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The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie

With special guest slow pulp.

• Date May 9 , 2024
• Time 7:30 PM
• Availability On Sale Now
• Ticket Prices $94.50, $84.50, $74.50, $54.50, $34.50 plus applicable fees (prices subject to change)

Know before you go

Doors and Times

5:30 p.m. - Founders Club / Premium Plus Doors 

5:45 p.m. - Club Magenta Doors

6:00 p.m. -  All Doors  

7:30 p.m. - Slow Pulp  

8:30 p.m. - Death Cab for Cutie  

9:35 p.m. - The Postal Service

*Schedule subject to change. 

*GA/Pit can line up starting at 11 a.m. the day of the event at the Oak Street entrance. 

T-Mobile Customer Perk and Expedited Entry

T-Mobile customers who enter through the T-Mobile customer entrance will be randomly selected to receive an exclusive #GetThanked perk. 

T-Mobile customers enjoy expedited entry at the T-Mobile customer entrance on Grand Blvd. by showing their Club Magenta Pass, available for download in the Profile section of the T-Mobile Tuesdays app, or  T-Mobile branding on their phone screen. 

Cash Not Accepted

T-Mobile Center is a fully cash-free venue. Guests may purchase concessions, tickets and merchandise with debit and credit cards.  Contactless and mobile payment methods are available at concessions.

Cash no longer accepted.

A to Z Guide

General information, venue policies, and answers to  FAQs  for guests while attending events at T-Mobile Center can be found  here .

Prohibited Items & Bag Policy

No backpacks ,  bags larger than 12x6x12,   selfie sticks, tablet computers, outside food and beverage, pocket knives, any type of weapon, fake weapon or object resembling a weapon and chain wallets. A complete list of prohibited items can be found  here . 

Guests are encouraged to pack lightly when coming to T-Mobile Center events. To expedite entry and minimize screening touchpoints, bags are not to exceed 12x12x6 inches. Please note that all diaper bags and medical bags will be screened prior to entry.

Event Details

To celebrate two decades of iconic albums, The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie will bring their Give Up & Transatlanticism 20th Anniversary Tour to T-Mobile Center  May 9, 2024 . 

The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie have joined forces for an unprecedented 20th anniversary co-headline tour. Each night, Benjamin Gibbard, the co-founder of both bands, will pull double duty performing with The Postal Service – comprised of Gibbard, Jimmy Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis – as well as with Death Cab for Cutie (alongside Nick Harmer, Dave Depper, Zac Rae, and Jason McGerr). The extraordinary live run will see both iconic groups performing their seminal 2003 albums in full.

Additional Ticket Information

Mobile ticket delivery will be delayed until 72 hours prior to event start.

The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie Tour: How to Buy Tickets

By Anna Tingley

Anna Tingley

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If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.

The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie are taking the stage together for a North American tour next year, celebrating the 20th anniversary of each of the band’s landmark albums.

Each band will return to their 2003 discography for the upcoming tour: The Postal Service’s platinum-certified “Give Up” and Death Cab’s fourth studio LP “Transatlanticism.” As the frontman and co-founder of both bands, singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard will take on double-duty throughout the North American jaunt, performing with both bands back-to-back for each show.

Popular on Variety

Buy tickets for the Postal Service and Death Cab co-headlining tour here , and check out their full list of dates below:

Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service $149 – $300 Buy Now

THE POSTAL SERVICE // DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

SEPTEMBER 2023

8 – Portland, ME – Cross Insurance Arena

9 – Kingston, RI – The Ryan Center

10 – New Haven, CT – Westville Music Bowl

12 – Boston, MA – MGM Music Hall

13 – Boston, MA – MGM Music Hall

14 – Washington, DC – Merriweather Post Pavilion

17 – Detroit, MI – Meadow Brook Amphitheater

20 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden

21 – Philadelphia, PA – The Mann Center

24 – Minneapolis, MN – Armory

26 – Denver, CO – Mission Ballroom

27 – Denver, CO – Mission Ballroom

OCTOBER 2023

3 – Phoenix, AZ – Arizona Financial Theatre

4 – Las Vegas, NV – The Chelsea Ballroom at The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas

7 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena

13 – Los Angeles, CA – Hollywood Bowl

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The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie

With slow pulp.

• Date Apr 30 , 2024
• Availability On Sale Now

ARRIVE EARLY

Doors scheduled to open at 6PM

Show scheduled to start at 7:30PM

GA guests must enter through SW Rotunda to get wristbands

JOIN US before the show ... Boombox Riot in the East Market at 6PM

SHUTTLES WILL RUN.

Need a ride after the show?  Uber and Lyft pickup is located at St. John Arena

Bags or Purses of any size are NOT permitted. Wallets/ wristlets no larger than 5”x 8”x1” are permitted. A dedicated screening lane is available for guests with medical or dietary needs – one bag permitted. We suggest leaving most items at home. Management reserves the right to determine prohibited items. Guests may return them to their vehicle or surrender to Security without return.

NO AUDIO or VIDEO RECORDING! No professional cameras or detachable lenses. GoPros, selfie sticks and iPads prohibited.

The Schottenstein Center has gone cashless. Make parking, concession and merchandise purchases via debit / credit card or mobile payment. 

Need a break or assistance? - A Wellness Room is available outside Seating Section 104. Masks are optional. We ask fans to be respectful of each other.

Information

The Schottenstein Center Ticket Office (Northeast corner of venue) is open weekdays from 9AM-4PM  with extended hours on event days .  Email [email protected]  or call 1-800-GO-BUCKS (1-800-462-8257).   

CLICK HERE to rent a suite. CLICK HERE  to pre-purchase parking. CLICK HERE for general Traffic & Parking info. 

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The beths & car seat headrest – brand new colony / we looked like giants 7", the district sleeps alone tonight print by kozyndan, such great heights print by kozyndan, we will become silhouettes print by kozyndan, kozyndan print bundle, everything looks perfect oxford pennant, boy with flowers diner mug, give up foil poster, logo beanie, give up reimagined tee, inner voice tee, logo 20th anniversary tie-dye tee.

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The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie

Give up & transatlanticism 20th anniversary tour.

• Date May 7 , 2024
• Event Starts 7:30 PM
• Doors Open 6:00 PM
• Ticket Prices $38.00, $52.50, $72.75, $82.75, $112.75, $122.75
• On Sale On Sale Now

Event Details

The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie: Give Up & Transatlanticism 20th Anniversary Tour. To celebrate two decades of ‘Give Up’ and ‘Transatlanticism’, The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie have joined forces for an unprecedented 20th anniversary co-headline tour. Each night, Benjamin Gibbard, the co-founder of both bands, will pull double duty performing with The Postal Service – comprised of Gibbard, Jimmy Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis – as well as with Death Cab for Cutie (alongside Nick Harmer, Dave Depper, Zac Rae, and Jason McGerr). The extraordinary live run will see both iconic groups performing their seminal 2003 albums in full.

Additional Ticket Information

*Plus applicable service charges on non-box office sales **Prices subject to change without notice.

Pre-Purchase Parking

Parking Options:

Laclede Garage  - Pre-purchase rate $6 - Day of $10

Olive/Compton General  - Pre-purchase rate $15 - Day of $20

Olive/Compton Premium - Pre-purchase ONLY - rate $25

• You must enter the garage from the intersection of Olive St. and Lindell Blvd.
• Guarantees a spot on the first level of the parking garage

Pre-Purchase Now

All garage parking is now cashless.  The garages will only accept major credit/debit cards as forms of payment on the day of the show.

Clear Bag Policy

To ensure guest safety and a quicker entry into the venue, Chaifetz Arena has implemented a bag policy limiting the size and type of bag allowed into the venue. Guests are encouraged not to bring bags. If a guest wishes to bring a bag, they must meet the criteria which can be found in detail by clicking the button below.

CLEAR BAG POLICY

Additional Info

Additional information can be found within our complete A-Z Guide.

First Avenue, JAM, and The Current present

The postal service and death cab for cutie, give up & transatlanticism 20th anniversary tour, with warpaint, show starts.

To celebrate two decades of Give Up and Transatlanticism , The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cutie have joined forces for an unprecedented 20th anniversary co-headline tour. Each night, Benjamin Gibbard, the co-founder of both bands, will pull double duty performing with The Postal Service – comprised of Gibbard, Jimmy Tamborello, and Jenny Lewis – as well as with Death Cab for Cutie (alongside Nick Harmer, Dave Depper, Zac Rae, and Jason McGerr). The extraordinary live run will see both iconic groups performing their seminal 2003 albums in full.

Pepper Flyaway Contest

Grand Prize

• A trip for two (2) to Death Cab for Cutie’s final Hollywood Bowl show with The Postal Service in Los Angeles on October 17. Travel and lodging for two (2) will be covered.

