Hunger for nostalgia is not unique to the music fan, but the music fan has a tendency to consume as much nostalgia as is placed in front of them, for as long as it is there. If you are Death Cab for Cutie—the indie band that came out of the Pacific Northwest music scene in the late nineties and spent the two-thousands releasing a string of massively recognizable songs, including “I Will Follow You Into the Dark,” “Soul Meets Body,” and “Transatlanticism,” to name a few—you could capitalize off of it to such a degree that you would not need to make any new music at all. The band’s catalogue of indie pop from the early to mid-two-thousands contains enough to satisfy both devoted fans and those who maybe heard one of their hits in a movie years ago.

But as much as I, too, revel in the time and place those songs take me back to, I’ve found myself significantly more drawn to the body of work that Death Cab has accumulated since 2015, beginning with “Kintsugi,” an album that veered into new-wave territory. Ben Gibbard, the band’s longtime front man, has been writing songs that feel more patient, expansive, and novelistic. 2022’s “Asphalt Meadows” was a high point of the band’s career, building upon the melancholy of their early work while upgrading the romantic confusion and malaise to speak to the middle of someone’s life.

“I Built You a Tower,” coming out this month, feels like a spiritual sibling to “Kintsugi.” If the earlier album orbited the theme of drifting apart (its title refers to the Japanese practice of repairing cracked ceramics with gold), “I Built You a Tower” asks what happens after the rupture: What do you do with the grief you’re carrying, and the grief to come? How is it possible to feel any individual sorrow in a world that manufactures horrors far greater than your personal ones? Gibbard’s lyrics swerve from resignation to regret to defiance. On the track “Riptides,” he sings of having “seen too many people leaving to take it too hard,” a shrug that doubles as a thesis statement of sorts. One must build a container to compartmentalize one’s pain, and the more pain there is to compartmentalize the larger the container gets.

Gibbard, who lives in Seattle, turns fifty this year. Between 2023 and 2025, he went through a separation and then a divorce from his wife, the photographer Rachel Demy, who he’d been married to since 2016. At the same time, he was on an anniversary tour playing twenty-year-old records by both Death Cab and his other longtime band, Postal Service. When that tour concluded, the work of making “I Built You a Tower” began. In his free time, Gibbard is an ultramarathoner, running courses that stretch fifty miles or beyond. During a conversation over Zoom in April, we began by discussing movement, aging, and the realities of time. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I was thinking about running as I was listening to the new record, because running is something that helps me check in with myself and humble myself as I get older. More than anything else, it gives me information about who I was and who I’m becoming. And I’m wondering about marathoning as it relates to your understanding of the passage of time, and to loss, both physical and emotional. How does that inform your songwriting?

What’s interesting about getting older, for me, is that I have to put in more to get less back. So, you know, in the case of writing this album, I-slash-we put together, like, ninety-some songs over the course of three or four years. I mean, I don’t know exactly when I started really writing in earnest for this record, but let’s just say it’s 2023. And so I’ve been finding that the longer I do this, I have to write more songs to get less back. So I’m doing more writing than I’ve ever done. But the return, the quality of return, just as a function of volume, is a lot lower. And I think the run this past weekend was a real object lesson in that as well.

In the past couple years, I’ve started to really slow down. There is no activity that really tells you that you are getting older as much as running does. You can’t lie to yourself. You can’t lean into your ego. You can’t lean into anything. You are being faced with it every day. You know, when we’re playing shows, and I’m looking out at an audience of a fairly wide age gap at this point, the young people tend to be in the front. And looking at them I can feel for a moment, I can delude myself that I’m also a young person. I can delude myself that I’m looking through my twenty-five-year-old eyes at twenty-five-year-olds. But it doesn’t work that way with running. There’s no ability to delude oneself.

You all have grown now, as a band. I feel like “middle-aged” can sound derogatory, but I mean it in a very complimentary way, your songs are steeped in middle-aged concerns. It also feels like you’re resisting the impulse of the nostalgia trip, of singing directly to the fans who came to your music when both you and they were younger. On this album, specifically, you really do elevate concerns about time’s passage. I’m curious how your heart navigates being grounded in the reality of time’s movements.

I’d like to think that one of the primary appeals of this band, and how I write songs, is that there is a level of transparency and authenticity about how I write, that I feel I’ve always written from the place that I was in, rather than some other place. I really feel that people are drawn to this band because there’s an earnestness and transparency in the lyrics. And I think that if I were attempting to rewrite a younger version of myself, or to write as a younger version of myself, for some craven desire to appeal to young people, that would undermine the spirit that the band was started with.

But there was also this duality when you were writing the album, where you were on tour, playing anniversary shows for two twenty-year-old albums, while emotionally carrying a fairly heavy weight in the present.

