oh, right—cool! Do you guys play after them?
BG: We’re flip-flopping. It’s kind of intimidating, playing after a band like that, because they’re so high-energy. We have our rocking moments, but we’re nowhere near as high-energy as these guys are. But I’m getting this impression from the crowd that people are coming to see us be us, and to see Franz Ferdinand be Franz Ferdinand. I think that we’re both learning about ways to integrate the other band’s elements into our own, to kind of make the show seem more cohesive, if that makes any sense, you know?
WC: Well, right. You want to make the whole show good. That’s what I think bands forget a lot of the time, that you don’t want the opening band to suck. You want the opening band to be good. You want the...
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