Runner-Up Prizes

• The first runner-up will win a pair of tickets to a Give Up & Transatlanticism 20th anniversary show of their choice this fall
• A second runner-up will receive a signed lithograph of the official Asphalt Meadows album art.
• Save “Pepper (Acoustic)” to your Apple or Spotify music library via  deathcabforcutie.com/PepperFlyaway  for a chance to win. 

Contest ends 3/31. Good luck!

The Postal Service

A collaboration between Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) and Jimmy Tamborello (from Dntel), with Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis, The Postal Service released Give Up, their one and only album,...

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When the writing of Asphalt Meadows (2022) began in the early part of the pandemic, Death Cab for Cutie wasn’t sure how to make a record. Singer/songwriter Ben Gibbard, bassist Nick...

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The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie Extend 20th Anniversary Tour

• By Tomás Mier

Ben Gibbard ‘s double-duty shift is continuing into the new year. On Thursday, the bands he fronts — The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie — announced that they have extended their co-headlining tour in the new year.

The two bands performed the albums they released in 2003 — Death Cab’s  Transatlanticism  and the Postal Service’s influential  Give Up  — on each tour date. They’ll do the same on the new dates.

The tour will commence on April 23 in Atlanta, before stopping in cities such as Nashville, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Salt Lake City. They’ll end their tour in Portland, Oregon on May 15. (They also tease a TBA date in London.)

View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Postal Service (@postalservicemusic)

Slow Pulp joins the groups as an opener on all of the U.S. and Canada dates. Presale ticekts go on sale Dec. 6 at 10 a.m. local time, before they go on sale for the general public on Dec. 8 at 10 a.m.

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Postal Service x Death Cab for Cutie 2024 Tour Dates

April 23 – Atlanta, GA @ Ameris Bank Amphitheatre April 24 – Orlando, FL @ Amway Center April 26 – Charleston, SC @ Credit One Stadium April 27 – Raleigh, NC @ Coastal Credit Union Music Park Raleigh April 29 – Nashville, TN @ Bridgestone Arena April 30 – Columbus, OH @ The Schottenstein Center May 2 – Pittsburgh, PA @ Petersen Events Center May 3 – Albany, NY @ MVP Arena May 4 – Toronto, ON @ Scotiabank Arena May 6 – Milwaukee, WI @ Miller High Life Theatre May 7 – St. Louis, MO @ Chaifetz Arena May 9 – Kansas City, MO @ T-Mobile Center May 11 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Venue TBA May 12 – Boise, ID @ Idaho Central Arena May 14 – Vancouver, BC @ Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre May 15 – Portland, OR @ Moda Center

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• May 16, 2024
• Reviews , Show Reviews
• By Neil Ferguson
• No Comments

It’s hard to find two figures more evocative of the early aughts indie rock spirit than Jenny Lewis and Ben Gibbard. With Lewis’ Rilo Kiley and Gibbard’s Death Cab For Cutie, each artist and their respective bands captured different ends of the spectrum in sounds that would define the era. With Rilo Kiley’s steering towards folk-pop and alt-country and Death Cab’s gradual progression of a bigger indie rock sound that was lamely and sometimes inaccurately lumped in with emo music, it was something of a surprise when these two characters came together to release a single album of dancey indie pop with Jimmy Tamborello under the moniker The Postal Service. Give Up became a massive success and connected these artists to fans who may not have known about either of their main projects. Twenty years later, its the impact of The Postal Service and Death Cab on future millennials is clear as Gibbard has gathered both groups for a co-headlining tour to celebrate two landmark albums. On Wednesday, May 15th, that tour came to Portland, Oregon, for a sold-out show at the Moda Center. 

There may be no other generation as obsessed with nostalgia as millennials,  and they’re willing to shell out their attention and dollars for it. Without discounting the artistry of The Postal Service and Death Cab, this obsession at least partially explains the ability of these acts to sell out arenas all of these years later. Many of us in our 30s and 40s discovered this music in our formative years. This also explained the crowd – mostly of this demographic – eagerly singing along as Gibbard and company took the stage and launched straight into their 2003 album Transatlanticism . Over the next fifty minutes, they would make their way through it, following the exact track listing. The album is actually fairly quiet and moody, and it was interesting to see the band translate it to the arena setting. Gibbard’s prowling of the stage and dramatic guitar movements – not to mention his distinctively soft voice still sounding exactly the same – amplified the impact of songs like “Lightness” and “Title and Registration.” Bouncier, poppier fare like “The Sound of Settling” and the crashing rock of “Tiny Vessels” also shined. The album’s sprawling title track was a peak emotional moment that saw the arena glowing with cell phone lights. By the time the band closed with the poignant folk of “A Lack of Color,” they had fully transported many fans back to a more youthful and impressionable time. 

Following a quick stage turnover, Gibbard returned to the stage decked out in white and accompanied by his Postal Service bandmates. Once again, the band stuck to the exact track listing as they traversed through Give Up . Iconic and beloved songs like “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” and “Such Great Heights” ensured the set kicked off with plenty of momentum and danceability. With a crisp sound that accentuated the clean electronica production of the album and an arena-worth light show, the songs sounded impeccable enough. They had most of the audience singing along to every word. Onstage, Gibbard and Lewis interacted as if reunited lovers, harmonizing vocals and trading guitar licks in a way that showed they still actually enjoy playing these songs night after night. 

Give or take the occasional flourish – Gibbard jumping on drums, extra layers of electronic textures and beats, some crowd chant-a-longs, and longer instrumental breakdowns on a couple of tunes – the band played Give Up nearly the same as the recording. This was what the audience wanted so they could savor the nostalgia of when they first heard The Postal Service. While many acts joke about playing their biggest hit twice in a set, they actually did it when Gibbard and Lewis returned to the stage to encore with an acoustic duet “Remix” of “Such Great Heights” that was seemingly a nod to the huge success Iron & Wine had with the hushed, folky rendition of the song. This gave the fans one more chance to sing along and soak up the moment before all members of each band returned to close the night with a fun take on Depeche Mode’s catchy New Wave classic “Enjoy the Silence.”  

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Angels of wistfulness herald the Death Cab for Cutie/Postal Service anniversary tour

My girlfriend, who has lived almost 29 years without knowingly listening to a single Death Cab For Cutie song, turns to me when the band takes the stage. 

“I thought they’d be cooler,” she says—or, rather, yells, as live music and Loop earplugs are impeding her communique. “They look like soft dads.”

She’s not wrong. While some men in their forties and fifties channel confident sexual energy that earns them the epithet of daddy , Death Cab for Cutie is not that. The musicians on-stage—clad in plain black shirts and pants, frontman Ben Gibbard poured into probably-no-longer-cool skinny jeans—are arguably Seattle’s finest sad boys. They are certainly some of the longest running, having begun peddling depressing songs about love and religion since their first album Something About Airplanes dropped in 1998, when I was a cool four years old.

The long-time earnestness of their broken-hearted indie hasn’t been cool since The OC was on TV. But these guys are doubtless endearing: noodling through extended breakdowns and shimmying during instrument breaks, they’re a mix of consummate professionals performing for a huge crowd, and indie kids just doin’ their thing in their jam space. 

Gibbard and the gang are here to play their fourth album Transatlanticism in full. Sitting in the floor seats in Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Stadium—because, for the first four songs, the security guards adamantly try to shush everyone with the temerity to stand up at a rock show—I have to admit this wouldn’t be my first choice for a record to hear live. 

The ode to long-distance relationships is beautiful—and depressing. But with a six-person band, lush soundscapes, and deceptive complexity, the 11 songs come to vibrant life. 

There isn’t much banter—though Gibbard does introduce “Death of an Interior Designer” with a wry note. “I write about four things: love, death, the crushing oppressiveness of growing up Catholic, and movies,” says the man once married to Zoey Deschanel (who—not to get distracted—is now with Vancouver-born Property Brothers star Jonathan Scott). “This one’s about a movie.” (Disgraced director Woody Allen’s Interiors , to be precise. In Gibbard’s defence, the album came out in 2003.) That leads into set highlight “We Looked Like Giants,” the stage thrumming with energy as the sharp melody pulses exuberantly against the chiller tracks on either side. 

After “A Lack of Color” draws the album to a close—a mellow, tender ballad that’s better at rounding out an album than a live show—the band bows, and promises to return in 15 minutes. This only further confuses my girlfriend. 

“Are they taking an intermission during their set?” she asks. 

And then, I explain the conceit: Ben Gibbard also fronts The Postal Service, along with musician and producer Jimmy Tamborello, and all-round icon Jenny Lewis. 

The Postal Service takes the stage in all-white (with Lewis in a diaphanous dress), looking like angels of wistfulness. Since releasing the uber-successful Give Up in 2003, the band has existed more in concept than in practice, last playing live shows on a 10-year anniversary tour in 2014. 

