Over the course of a two-and-a-half-year pandemic thousands, if not millions of people across the country—and the globe—were forced into an extended, existential crisis, resulting in all kinds of self-reflection and reevaluation on our emotional and mental wellbeing, the importance of a healthy work/life balance, and how we even want to interact with the rest of the world. Contrasting this inner focus was the even greater attention we placed on what was happening outside the confines of our quarantined homes in and around our local and national communities. Like so many others, Death Cab For Cutie frontman and songwriter Ben Gibbard watched events around him play out with a heightened sense of dread.
“We in America had kind of taken for granted this idea that everything was just going to keep working,” he says. “That our institutions will continue to function, that the people in charge know what they’re doing, and that you have nothing to worry about. It just seemed as though many of the things that we took for granted were on the precipice of just falling apart. And I think that when you live with that sense of chaos you are made painfully aware of the fact that it was never functioning as well as you thought it was, and all it took was somebody just to push it a little bit.” death cab for cutie t shirt
This pervading air of frustration, disappointment, and apprehension is something that weighs heavily within the core of Death Cab for Cutie’s 10th LP, Asphalt Meadows. Gibbard himself cites a line from one of the record’s standout singles, “Here to Forever”—“Now it seems more than ever, there’s no hands on the levers.”\
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