What was difficult about that tour was, you know, I was going onstage and existing in this twenty-six-year-old version of myself when I was writing those records. You have to exist in the version of yourself who wrote that too, to really effectively translate it and be in it, and best portray the spirit of the work. And as we’re playing these songs, I’m thinking about the people in the songs. I am thinking about who I was at that age, and I’m doing that for two hours, which is different from a traditional Death Cab show, where I’m existing in my forty-nine-year-old self in one song, and then I’m existing in my twenty-year-old self in the next song. So I’m kind of bouncing around the eras of my life. But what was really trying about that tour was I was going through a divorce at that time, a separation and a divorce. There were some incredibly difficult and painful things that I was working through, sometimes mere hours before I was going onstage in Madison Square Garden or something like that. I’d never experienced that kind of emotional seesaw before, dealing in the present with a situation that I really wish I wasn’t dealing with and then walking out onstage and embodying a version of myself from twenty years prior, and then coming offstage—“thank you, good night”—and I’m right back into that forty-eight-year-old person in the midst of a very difficult and contentious place in his life. That’s just a really bizarre back and forth to exist in. So when I started really writing in earnest for the record, something I was meditating on a lot was how we have to compartmentalize these painful parts of our lives just so that we can get through the work that we have to do or raise our families, or whatever we have to do.

Spending time with the record made me think about this impulse that I often see people seeming to have, which is an impulse to almost shed grief as soon as it arrives. And I actually found much of this album acting in opposition to that impulse because of how nuanced your writing approach was in talking about the more uncomfortable, and self-aware parts of grief and loss.

Americans, I think Americans specifically, like to show strength. Americans will just kind of push grief down and just try to convince themselves and those around them that they have moved past it, as a show of strength that we are so strong, as a culture, we don’t need to, you know, quote-unquote, wallow in our grief. We put the body in the ground, and we just move on with our lives.

I’ve been in therapy for about the past five years, really for the first time in my life, and I really don’t want to characterize this record as a therapy record, in the same way that I don’t want to characterize it as a breakup record, because it is neither of those things. But I’ve done so much work in therapy around holding diametrically opposed emotions, and allowing them space and allowing them grace, and listening to them and what they’re trying to teach me. So I feel as if the writing of this record is certainly a reflection of that in the sense that, for the first time in my life, I’ve been able to sit with the discomfort of grief or loss, and acknowledge that it’s going to stay with you. It is going to exist within you as long as it needs to. And various brands of loss or trauma or heartache or whatever, they might have varying half lives, and you can try to just move past it, but they are going to reëmerge, often at the least opportune times. And that’s where the central image of the title came from. This idea of building someone a tower—you’re placing that loss, that pain, that grief, or whatever, in this edifice that’s on your emotional horizon, and you can see it’s always there. The contents of that edifice don’t have to be constantly visible to your eye, but you know what’s in there. You know why it’s there, and oftentimes that’s enough.

The lyrical direction of this record intrigued me. You are using language and imagery that could be directed toward another person, but it feels, to my ear, like it’s also you speaking to yourself. You’ve found this conversational balance, where it does not feel like the songs are necessarily an indictment of an other but more a curious exploration of an internal self. How did you build the fortitude to continually, you know, make that mirror and stare into it?

I don’t know if it was built as much as it just arrived. I just felt I wanted to go deeper and deeper into myself, and how I was feeling, and about this situation, rather than do emotional accounting for the relationship as a whole. In “Full of Stars,” the first song, there was a line in the chorus that, I think people can interpret it however they like, but it’s, like, all I need is for you to be kind, and it seems it’s really worth your time. I’m singing to myself in that sense, “I need you,” I and you being the same person. I need you to just take a beat, man, and realize that you’re gonna be O.K. Everything’s gonna be fine. But I’m the kind of person who’s just always going. I’m always in motion, literally and figuratively. One of the things I struggle the most with as a person is just taking some time, taking actual downtime. One of my biggest fears as a songwriter or as a human being is losing my edge, you know? If I stop writing that, I’ll die, you know? And in that first song I was just telling myself to slow down, that everything would be fine.

I also love that the album opens with the lyric “Please forgive me,” and then expands from there. You do an incredible job of tone setting, where the line between “I” and “you” are instantly blurred in this incredible way. The song “Envy the Birds” has great moments of that as well, and I think there can be times in writing where that blurring is shunned or not looked upon very generously, because people are seeking a clear distinction between the speaker and the person being spoken to. But what I love about the writing on this record is that it resists the idea that everything needs to be known, and so it does feel, in some ways, like even though it is a very intimate record there is this beautiful layer of protection around it.