And yet, here they are, another decade later. The Postal Service’s oeuvre isn’t necessarily more thematically upbeat than Death Cab’s, but it’s certainly more danceable. The indietronica pioneers sound impossibly good live, the buttery vocals accompanying the synths and samples of an album full of daydreams.  

“Such Great Heights”, predictably, demands a huge singalong from the assembled masses. The lyrical interplay on “Nothing Better” also cements it as a surefire crowd-pleaser, and Gibbard elicits cheers during the three different tracks that see him hop behind the drumkit to bang out the four-on-the-floor percussion that anchors the back half of the album. 

Once again, “Natural Anthem” ends the set on more of a subdued note. But the cheers bring members of both bands back to the stage for an encore. Fans expecting some classic Death Cab hits wind up disappointed, though: Lewis and Gibbard reappear for their version of Iron & Wine’s acoustic cover of “Such Great Heights” (referential!) before all seven musicians assemble for a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence” to round out the show. Unexpected—but, somehow, apt. They play two albums, and nought else: you’ve gotta admire the dedication.

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Music + concerts, music + concerts | why just like heaven may be the last dual death cab for cutie & postal service u.s. show, the pasadena music festival will feature 20th anniversary performances by the ben gibbard-fronted bands..

“Ben had this idea,” says Nick Harmer, Death Cab for Cutie ‘s bassist since 1997 when Gibbard decided to turn his fledgling solo project into a proper band. “It was like, ‘Do you think it’s time? Do you think there’s a world where we sort of combine these things together for a celebration and do this together?’

“I think everyone in the band immediately was like, ‘I absolutely think that’s a wonderful idea,’” Harmer says. “You know, it’s a very unique accomplishment that hardly any other singer-songwriter can claim to have made. We’re all very proud of Ben for that.”

Death Cab for Cutie is touring in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the 2003 album “Transatlanticism.” The band will play it in full at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. (Photo by Jimmy Fontaine)

Death Cab for Cutie is touring in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the 2003 album “Transatlanticism.” The band will play it in full at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. (Album image courtesy of the artist)

The Postal Service will play its 2003 album “Give Up” in full at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. Seen here are singer Ben Gibbard, left, and producer-keyboardist Jimmy Tamborella circa 2013. (Photo by Autumn De Wilde)

The Postal Service will play its 2003 album “Give Up” in full at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. (Album image courtesy of the artist)

Death Cab for Cutie’s bassist Nick Harmer will play Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024 as part of that band’s joint tour with the Postal Service, which is fronted by Death Cab singer Ben Gibbard. Harmer is seen here at the All In Music & Arts Festival at the Indiana State Fairgrounds on Sunday, Sept. 4, 2022, in Indianapolis. (Photo by Amy Harris/Invision/AP)

Ben Gibbard will perform with the Postal Service at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. Gibbard’s other band Death Cab for Cutie will also perform there. The Postal Service is seen here performing at Riot Fest on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, at Douglass Park in Chicago. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP)

Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, right, and Nick Harmer, left, perform during the KROQ Absolut Almost Acoustic Christmas at the Forum in Inglewood in 2022. (Photo by Kelly A. Swift, Contributing Photographer)

Jenny Lewis of the Postal Service will perform with the group at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. She’s seen here performing with that group at Riot Fest on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, at Douglass Park in Chicago. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP)

Dave Depper of the Postal Service will perform with that band at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. Depper is also a member of Death Cab for Cutie which also appears at Just Like Heaven this year. He’s seen here with the Postal Service at Riot Fest on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, at Douglass Park in Chicago. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP)

Ben Gibbard, right, and Jenny Lewis, left, will perform as the Postal Service at Just Like Heaven Festival in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. Gibbard’s other band Death Cab for Cutie will also perform there. The Postal Service is seen here performing at Riot Fest on Saturday, Sept. 16, 2023, at Douglass Park in Chicago. (Photo by Rob Grabowski/Invision/AP)

The tour that kicked off in September 2023 with Death Cab playing its album “Transatlanticism” followed by the Postal Service performing “Give Up” got extended into 2024.

But when the two groups play Just Like Heaven in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, that will be the end of the road in the United States for this 20th anniversary celebration. If you want to see both albums played in full, this is likely your last chance without flying to Europe for a final handful of shows come summer.

Just Like Heaven also features indie acts such as Phoenix , the War on Drugs, Metric , Tegan and Sara and more, and Harmer says he and his bandmates are delighted to bring their album to Brookside at the Rose Bowl this year, too.

“We’ve been having an amazing time playing this record,” Harmer says. “I think when we were thinking about a way to sort of significantly mark the 20-year anniversary of ‘Transatlanticism,’ it’s kind of hard to isolate the success of it in 2003 from the success of “Give Up’ that Ben also wrote and released in 2003.

“Those two records, while they’re different projects, and certainly, we’ve done our best over the years to keep them separate in people’s minds as much possible, they still are very much related because of the central mind that they’re coming out of.

“And the response has been phenomenal. I don’t think I quite expected how strong of a response we would get for a record that we made so long ago. But it’s really nice to play this each night and realize how these songs have continued to live and find people over the years.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, Harmer talked about old memories the tour has stirred, the unique blend of Death Cab and the Postal Service on tour as well as the impact of “The OC” television series, which also debuted in 2003, on Death Cab’s rising popularity and more.

Q: Diving back into ‘Transatlanticism’ must have reconnected you to memories. What stands out?

A: Playing this record is as close to stepping into a time machine as I think I’ll ever get in my life. There’s so much that you don’t even think you have in your mind, or that you’re carrying with you, that suddenly a certain phrase in a song or a moment of playing will trigger some buried memory.

It’s been kind of a constant wash of these feelings and emotions and remembering who I was, and who we were when we made the record, and then reflecting on how much growth and evolution has happened since then.

Q: Any specific example?

A: Just like how my relationships to the songs have changed. Take a song like ‘Passenger Seat’ on the album. When we wrote and recorded that song and played it in 2003, that song was very much a love song. A pretty straightforward romantic song about driving with a partner.

But in the fall tour – I have a daughter now who’s 9 – I had this weird feeling where suddenly my relationship with the song, it’s like someday I’m going to be old and I’m going to be in a car and she’s going to be the one driving me from someplace we were together. Maybe a dinner or a medical appointment or something.

My relationship to the song completely changed in an instant, and I was overcome with emotion in a new way that I’ve never even processed. So it’s kind of fun that the songs can change for us as we move along. They’re, in some ways, fixed in a period of time, but they’re also these kinds of living things that ask to be re-interfaced with.

Q: Just to fact check – you made ‘Transatlanticism’ after Ben (and producer-keyboardist Jimmy Tamborello and singer Jenny Lewis) had done the Postal Service record?

A: Yes, he had been writing all of the material for both of the records concurrently. It just so happened that as he was in the demoing process he started mailing stuff back and forth to Jimmy and that record came together first. And then we were recording while they were prepping that record for release.

Q: So when Ben was doing the Postal Service, what was the reaction within Death Cab? I’d imagine some bands might be nervous about their singer-songwriter working on a different project.

A: We were all very cool with it. We had a long history in this band of encouraging members to kind of moonlight and do other projects on the side in between Death Cab stuff. And Ben was always clear with us that this was never going to be something that was going to become his (main group).

Death Cab’s always been Ben’s sort of vehicle. It’s been his center. So there was no world where the Postal Service suddenly was going to be his new thing and Death Cab wasn’t.

The fact that (‘Give Up) went on to be a runaway hit I think surprised everyone, including Ben. Certainly there was some adjustment period where some fans were coming to Death Cab shows expecting to hear Postal Service songs and couldn’t quite get their heads wrapped around that we were separate bands. We didn’t even know that material, but that kind of faded and it was fine.

Q: Why do you think ‘Transatlantacism’ connected so strongly with fans and propelled Death Cab to the next level?

A: Some of it was a result of just the years we had put in on the road and with the previous three albums. But I think that record sort of really started to connect and take off because there was kind of a cultural shift that was happening in 2003-2004. You had Modest Mouse’s ‘Float On’ suddenly being a huge radio hit. You had the Shins showing up in major motion pictures. You had licensing opportunities for bit TV shows suddenly coming to a lot of bands that were our peers. That we had been touring with in relative obscurity for a while and suddenly were a little bit more of the musical conversation.

Q: I have to ask you about ‘The OC’ – your songs weren’t just in the background, the character Seth was a huge Death Cab fan and the band eventually played itself on the show.

A: It was just kind of surreal. It was this time when things were starting to happen, like I said, for bands of our ilk. The Shins had ‘New Slang’ in a McDonalds commercial. And there was luck. All of these opportunities that were coming our way. So it started with, ‘Hey, can we use a snippet of one of your songs in a show,’ and we said sure.

