Being 20 again, 20 years later
Don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping in
Back in college, I worked at the modern rock radio station in town. My on-air shifts were Saturday and Sunday nights, so I don’t know the reason that I happened to be driving into the studio downtown one sunny, weekday afternoon. But I had the radio tuned to 92.9 when a song came on, the kind of song that snaps you to attention, pulling you into its sound like a dolly zoom, the rest of the world fading into a blurry background.
I knew two things immediately — that this was going to be a big song in a way that mattered to me, and that the voice delivering its lyrics sounded oddly familiar, in a way I didn’t expect to hear on the radio. When I got to the station, a couple minutes after it had finished, I bounded up the concrete stairs two at a time to the studio (high atop the Goodwill Building in Downtown Santa Barbara, for the real heads), and crashed through the door to ask the DJ the question that had been burning through me for the last five minutes.
“Did we just play a new Death Cab song on the radio?”
This was in early 2004. If you weren’t introduced to Death Cab for Cutie until their major label debut, Plans, in 2005 — think “Soul Meets Body” and “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” — or perhaps through their fall 2004 appearance on The O.C., you might not have yet been familiar with the band. I had, by chance, picked up a copy of an album on a recommendation in the fall of 2003 called Transatlanticism, playing it over and over again through the most prolific stretch of my own (very personal, private) songwriting career, the white noise that closes the killer finishing track “A Lack of Color” buzzing seamlessly right back into the opener, “The New Year.” Alongside Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Transatlanticism fueled my most creative stretch, during which I wrote five songs and a short film, all in the lead up to and through finals, in December of that year.
And now, here was…what, another song? Another album? Somehow at once the same, imbued with the same voice and feelings, but somehow different? Sharper? More electronic?
“Good ear,” my coworker said. “It’s actually a side project from (Death Cab front man) Ben Gibbard.
“It’s called The Postal Service.”
“Everything looks perfect from far away”
Give Up — the 45-minute album that Gibbard constructed with Jimmy Tamborello — was the only one The Postal Service would ever make. It has stood up as one of the most successful musical side projects of my lifetime, one which also lassoed in Jenny Lewis for vocals on a handful of tracks. Even if you’re not a fan of indie rock, you’ve certainly heard “Such Great Heights,” in a movie, or a commercial, or at a wedding.
And while Death Cab has gained greater commercial success with later releases, even the most insufferable of hipster outlets can agree that Transatlanticism remains the band’s best, most enduring work.
The two albums have long been inexorably tied through my own life, just as they were through Gibbard’s. Knowing that he flew to LA to work with Tamborello, lyrics like “I spent two weeks in Silver Lake, the California sun cascading down my face” from Transatlanticism’s “Tiny Vessels” come into focus as an interconnected experience. Both are very much expressions of navigating life and love in your early 20s, with the emotional highs and inevitable failures those endeavors entail.
Listening to them again and again over the years, they still have the ability to pull you back into those emotional states, prodding your heart and jogging your memories of the silhouettes of past versions of yourself, echoes belonging to someone you used to know. Like everything else, they’re sanded down and softened over the years; music never hits at this age quite the same way it did when we were young.
Unless, of course, you get to see it live.
“I need you so much closer
So come on”
In the winter of 2005, I raced in vain from the studio of Live 105, at the corner of Broadway and Battery, on foot a mile to the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium to try to catch the end of Death Cab’s set at our station’s Christmas show. I caught the last 45 seconds of the last song.
Eight years later, I watched with envy as friends got to see one of the limited run of 10th anniversary shows that The Postal Service put on. While I’ve finally gotten to see Death Cab in the intervening years, I figured the ship had sailed on seeing Ben, Jimmy, and Jenny. I’d given up, as it were.
Over dinner before another concert late last year, we were discussing our favorite live shows with some friends. Mine, since moving to Washington more than a decade ago, felt like a bit of an odd choice, but I knew it was true — Bloc Party’s 15th anniversary tour of their seminal debut album, Silent Alarm. You knew exactly what you were getting and they absolutely delivered. It made me wish I’d braved the rest of the dreadful experience of attending any event at FedEx Field to have seen U2’s Joshua Tree tour.
I’m not someone who leans heavily into nostalgia, but there’s something about a great album and how it owns your emotional history from the moments that it found and wrapped its arms around you, that makes a concert like that special. As we sat around, recalling shows, we wondered aloud how incredible it would be if Death Cab and The Postal Service were to tour those two 2003 albums together. We went in and enjoyed the show.
The next morning, the announcement dropped.
It felt as if we’d divined it, manifesting our wishes into reality. The show was still nine months away, but it didn’t matter — the tickets were purchased, the date circled on the calendar. Then, adulthood firmed its grasp.
“We’ll cut our bodies free
From the tethers of this scene
Start a brand new colony”
In our 20s, we might have crafted our whole day — our week, even — around a show like this, taking the day off, showing up hours early to be the first in the door. Our big plan this time was getting grandma to come to town to babysit, giving us our first night out as new parents.
While some of our group of friends tried to plan dinner, I ended up having to work not only my day job, but also teach my first class of the semester on the night of the show. Everyone ended up working late anyway, missing the opener, and not even getting to the venue in time to snag one of the limited edition run posters (note: I will gladly overpay for one of these, if someone has one).
Our normal spot, perched at the very top of the venue, was already jammed full of people by the time we got there. The nature of the show meant an older crowd less prone to filling the floor in front of the stage. It was still a sellout, and still full down there. But it was fitting to find ourselves back down where we would have unequivocally decided to stand 20 years ago, among the dark, swaying, chanting, aging masses.
Letting it all wash over me did not make me feel young again. It wasn’t a spiritually transcendent experience. But it felt like a milestone, a lifetime achievement worth soaking up every moment of. As the bands played both albums sequentially, I could feel the sand slipping through the hourglass toward the end of each set. Of course it was too short — of course I’d love to put the whole performance on repeat, just as I’d done so many times. But that’s not the way any of this works.
Things could never be exactly as they were. But if you’re clear-eyed about your nostalgia, you wouldn’t want them to be. Those were horrid times, in their own way, smeared with the raw and bloodied emotions that come with that age, half a lifetime ago. But they were foundational times that helped make us the people we are today.
Everything will change. Everything has. But there’s comfort in knowing those notes, those chords, those forlorn lyrics will always be there, whenever you need them.
Incredibly good, as usual. Live music - especially when it is a band and/or album that’s meaningful to you - is an exhilarating drug... at any age. (Don’t ask how I know that.)