I think one of the other great appeals of our band is that our personalities onstage and in public are as close as they can be to how they are in our private lives, and who we are as people. That’s how we dress, how we present ourselves, how we talk to people, and it’s reflected in how I write. When we were having conversations about the record and how we’re gonna talk about this stuff, you know, there are people in our circle who were attempting to be very protective around my personal life and what I had been through, although you can go on Reddit and find that out. But at some point, you know, in a conversation about it, I was, like, Let’s just tell people what’s going on. There’s no point trying to be coy or cryptic about this stuff. We’ve always carried ourselves that way, and I think it’s a reflection of our musical upbringing, and the people that were really important to us, and the kind of music that we connected to and which made us want to do this in the first place. It’s been important to me, as a songwriter, to always just be honest and transparent, and if there is a “you never give all of yourself away,” of course. Maybe that’s that, you know, layer of protection around it. In any relationship—be it a romantic relationship, friendships, or a relationship with an audience—you have to hold something back for yourself. But it’s always been my goal to be as emotionally transparent as possible, and I think that’s both what people love about the band, and the people who don’t like the band, what they hate about the band.

I really enjoyed hearing you expand upon your image bank as a writer. Like the lyric “My past is a whiskey glass tipping down a drunkard’s throat,” and then the image of death lingering like a vampire or a neighbor. I know how it can be, to be a writer for a long time and continue to reach for new things. How do you challenge yourself on that front?

You know, I was listening to the latest Cure album last night. My partner and I were making dinner, and I, for whatever reason, wanted to listen to “Songs of a Lost World.” So I put it on, and I was thinking that one of the many things I love about Robert Smith is that he has created a lyrical world that is familiar and comforting, kind of like how a worn-in sweatshirt feels—you just put it on, and you’re in his world. I’m never disappointed if a new Cure song has a lyric that feels like a song that they’ve already written—it just feels like the continuation of a thought, if that makes sense. I think certain artists have a mood that they’ve created, and their whole career has been one complete thought. But for me, in the last couple albums, I started to flag words and imagery that I feel I really overused, and I think there’s something about how I sing, and the sound of my voice, and the fact that I enunciate, arguably too much, means that I can’t get away with the kind of stuff that Matt Berninger gets away with. I can’t get away with the kind of stuff that, like, Thom Yorke gets away with. And I mean that as a compliment to both of those guys. Because the way I sing, the way I write melodies, the way my voice sounds, I feel if I keep repeating myself my voice isn’t enough to carry it, if that makes sense. I’ve been making a conscious effort to break out of a couple of the jails that I built for myself lyrically. I can’t tell you how I did that. I would just write something and go, Nah, that sounds like I’ve written that before. Let’s just start over again. It was just a matter of throwing out a lot. And also, honestly, leaning on Nick from Death Cab. Nick Harmer has been my editor for almost thirty years, and he’s focussed on stuff like that. That second verse, for example, in “Pep Talk,” I wrote in the studio. I was, like, Yeah, but I’m probably going to rewrite that. He’s, like, No, no, keep that. Like, I was, like, Really? You understand what I’m saying? He’s, like, No, I one-hundred-per-cent understand what you’re saying. And I’m not sure if he did, but he was, like, I just really liked how it sounds. It’s very evocative, and it’s very poetic, and I think you should keep it, cause it’s not the kind of thing that you would normally write. So I also have the benefit of having an editor in the band who has my utmost trust, to tell me when something’s working, when something’s not working. And I just feel it’s important, as we get older, as artists, to not close off to outside input and constructive criticism, and have people tell you, “Hey, man, you can do better than that.”

When I was coming up, what I loved about Death Cab songs was this vivid state of catharsis that was propelling them. And what I love about how some of the songs on this album come to life, like “Trap Door,” for example—there’s this tension between active catharsis and then reckoning with the aftermath of catharsis. For example, in the first act of “Trap Door” there’s an image of snowflakes starting an avalanche and then, in the second act, that image shifts to a boulder tumbling down a hill. And those images are doing similar things, but in the latter image you are positioning yourself within it. And so now there’s that tension of, I am at stake, the stakes are myself. I think the easy thing for a writer to do is to say, I’m feeling a big feeling, I’m in the midst of a large feeling. Catharsis all the time. I don’t need to reckon with any outcomes at all, right?

One of my personal rules about songwriting is: finish everything. Because you never know. Even if I’m working on something that I know is a piece of shit, I’ll still finish all the lyrics for it, because you never know—there might be something in the third verse, you know, a little snippet of an idea that can be used later. So when we were working on “Trap Door,” Zach had sent me this music, and I had all the lyrics that I’d written for the record in a Word file or whatever. And I had these two kind of related but slightly conflicting images that had existed in two other songs. I just like this idea of, you know, kind of a butterfly-effect lyric of, like, one snowflake hits the ground and the whole hillside just wipes out. And as I was constructing the song, I realized I had these two images, these two ideas that were tangentially related, but they worked really nicely as the conclusion of both the first verse and the second verse. And I’m particularly proud of how I place the narrator in the second verse, in the sense where it’s, like, there’s a boulder tumbling down the hill. And the narrator can get out of the way. They can see it coming from all the way up the top of the hill, and at least the way I see the lyric, you see it: Oh, that’s coming toward me and, well, I better get out of the way. But for reasons that are still unclear, you stay in the boulder’s path. And your fate is determined. You knew what was coming your way, and yet you chose to stay in its path, for reasons that only you know. ♦