We didn’t know they would take the creative license to write us into the scripts. I think at first we were sort of like whatever. Then there was a moment when we were all a little bit slightly nervous about it. We would run into people that would be like, ‘Oh, “The OC” made you, you were nobodies until “The OC.”‘

But this was kind of concurrently happening with the rise of the internet, and so I think pretty people figured out our story and could understand what had happened. The thing that I think probably surprised us the most was just the reach that show had internationally. We showed up in Singapore and there are thousands of fans in Singapore suddenly. They’re like, ‘Oh, (we) saw you on “The OC.””

Q: How does this tour work? Does Death Cab always play first and then the Postal Service?

A: Yeah, it works out that way mainly because of the scarcity of the Postal Service touring and playing shows. They’re a bit more of a draw in that way, the valuable commodity. But also just the tone of that record is more upbeat and dance-centric in some ways, and the Death Cab record is a fairly moody journey from start to finish.

I think there was some question of whether or not Ben was going to be able to do it and what that would be like for him. Just sort of more psychologically. Physically, and having the stamina to pull that off was never in question because it kind of falls within our normal show length that we’d been doing for years.

Q: So when Death Cab finishes ‘Transatlanticism’ what do you and the the guys do when Ben goes back out for ‘Give Up’?

A: When Death Cab is on stage, we’re all in black. We’ve committed to a certain color palette in the lights. And then when Postal Service comes out they’re dressed all in white and the lights switch to a different color palate.

Dave (Depper) who plays guitar in Death Cab switches and plays with Postal Service as well. Jason (McGeer, Death Cab’s drummer) jumps up and plays on a couple of Postal Service songs live. And Zac (Rae, Death Cab’s keyboardist) and I, we switch clothes to white and we all come back at the end.

Q: It sounds different, but fun for you, too.

A: It has been fun for me, because, you know, I was the first tour manager on the very first national Postal Service tour years ago. So I have really fond memories of driving around in a van with Ben and Jenny and Jimmy. This is before the record even really started to hit. We’re playing these small little clubs.

And now it’s just been so fun to watch the show every night and watch all these people just have these really powerful emotional experiences with that record and those things. It’s a different form of nostalgia for me. I’m not actually playing music, but I can also track growth from the beginning until now. That’s nice, you know?

Just Like Heaven

When : 12 p.m. to 11 p.m. Saturday, May 18, 2024

Where: Brookside at the Rose Bowl, 1133 Rosemont Ave., Pasadena

How much: $199 for general admission, $379 for VIP, and $659 for clubhouse.

For more: See Justlikeheavenfest .com for the lineup, set times, and ticket information.

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Ben Gibbard on his love-hate relationship with L.A. and life after the Postal Service

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Twenty-one years ago, Ben Gibbard’s life changed twice in the span of eight months.

In February 2003, the frontman of Seattle’s Death Cab for Cutie released “ Give Up ,” the first (and only) album by his electro-pop side project the Postal Service; it went on to become an indie blockbuster, selling more than a million copies and spawning swoony millennial anthems like “Such Great Heights.” Gibbard doubled down in October of that year with Death Cab’s even swoonier “Transatlanticism,” which led to the band’s appearance on the hit teen soap “The O.C.” and a major-label deal with Atlantic Records.

Last fall, Death Cab and the Postal Service marked the 20th anniversary of both LPs with a tour on which each act performed its signature work from beginning to end. (Gibbard, an experienced long-distance runner, has joked about the no-big-deal endurance required to play two 45-minute albums in one evening.) Like “Give Up” and “Transatlanticism,” the road show was a hit, filling arenas and amphitheaters including Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl. Now the groups are set to take a victory lap with performances at Saturday’s Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena.

For Gibbard, 47, the show marks a return to familiar ground: He formed the Postal Service with a pair of Angelenos: producer Jimmy Tamborello and singer Jenny Lewis of L.A.’s Rilo Kiley. “Transatlanticism,” meanwhile, describes a fling with a woman in Silver Lake and followed Death Cab’s 2001 “The Photo Album,” on which Gibbard asks someone why they’d want to live in a town that “smells like an airport runway.” (The frontman later moved to L.A. during his three-year marriage to actor Zooey Deschanel, whom he divorced in 2012.)

Gibbard talked to The Times about the albums — as well as the state of indie rock and his friendship with former Death Cab guitarist Chris Walla, who quit the band in 2014 — before a gig last week in Kansas City, where he’d just spent the day visiting the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum. “There’s only so many Ernest movies you can watch on tour,” he said with a laugh of the cultural enrichment. “At a certain point you gotta up it a bit.”

Is the relationship you’re singing about in Death Cab’s “ Tiny Vessels ” — the girl in Silver Lake with the light brown streaks in her hair — the same relationship that had earlier inspired “ Why You’d Want to Live Here ”? No. “Why You’d Want to Live Here” is kind of a stand-alone piece of fiction. And the mentions of Silver Lake on “Transatlanticism” are specific to a relationship that’s not really central to the album.

So why identify Silver Lake by name? Well, “Transatlanticism” wasn’t conceived as a concept record — it wasn’t written about one person, despite the legend that’s kind of grown up around it. The songs span from like August 2001 to the spring of 2003, and there was a lot happening in my life at that point: I’d moved to Seattle to live with someone in my first real adult relationship, and then that person moved back to the East Coast and I was kind of floating for a year and a half through false starts of relationships — just feeling that general mid-20s malaise, trying to figure my s— out. But I’d rather allow people their fantasies than go song by song telling them they’re wrong.

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Rolling Stone described “Transatlanticism” in 2003 as “11 indie lullabies … ostensibly about a long distance relationship.” I think a lot of it has to do with Chris’ production. Because we’ve been playing the record in order with the transitions and everything, I’ve really been living with it for the first time in 20 years. And there’s this three-song sequence — “Tiny Vessels” into “ Transatlanticism ” into “ Passenger Seat ” — where Chris did such a brilliant job of sonically connecting them that it kind of gives the listener the impression that the subject matter is related to the same person or the same situation.

“Give Up” was framed with this idea that you and Jimmy were sending music back and forth through the mail. But how significant was the time you spent working on the album in L.A.? Crucial. L.A.’s where I first met Jenny Lewis. I just emailed her out of the blue because Rilo Kiley was on [Death Cab’s label] Barsuk and I liked her voice. She picked me up at the Burbank airport and we got Mexican food and then went to Jimmy’s house and started making the record. It feels like the kind of thing that would never happen today. But in your 20s you’re like, “Something’s going on? I’ll do it. I don’t need to know if there’s parking.”

You sing about L.A. in a pretty negative way on Death Cab’s “Kintsugi,” which followed your divorce. “Kintsugi” is not necessarily an indictment of L.A. — it’s an indictment of the entertainment industry that I’d found myself rubbing up against. Whereas my experience making “Give Up” with Jimmy and Jenny was hanging out with their friends and recognizing that there were a lot of really interesting creative people doing cool things in the underground that weren’t directly tied to Hollywood. Los Angeles has been a character in so much of my music because I’m both attracted and repulsed by it.

Where in town did you and your ex-wife live? We lived initially in a duplex a couple blocks off La Brea — the Orthodox part of Hancock Park before it starts getting really fancy. Then we bought a house in the Cahuenga Pass, which looking back wasn’t somewhere I particularly liked living. As people do in relationships, I made a very hasty leap not only into that relationship but into a totally different city that I didn’t know. When I moved back to Seattle, kind of battered with my tail between my legs, I was like, “I’m never f—ing leaving this place ever again.”

Are there certain areas here that you avoid now? There aren’t really. When we were rehearsing for this tour [in L.A.] last August, I went on a run one day and took this big loop through Hancock Park. My path went by our old place, and it was just: “Ah, I used to live there. Moving on.”

How big had “Give Up” become by the time “Transatlanticism” came out? I don’t know how many copies it had sold but I think it was over 100 or 200,000. That was a fairly tense time because this little side project had completely outsold “The Photo Album” like three to four times over. I’m not sitting here 20 years later saying I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much I wanted to — nobody in Death Cab made me feel that way. But it was weird for the other guys: We’re going out on tour, and people are yelling Postal Service songs at us because at that point the Postal Service was bigger than Death Cab for Cutie.

In a sense that’s still true. The Postal Service is billed higher than Death Cab at Just Like Heaven. As well it should be. It’s an issue of scarcity: When the Pixies came back after not playing a show for 10 or 15 years, they were playing venues way bigger than the places they played when they were actually a band. So of course the Postal Service is gonna headline the show. We sold 13,000 seats in Toronto a couple nights ago. The last time Death Cab played Toronto, we played Massey Hall, which is like 2,800 people. We all know what’s driving these tickets.

