How Death Cab for Cutie Recaptured Its Roots for ‘I Built You a Tower’

When the joint Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service tour – paying tribute to the indie classics Transatlanticism and Give Up, respectively – passed through the Washington, D.C., area in 2023, Ben Gibbard made an unexpected detour.

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“I had been listening to an egregious amount of Fugazi, and I was reconnecting with that music that was so important to me when I was younger,” the Death Cab and Postal Service frontman says. “Nick [Harmer, Death Cab’s bassist] and I went to the Dischord House, and Ian [MacKaye, Fugazi and Minor Threat frontman and Dischord Records founder] showed us around. He was just showing us all this emphemera, and we’re sitting there talking in the basement that Minor Threat practiced in. You know, crazy s–t – like, 27-year-old me wouldn’t be able to handle it.”

But the visit was more than a pinch-me music nerd moment for Gibbard, now 49. “I started to take a lot from how they arranged their music,” he continues. “Their music was so unadorned.”