Has the strong reception made you think about what audiences are responding to? Absolutely. Music is a time machine — more than any other art form, it has this ability to take us back to a time in our lives. I remember coming home from college and my dad was playing me some records. He played “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and it got to “ Girl From the North Country ” and he had his hand over his face — I knew he was listening to this song, thinking about a woman that wasn’t my mom. That’s just what music does.

So when I had the idea to do this tour, I felt like we almost had an obligation to do it because of how much these two records mean to people. And because there’s not another artist or band or collection of people that could. I don’t mean that in a self-aggrandizing way. If you can name another artist who had two records like this in the course of one calendar year, by all means tell me.

Even so, has the reaction surprised you? It was the additional nights that were humbling: adding a second Hollywood Bowl, a third Hollywood Bowl, a second Madison Square Garden. I knew that people had relationships with these records, but I had no idea that this many people did.

This tour’s really changed me as far as how I move forward, not necessarily as a writer but as a performer. Before this tour, my performances were physical but kind of internal — I’m up there playing my guitar, I’m talking a bit, but I’ve never performed to the crowd. Now, for whatever reason — maybe because I’m standing next to Jenny Lewis, who’s one of the most amazing performers we have — it’s given me the confidence to look people in the eyes, to move toward the front of the stage rather than staying toward the back. A little less Stephen Malkmus , a little more Bono .

At some point before the tour you got a real glow-up of a haircut. I went to the woman who cuts my hair and said, “I’ve had bangs for 25 years — I gotta make a change.” But there might be something to not performing with a mess of hair in my face all the time. It’s nice when you have friends text you photos or Twitter posts saying nice things about how you look — certainly helps build your confidence.

Your voice in these shows is almost eerily unchanged from the records. It doesn’t sound like you’re having much trouble singing this old music. I’ve been blessed with pretty good genetics. But I’ve spent the better part of the last 15 years being very cognizant of what I put in my body. Knock on wood that it remains so, but if you’re not smoking or drinking, and you’re physically fit, it’s actually easier now.

You ever worry that the boyishness of your voice will start to feel emotionally inappropriate for your age? There’s the tone of the voice and then what the voice is singing, right? Playing songs you wrote when you were 21 or 22 when you’re 47 or 50 — there’s a lot of life between those ages. But I think as a concertgoer you just kind of know that’s the case. I saw the Cure last year — one of my top three bands of all time — and there’s Robert Smith singing “Boys Don’t Cry.” I think I’d feel more self-conscious about it if I wasn’t also writing songs from the perspective of a 47-year-old man.

As far as the tone goes, I’m a little cringey when I hear how boyish I sound on the old records. No one’s ever gonna consider my voice masculine, but it has a little bit of a patina on it now — a little bit grittier, a little more heft to it.

How would you describe your relationship with Chris Walla at the moment? We just texted yesterday about Steve Albini . Chris and I had some rough patches after he left — he was very upset about some things I said specifically to you . And, you know, I stand by what I was trying to say, though I probably could have said it better. But he’s in Norway with his wife and a kid, and he’s making records and living the life he wants to live. His influence on my life, both as a human being and as a creative person, can’t be overstated. But sometimes what’s best for somebody you love is not necessarily for them to stay with you.

Was Albini important to you? I think he was important to everybody in our world. But for Chris specifically, I remember he had this Shellac 7-inch where the insert was like their recording setup, with a drawing of every microphone and every compressor. The takeaway was: Get this stuff, and you can do this too . That was such an important message to receive, certainly for Chris — the idea that you don’t have to wait around for a major label to find you and put you in the studio. You can just start making recordings yourself. All of the schematics and photos that Albini was willingly putting out in the world, not caring whether anybody was gonna quote-unquote steal his sound — that was part of the DNA of our first few albums.

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The era of those albums — the era this tour looks back on — was a fruitful one for white dudes writing indie rock songs. Two decades later, most of the energy in indie rock is with young women. White male voices dominated rock ’n’ roll from the jump until, like, five years ago. We had a pretty good run [ Laughs ]. No one is sitting here saying, “I really want to know what a 25-year-old white guy has to say on this topic.” We already know! I think one of the wonderful things about the world we’re living in these days — and contrary to popular belief, there are some wonderful things — is that voices that maybe once were very much kept to the fringe are now finding an audience.

I’m gonna go off on this for a bit, if you don’t mind. Basically, in the early aughts, with the rise of indie rock, there were a lot of straight white men who were making music that was fine — not unique, not particularly interesting, but it was fine. And I’ve seen a number of people — my friends — who’ve kind of fallen on hard times. And while I feel bad for them, I’d rather live in a world where being a straight white guy is not enough. You actually have to be really f—ing talented.

I feel horrible saying this. But people don’t have to listen to you anymore. They can find something that speaks to them as a queer person or as a person of color. We’ve experienced this ourselves with putting out new records. We put out records and they don’t have the impact they once had for a number of reasons. But one of them, which is entirely justifiable, is that people have more options now. They don’t need my perspective on things.

With that in mind: Drake or Kendrick Lamar ? Oh, Kendrick all the way. You gotta be out of your damn mind to go toe to toe with that guy.

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The Postal Service & Death Cab for Cuties Unite for Sensational “Give Up & Transatlanticism” Tour

Two giants of the indie music industry, The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, have come together for a magnificent music tour named “Give Up & Transatlanticism”. It will take place on May 14th at the Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre in Vancouver, as you eagerly anticipate this significant concert.

The Postal Service, a band known for its electro-pop anthems, and Death Cab for Cuties, known for melancholic indie rock, a wave of anticipation rises, fans eagerly await the thrilling performances that this important concert promises to bring. Both bands hail from the early 2000’s indie music era, and they have decided to unite for this unique and exciting tour.

“Give Up & Transatlanticism” tour is a nostalgic journey back to the early 2000s when these bands first made their mark. Postal Service’s “Give Up” and Death Cab’s “Transatlanticism” were landmark albums that catapulted these bands into the spotlight. Fans will be able to live those nostalgic years as the bands play hits from these albums.

Funny thing is I never heard of these bands before last week while I was on air for the radio I heard them and damn I really liked Death Cab for cutie and some songs I’d recommend are Transatlanticism which funnily enough is what part of the tours name is and Death of an interior decorator which has a very catchy bassline with nice lyrics

After I heard about the tour I started listening to Postal Service and I can say I like them more than Death Cab but some standouts that I really like were The District Sleeps Alone tonight for its mellow beat with synths and vocals, and also Against all Odds as I liked the lyrics and really resonated with them.

The 20th anniversary celebration continues in Spring 2024: Death Cab for Cutie, Transatlanticism. @PostalService , Give Up. Each band will perform each album in its entirety. Sign up for early ticket access now: https://t.co/IyyZuiJQu2 Video by Juliet Bryant pic.twitter.com/7ubTzKmseS — Death Cab for Cutie (@dcfc) November 30, 2023

The artists’ perseverance in their craft, indie’s heart warming beauty, and the loyalty of their fans have been the foundation of their long-standing careers. The tour commemorates the triumph of their catalog while offering fans a taste of what new magic might be in store.

Both bands excel in their respective genres, with The Postal Service offering a blend of electronic beats and indie-pop melodies while Death Cab for Cuties deliver rock numbers loaded with affective lyrics. Expect an evening of varied music, one that will make hearts your overjoyed.

As a treat for longtime fans like you may be, the bands plan to perform some rare tracks from their extensive discographies, alongside their popular hits. This adds an exotic touch to the concert, making it a must attend event for enthusiasts like you.

The “Give Up & Transatlanticism” tour promises to be a memorable experience, a wholesome mix of nostalgia, fresh elements, and a testament to indie music’s organic evolution over the years.

There’s no grand spectacle to witness, no overwhelming firework displays or dancing drones, just a group of talented musicians doing what they do best: distilling their craft into a raw, passionate performance. And that’s the charm of the down to earth, simplicity driven “Give Up & Transatlanticism” tour.

Get ready for tonight, and be prepared for the ultimate collaboration with The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cuties. Sure to be a great time!

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The Real-Life Diet of Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, Who Runs 100-Mile Races When He’s Not on Tour

By Yang-Yi Goh

This story was featured in The Must Read, a newsletter in which our editors recommend one can’t-miss story every weekday. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

As far as rock-‘n’-roll excess is concerned, Death Cab for Cutie probably isn’t the first band that jumps to mind. Especially back in their mid-aughts heyday, when they were soundtracking shows like The OC and posing with bloody hearts on the cover of Spin , the beloved Seattle indie rockers—and their frontman Ben Gibbard, in particular—were poster children for a sweeter, more sensitive, less chaotic brand of guitar gods. But the temptations that came with life on the road eventually caught up to Gibbard all the same.

“We were never the kind of band that was just getting fucked up all the time,” Gibbard says now. “But being a musician, it’s one of the only jobs in the world where you’re encouraged to drink at work. You show up at a venue and they’re like, ‘Hey, I just want to make sure you guys have enough alcohol for work.’ It became a slippery slope and eventually I lost control of it. I had to cut it off.”

After Gibbard got sober in 2008, he replaced his drinking habit with a running obsession. He started off with a couple of regular marathons before finding his true love in ultras—trail races that stretch on for 100 miles (or more), through rugged terrain, sometimes requiring multiple days to complete. “It’s a callback to the things I loved as a kid, being out in the woods and mountains here in the Northwest,” he says. “It helps me to achieve this kind of meditative thought that I had not been able to find doing anything else.”

When I reach Gibbard via Zoom at home in Seattle, he’s a few days removed from an 100-kilometer jaunt through the Columbia River Gorge and preparing for the second leg of the massive world tour that his two bands—Death Cab and The Postal Service—are currently on to celebrate the 20th anniversaries of their seminal albums Transatlanticism and Give Up . We chopped it up about his training regimen on the road, how it feels to revisit your 26-year-old self every night on stage, and why podcasts are better than music when you’re out on a 13-hour run.

For Real-Life Diet , GQ talks to athletes, celebrities, and other high performers about their diet, exercise routines, and pursuit of wellness. Keep in mind that what works for them might not necessarily be healthy for you.

Ben Gibbard: Oh, my exercise routine was non-existent and my eating habits were kind of—I didn't really hold back on anything. I think when people are in their twenties for the most part, their metabolisms can handle a lot more. Death Cab was playing pretty long sets, but I was drinking, I smoked a little bit off and on during that time, and I was just a young person who wasn't really thinking about any of those things.

It didn't even register to me that exercise might be a good idea. Even though I grew up a swimmer—I swam competitively all through high school and played baseball as a kid, so I was active. We always hiked as a family. It wasn't like I lived a sedentary video game life. But I think when I became a professional musician, I never even thought about those things.

I mean, based on my waistline towards the end of my twenties, I don't think that was enough. [Laughs.]

I was the heaviest I've ever been at what I would assume was probably my most visible or famous. It was like 2006 or something like that. And that was just a function of a tour bus lifestyle—when we were touring in vans, you didn't have a refrigerator and a freezer full of food there all the time. We'd maybe take a bottle of Jack Daniels from the venue or something like that, but we didn't have a bar and a cooler full of beers to get drunk at 2 in the morning after a show. I wasn't eating pizza at 1 in the morning when we were in the van days that often.

I've heard it said that at 28 you get your man weight—that’s the age when your food and drink choices start to catch up with you a bit. And that definitely was true in my case.

Well, I started to run a little bit at the tail end of my drinking career. At the time, I was running two or three miles on a treadmill at the gym or something like that. When you stop waking up hungover, you have a lot more energy and a lot more desire to be out in the world and be on your feet. I was doing a lot more physical things, because I wasn't run down from my own substance abuse. I wasn't waking up with a headache or not sleeping well and just like, "Oh, I just want to go back to bed."

I wanted to get up. I wanted to do things. Alcohol is a depressant, and when you remove that depressant from your quiver, you go to bed and you sleep better, you wake up in a better mood. I mean, it's not like woo woo, this is straight up science. Your moods are improving. You're not waking up hungover, you're not detoxing from alcohol. So I think maybe there's something to be said about this window that opened up where all of a sudden I desired more physical exertion than I did before because I had more energy.

It started when I signed up for a trail race by accident. It wasn't an ultra—it was like a 30K, which is around 18 miles. I had run a couple marathons at that point. I had run the LA Marathon when I was living in LA and it felt like an accomplishment, for sure, but I didn't particularly like road running. It was just too much running. It was just the culture of it. I mean, it was fine. It was fun, it was running, and I'll take running on the road versus running on a treadmill or not running. But I signed up for this race in the Marin Headlands outside of San Francisco. I didn't know it was a trail race. I just thought it was a 30K, like, "Oh, that sounds like a distance I could do."

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By Megan Armstrong

And I showed up and it was at the end of this road in Rodeo Beach, and I was like, "Where are we going?" And the guy's looking at me like I was a moron: "We're going up there." I went, "What do you mean we're going up there? You can't run up that."

And while it was a very painful experience, I was just hooked. I was like, What is this crazy sport? You can do this? You're allowed to do this? For me, trail running and ultra running felt like a callback to the kind of things I liked to do as a kid in the Northwest. I spent all my free time in the woods goofing off with my friends. My parents would take us hiking in Olympic National Park. It felt then, and still does to this day, like pure freedom.

As I started to push myself, going further and further, trying longer distances and more challenging terrain, I started to hit these meditative spaces where I'd never been before as a human being. The world just seemed to fall away and I was just like a being in space at my core. Nothing else matters. All of the problems in my life don't matter for this time I'm on the trail. My band doesn't matter, my people I know being sick or dying doesn't matter. It's just this. You are so in tune with your body. And look, there's other ways to do it. People meditate, they do yoga, they do ayahuasca, whatever the fuck. People do what they gotta do. But for me, it just became this.

And then finally, one of the many things I love about the ultrarunning community in general is that it felt very akin to what it was like being in punk and indie circles when I was younger. Everybody who's doing this is doing it because they love it. People are coming from all walks of life to participate in this sport and challenge themselves—not because they think they're going to make money or get famous or whatever, but because they just love it. There's a real grassroots, DIY kind of vibe to a lot of the races that I run. It's a very community-oriented sport, in the same way that those early music scenes that I was in were: We're all doing this because we love it. We're all going to help each other. We're all going to participate and volunteer and give our time to this because we love it.

There's nothing else to gain from it, aside from somebody giving you a buckle when you finish a hundred miles. That's it. You're doing it for a buckle and to be a member of this community. To me, as my career as a musician has grown and I've found myself in different echelons of the music industry—some for better, some for worse—it is very valuable. It's valuable to have this callback to a more innocent time in my life.

And the fact that we all come from different walks of life and do this sport also means that I'm spending a lot of time with people who I normally wouldn't get to know if I was just doing music. I'm here to tell you, man, I'm so bored of hanging out with musicians. I really want to hang out with some people who do other shit. I don't want to sit around and talk about gear with anybody ever again. I'd rather hear about what somebody does for a living, what their life is like, why they're at this race, share routes and data about mountains. That, to me, is so much more exciting.

When music was the sole focus of my life, I was fearful that if I took my eye off it for one second, I would lose my edge or my creativity would escape me or something. I've learned over the years that remaining creatively viable is hard work, and I put in more hours of writing now than I did when I was 25 to get less back.

But at the same time, spending my free time in the mountains—running with friends and camping and traveling to go run races or hang out with people and do the sport—I need that counterweight to the time I spend in my head. I need to walk away. I think one of the most important things that creative people need to do is take time away, to walk away from their work, to leave the studio and come back with fresh eyes or ears. Because otherwise, we lose perspective on what's good, what's bad. You get too into the minutiae. So for me, coming back into my studio to write after spending the morning in the mountains, I just feel I'm able to focus a lot better and see what's working and what isn't a little more clearly.

Yeah, I did.

I'm feeling really good. I had a really good training. 100K is kind of my favorite distance because it's a really long day—it took me 13 hours, which was a little longer than I was hoping it would—but at the same time, you can have dinner afterwards. I'm coming in finishing this thing and my legs feel really good, and I'm kind of thinking like, man, if this is was a 100 miler , I could fucking do it today. My legs are feeling strong.

Nutrition-wise, when I'm training or racing, I've tried a lot of different things. Sometimes I'll do more real food, sometimes I'll go more chemical food. But I do a combination usually of [real food] and GU brand gels. I like those because they have a lot of different flavors, and one of the hardest things to do when you're training for ultramarathons is to find something that doesn't give you flavor fatigue. Because you might be out there for a day or longer, and if that's all you're eating, you're going to get really tired of it, and you need those calories in. So the GUs are easy to get down, because sometimes your stomach's kind of rotten or you just don't feel like eating, but you really should be getting at least a hundred calories in every half hour, usually more.

Your body can process about 250, 300 calories an hour. When I'm racing or training, I'll do a GU every half hour after the first hour or two, and I'll supplement that with something like Gnarly Nutrition, which is a liquid-based nutrition. That has about 200 calories per 20 ounce bottle, plus electrolyte salt, everything like that. So I'll be getting 200 calories an hour from the GU, and then I'll get an extra 50 or 100 calories from Gnarly Nutrition.

Yeah, totally. If I go out for anything under a two-hour run, I won't bring food with me because you have roughly two hours of glycogen stores in your body for a high-effort activity. But anything over that, I [do bring food]. One of the important things in training for ultras—or even, I'm sure, triathlons or marathons too—is that you have to simulate the conditions during the race. There's an old adage: Nothing new on race day. You don't do gels and Gnarly for your training and then go, "I'm going to see what these gummy bears do." No, you got to stick with what works.

And as far as training goes, for years, I just went off training programs I would find online. But a couple of years ago, I hired a coach, this guy named Gary Robbins , who is an incredible ultrarunner and has been a friend of mine for a long time. So it was a nice way to have somebody to help build a program for me based on my schedule, especially when I'm on tour or touring a lot.

When I'm on tour, I'll usually try to cap it at 35 to 40 miles a week, which is a good base for me. And then I'll probably do one strength session and one core workout a week, as prescribed by Gary. My diet in the last year or so, the best way to put it, is kind of like a non-dogmatic paleo diet.

I think a lot of people, when they start running ultras, they kind of just go, "I'm burning tens of thousands of calories a week running. I can eat whatever I want." And that's true to an extent. But around a year ago, I got some blood work done. I'm sure stress had a lot to do with it, a lot of personal things, and also getting ready for this big tour we did. But I had some pretty wonky results come back. and I was starting to move into slightly pre-diabetic territory, because I was just eating like a trash compactor.

So that was all the motivation I needed. Around eight or nine years ago, I cut out wheat and dairy from my diet, and I had my best year of running ever during that time. I was down five or 10 pounds just from not having bread, because I would eat bread with everything—toast for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, pizza or pasta for dinner. I was just a total carb nut. Now, I've kind of shifted to this diet where it's…like I said, I’m not dogmatic about it. I'm not going out to eat and asking the waiter if there's sugar in the salad. It's not that kind of thing. It's more just trying to focus my diet on meat and fish as a protein source. And then a lot of vegetables, a lot of salads, avoiding rice and grains, desserts and sugar, that kind of stuff.

Man, good question. It used to be that whenever we went to San Francisco, I would make a beeline to the Taqueria Cancun on 17th and Mission. For the longest time, that was my last meal: a veggie burrito from Cancun with this green sauce there that's just incredible. I don't know how they make it, but every time I go in there, I want to take an empty mason jar and have them just fill it. I never have. I'm like, "I got to get this stuff home, I don't know what's in this stuff."

But in the last year or so, [things have changed]. So I ran the 100K on Saturday, and after I do a big event, I usually give myself a couple days of just eating like shit, because I burned 9,000 calories on this race or something like that and I’m starving. I had a burrito, and at first I was like, Oh man, burrito, so good. But then I immediately just felt like garbage.

I think as we get older, we develop—not so much allergies, but sensitivities to foods in ways that we didn't before. Either they affect our bodies differently or we're just old enough to feel that we don't feel great, if that makes sense. When you're young, you're just like, Fuck it, Cheetos! Funyuns? Who cares? Your body can just process anything. And then as you get older, your body starts to rebel against you a bit.

So [after that post-race burrito], I was like, "Nope, I'm done. I’ve got to get back [to eating healthy]. I don't like feeling like this." There are certain foods where the satisfaction that they give you going in do not outweigh how they make you feel when they're in you or—God forbid—when they're coming out of you. That was a good check in and reminder that I'm doing the right thing for my body. This is what works best for me.

My go-to that I could eat for the rest of my life is this: I go to the co-op and buy a bunch of broccoli and Brussels sprouts, potatoes, onions, carrots, whatever, any kind of combination of this kind of stuff, and get it all chopped up, put it in a bowl of olive oil, salt and pepper, and then throw it on a baking sheet with some dukkah. I make my own dukkah, which is a kind of Middle Eastern condiment of nuts and seeds and spices—it’s a flavor and texture bomb. So I'll put all these vegetables on a baking sheet, throw a bunch of dukkah all over it, roast it for a half hour at 400, and then either do some chicken thighs in a skillet on the stove, make a steak, or barbecue chicken or pork or something like that out on the grill. And that to me, strangely, is the meal that I crave the most when I'm away from home. Just after being gone this weekend down at the race, I was like, man, I cannot wait to just throw some vegetables in the fucking oven and roast them and make a salad.

It's so good. It's filling, but it's the good kind of filling. And yeah, I don't have that same feeling of just being weighed down or the GI issues that I had when I was eating a lot of wheat. I'm not one those people who's like, "Gluten is terrible. Bread's terrible." I'm not gluten intolerant, I don't have celiac, it's nothing like that. You just realize some things work better for you sometimes. There are days where I really miss eating pizza, but I don't miss how I felt after I ate it.

Yeah. It's so good going in and then you're like, "Oh my God, why did I do that?"

I do both. Oftentimes if I'm out by myself, usually I'll cue up a bunch of podcasts—a lot of just nerdy baseball podcasts or whatever. But music I sometimes find is hard. The short answer is yes, I do listen to music, but oftentimes—especially when I'm on training runs—music just marks time in too clear of a way. If a song is three minutes long or four minutes long and you know it, you know how much time you've been running. And when I'm out on the trail, more times than not, I don't like to be reminded of how long I've gone or how far I have to go.

Having said that, at the Gorge Waterfalls 100K this weekend, I was running with a friend of mine, and he was kind of struggling because he was under trained, so he was like, "Just go ahead.” [From that point] it was a 10-mile section of trail with no aid to a turnaround where I was picking up my friend, who was going to pace me for the last 13 miles.

In ultra running—often in races longer than 50 miles—you can have somebody hop in with you later in the race. And their job is basically to keep you company, keep you safe, make sure you're eating, make sure you don't go off course. And it's also just an opportunity to have somebody new to talk to. So I had this 10-mile section where I was like, "Man, I'm not over this, but I need something." I’ve got a long way to go with no stimulation outside of…obviously [the surroundings are] beautiful, but I've been out there at that point for nine hours—I get that it’s beautiful here.

So, I ended up listening to the Nas record Illmatic, which I love, and this Jeru the Damaja record called Wrath of the Math , which is one of my favorite records from the '90s. I mean, that record's genius. So I will definitely use music on races like a treat. Like: "Okay, when I get to mile 50, I get music." And then, even though it might contradict what I just said, getting that music as a reward made the miles tick down after that. I was like, “Oh man, fuck yeah!” when “New York State of Mind” came on. And then I was just playing songs on repeat, like, “Oh, I got to hear that again.” And then before I know it, I'm pulling into the parking lot.

Oh, 100%. I remember when we were touring on Plans , which was the last record that we toured when I was drinking, and we were playing an hour and a half [sets], and I wasn't smart enough to realize that the reason I was tired is I was drinking so much and I was out of shape. I wasn't in great cardiovascular shape. But I mean, to be honest, [getting fit has] made the shows just so easy. No matter how tired I am, no matter how jet-lagged I am, I have a reference point not that far in the distant past where I persevered through something way more difficult for way longer. It's like, dude, I just ran through the mountains for 28 hours straight. I can do a two-hour show.

Psychologically that's helpful because I know that I'm able to be on my feet moving with my heart rate elevated for a lot longer than the set time. When we were heading out on the first leg of this [Death Cab and Postal Service] tour in the fall, people were like, “How are you going to do that? You're going to be so exhausted.” I'm like, “Motherfucker, I run 50K on the weekends! I run 30 miles for fun!” Standing and playing music and moving around a little bit is not going to be hard. That's not going to be physically draining.

No, I don't want to be flippant about it. I want to catch myself here and not make it sound like I'm just patting myself in the back. I'm just saying that it's like, what do you think is more difficult? Running 100 miles through the mountains or playing for two hours on stage? Not even close.

The thing that's been interesting about doing these two albums back-to-back is really that when Death Cab's playing our own shows, and we're playing a little under two hours from start to finish, I'm creating a set list that has a particular arc to it. Doing these shows, we play Transatlanticism , which has some rocking moments, but it is mostly a pretty mid-tempo, down-tempo record. And then, when Postal Service comes out, the first two songs are the biggest songs that we have. So because we’re playing the albums in order, the first two songs are peak crowd energy, and the context switching between those two things was jarring at first. It wasn't exhausting, but it was like, “Oh man, normally when I'm an hour into a set, I'm kind of just getting my groove and we're maybe playing some slow songs, but now we're coming out with bangers immediately.”

Anyway, even though I'm saying it's not it's not super difficult for me given my level of fitness, I haven't allowed myself to get cocky with it. Everybody else is staying up [after performing] doing whatever they're doing—watching movies, having a glass of wine, whatever, late into the night. I'm not going out after the show with friends. I'm going to sleep, because I’ve got to get up and run, and then I have to play a show.

No, no. I'll definitely make sure I'm staying hydrated, though—I’ll always have an electrolyte in my bottle, like a Nuun tablet or something, because you need the salts as much as you need the water.

But when I'm on tour, I definitely move into fourth meal territory. I eat a pretty small meal beforehand so that I'm not playing on a full stomach—but that means I'm starving after the show. Eating a meal at 11:00 PM isn't the greatest, but given the exertion, I think it's fine.

It's not really that dissimilar from the headspace I find myself in during a regular Death Cab show, where we're playing new material from whatever new record just came out, but we're also playing, obviously, a lot more older stuff because that’s mostly the stuff that's getting people in the doors. So on a nightly basis, in order to perform the songs to the best of my ability, I have to just live back in the mind of that person who wrote that song.

I find that when I'm singing a song about a particular person or a scenario, for that three to five or however many minutes, I'm living in that space again—I'm time traveling a bit. And at this point in my life, any of these songs that might come off as kiss-offs or sad breakup songs or feel very emotionally wrought, I've long since dealt with my emotions around the subject matter. So it's not so much that I'm tortured by them—I'm not tortured by them. But it is kind of an interesting introspection to play a song you wrote when you were 25 or 26 and think, "Wow, I really felt that way at that time."

It’s not something that worries me. But it’s certainly a reminder of how much emotional growth I've experienced in my life—how my life has changed in some ways, and how it's stayed the same. The band and I have been writing a lot for whatever the next Death Cab record is going to be, whenever we're ready to make that. That pivot is going to be a little strange [heading into this next leg of the tour], going from very intense writing and forward motion, like, “These are the things that I'm thinking about at 47,” back into, “Here's two hours of me at 26.”

But at the same time, I recognize, as I said earlier, that music is a time machine and it brings people back. When people come to see us play these records, you get to interface with a younger version of yourself and reminisce about the people that were important to you. A time in your life where maybe you're a little more carefree, maybe you weren't. Maybe things were better, maybe they're worse.

And obviously this isn't a public service. We're doing it for money. But at the same time, as a music fan myself, I recognize why these kinds of shows are important to people, because I go to see some of my favorite bands do the same thing for the same reason.

Oh my God, do we have enough time? I mean, everything that's happening right now [in early April] is pretty much what I had expected was going to happen. When you're a fan of a perennially failing franchise… and let's be honest, I love the Mariners. I've been a fan since I was five. But they are not a good franchise. They've never been. They literally have as many playoff appearances as ruptured testicles. Look it up. It's true.

I mean, this is not a storied franchise. They have no banners of any note. They've never even made it to a World Series, let alone won one. And there are these moments when you see guys like Jared Kelnick and Eugenio Suarez leaving the team and automatically learning how to hit. I've seen this movie so many times.

It's still too early to say they're not going to make the playoffs. It's a long season. But the team on the field is not instilling any confidence in anybody in Seattle. And there are a lot of factors as to why the team was constructed this way, which we don't necessarily have to go into. But the reality is this is not a good team. And they might make some adjustments throughout the season to get better there. It's always possible. They won at least 88 games the last four seasons, and that's really good.

But you're catching me at a pretty bruised period right now. The Mariners haven't won a fucking series yet. The season's been going for almost three weeks. They have not won a series. And I was watching the game yesterday when Julio got picked off. First off, you're supposed to have… sorry, I'm going to go off for a second. You asked about the Mariners, I can't fucking stop talking. But Julio is supposed to have the day off, a mental health day. And what do they do? They put him into pinch run in the ninth inning when they're down by two runs and he gets picked off first.

You're like, "Why is this guy in the game?" What are these choices you're making here? You gave him the day off so he can get a mental day off, and now you destroy his confidence even more by setting him up to fail.

Yeah. I mean, one of the great things about baseball is that it's every day, but one of the worst things about baseball is that it's every day. When the team's playing like shit, and you're like, "I'm going to watch at least some of this, but I'm going to go to bed angry."

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Vampire Weekend, LCD Soundsystem, More Put Kilby Block Party On The Festival Map [Recap/Photos]

For the last 25 years, Kilby Court has been a hidden gem of the Mountain West music landscape. But since its expansion into the Kilby Block Party —with the likes of Vampire Weekend , Death Cab For Cutie , The Postal Service , and LCD Soundsystem headlining—this staple of Utah’s concert calendar has become a draw for live music fans all across America and around the world.

For three days in May, the beating alt-indie heart of Salt Lake City descended upon the Utah State Fairgrounds for a celebration of music, art, food, and culture that was nothing short of world class—all tucked between a scene of snow-capped Rocky Mountains, no less. Even without access to the usual carnival rides of the Utah State Fair, attendees had plenty to keep busy and entertained.

Four stages—two larger ones and two smaller ones—dotted the festival grounds. The organizers did a clever job of staggering acts, with one large and one small stage activated at a time. That split, while agonizing at times, afforded ample opportunity to cross pollinate styles and sounds.

Day 1 saw the crowd torn between indie cornerstones, with Los Angeles-based indie artist Blondshell on the smaller Mountain Stage counter-programmed against New Zealand psych-rock powerhouse Unknown Mortal Orchestra . Those determined enough could have easily jaunted from one to the next in time to catch a bit of each, albeit at the expense of UMO favorites like “Multi-Love”, “Hunnybee”, and “That Life”.

Hemlocke Springs and Peach Pit followed that up with a battle between indie pop acts, as an entree into yet another indie pop act: Alvvays . Jai Paul ’s British-Indian R&B and Ty Segall ’s psych rock made for the most divergent duo among acts that had to compete.

Courtney Barnett took the vibes a bit more downtempo with her dry wit on “Avant Gardener” and “Pedestrian At Best”. Joanna Newsom ’s triumphant return to live performance, on both harp and grand piano, was a delightful addition—not to mention, a sweet lead-in to Vampire Weekend.

The New York City-formed, now-Los Angeles-based indie rockers returned to Salt Lake City, 17 years after playing Kilby Court, to regale the crowd with selections from across their five-album catalog. Ezra Koenig and company paid plenty of attention to their new album, Only God Was Above Us , with cuts like “Classical”, “Capricorn”, “Gen-X Cops”, and “Connect”—the latter of which featured a fan coming out of the crowd to play a piano solo.

The highlight of Vampire Weekend’s set, though, came just prior to “Campus”. In a callback to a recent episode of the band’s podcast, Vampire Campfire , the guys invited Heather Gay from The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City onstage to play cornhole and win band merchandise.

And that was just Friday. Saturday brought another wave of spectacular music, along with a bit of weather.

TV Girl transposed some edgy-yet-sarcastic indie rock from LA to SLC. Belle and Sebastian brought back their Scottish pop with a vengeance on the main Kilby Stage.

After a brief delay in the early evening due to high winds, the festival returned in full force with an abbreviated electropop set from Santigold . Her M.I.A.-but-cheerier vibes made for an excellent opener to the Death Cab For Cutie/The Postal Service headlining doubleheader.

As always, Ben Gibbard rocked out in both black and white outfits. Whether singing his heart out to “The New Year”, “Title and Registration”, and “The Sound of Settling” off Death Cab’s Transatlanticism or jamming with Jenny Lewis through “Such Great Heights”, “Clark Gable”, and “Brand New Colony” as The Postal Service, the sharp-penned Seattleite seemed to soak in every moment at the peak of his powers.

Sunday saw perhaps the most eclectic lineup of the weekend in terms of both style and geography. There was the electro-punk of Miami’s Yves Tumor , the Mumford-esque Spanish indie folk of Mexico’s Kevin Kaarl , the mostly-Tame psych rock of Australia’s Pond and the hyperpop of St. Louis’ 100 gecs .

The evening transitioned with the more traditional post-punk of Guided by Voices and Interpol as perfunctory palette-setters for LCD Soundsystem. James Murphy needed a tank of oxygen to replenish his wind while expending his passion on the audience. Though the New York City legends didn’t drop “Daft Punk is Playing at My House”, they still put forth plenty of dance-punk favorites, from “Get Innocuous” and “Tonite” to “Dance Yrself Clean” and “All My Friends”.

Rarely has a festival seen all of its headliners deliver in such spectacular fashion as LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, Death Cab For Cutie, and The Postal Service did at Kilby Block Party. And rarely has a festival, in turn, provided such a scenic setting, with such an enthusiastic audience, as Kilby did to its visiting artists.

With a combination of factors like that, it stands to reason that Kilby Block Party will only grow in size and scope, as will the caliber of talent that drops into Salt Lake City in May.

Click below to view daily photo galleries from Kilby Block Party 2024 courtesy of photographer Brent Goldman .

Kilby Block Party | The Utah State Fairpark | Salt Lake City, UT | 5/10/24 | Photos: Brent Goldman

Kilby block party | the utah state fairpark | salt lake city, ut | 5/11/24 | photos: brent goldman, kilby block party | the utah state fairpark | salt lake city, ut | 5/12/24 | photos: brent goldman.

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