As someone who has used his voice and influence for years to encourage people to vote, Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard has a question. " I don't understand why anybody in this country would oppose having election day be a national holiday," Gibbard says.
Over the course of their 25 years together, Death Cab have been involved in several philanthropic endeavors, going back to being part of the Vote For Change tour in 2004. Over those 10 dates, which featured different performers in key battleground states, artists like Bruce Springsteen, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Neil Young, Bonnie Raitt, The Chicks, Pearl Jam, John Mellencamp and more performed.
So the band has been focused on voting rights and getting people out to vote for going on two decades. Gibbard was also active in recent years in fundraising for various Seattle organizations during the beginning of the COVID pandemic, raising over $250,000 for the different charities.
But as Gibbard explained to me on a recent conversation, their main priority still rests on getting people to vote. " Our goal has been to register as many voters as we possibly can at our shows, make sure that we're participating in campaigns that promote voting rights," he says. "We believe, as I wish everybody in this country believed, that our right to vote and choose our elected representatives is fundamental to being American regardless of whether or not you're on the right or the left."
I spoke with Gibbard at length about his passion for voting and voters rights, the considerable influence R.E.M. had on him, why the band's recent tour was one of their best ever and much more.
Steve Baltin: You guys have always been so politically minded, and been so open about your beliefs in everything. I'm very curious what the vibe you've been getting as you go through America is.
Ben Gibbard: The vibe that we are getting is honestly not very political. I think a large function of it is, we are out here to entertain people. And maybe it's just the way I'm choosing to frame it after not being able to do a large part of my job for the last couple years. But the impression that I get from the audience is that for the people who are feeling comfortable going out, and who can afford to go out, almost every show just has this like incredibly life-affirming energy to it. And it's across the board. We're in Boston one night and we're having the best show we've ever had in Boston. The next night, a couple nights later we're playing in Charleston, South Carolina, a very red state. And we're very unclear as to who our fans even are, and we're playing this sold-out field show in a brewery. People are going absolutely bonkers, and we're like, "Holy s**t, that was the best show the whole tour. Who would've thought it would've been North Charleston, South Carolina?" But also I think it's worth mentioning, we did some shows in September, 2021 during the first Omicron where we had to be really locked down, just because none of us at that point had had it, at least not to our knowledge. And everything felt a lot more tenuous. Now at this point, we're not going out and hanging out in bars after shows, but we're going out to dinner, and doing regular s**. And I think we feel good about that.
Baltin: What do you see your role as an artist in this political minefield in 2022?
Gibbard: We're not out here stumping for political candidates along the way. We're just out playing shows. And I think for me at least, I can't speak for the whole band, but as the Trump years seemingly lasted forever, I started to notice I'd go to shows in Seattle mind you, and an artist would get on stage and they would spend 10 or 15 minutes of their set over the course of an hour or an hour and a half, like f**king yelling at Trump. And we're like, "Yeah, dude, we all get it. We all dislike this guy greatly. We're in Seattle for Christ's sake." And secondly I wantto get away from this for like an hour or two. It feels like we're back in that period. Now, with everything happening with Trump and all the legal kind of battles that assuredly will kind of amount to nothing with him, I feel like we're back in this Trump news every day. But, as we all lived through that period, we were just being inundated with this guy every day. We just couldn't get away from him. And I started to realize that my job as a performing artist, at least in front of an audience, was to give that respite from political Twitter, Instagram just, cable news like that for two hours of their day. They could just enjoy some music and not necessarily have it be tied into what was happening politically in that period. Now having said that, our cause basically since day one has been voting rights and voter registration. And for us, we've often felt that this should be a cause that everybody in this country should be behind. Our goal has been to register as many voters as we possibly can at our shows, make sure that we're participating in campaigns that promote voting rights. We believe as I wish everybody in this country believed that our right to vote and choose our elected representatives is fundamental to being American regardless of whether or not you're on the right or the left. But as we've seen in recent years there seems to be a concerted effort by the far right in this country to inhibit people's ability and ease of voting. I don't understand why anybody in this country would oppose having election day be a national holiday. That shouldn't be anything that anybody should oppose. We should all be doing everything we can to get every citizen out to vote. We kind of pick up things along the way, but that's been the through line throughout this band's career.
Baltin: You did the Vote for Change tour in 2004,which Bruce Springsteen was on.
Gibbard: And Pearl Jam, a bunch of people. It was crazy.
Baltin: The reason I mentioned Springsteen specifically is I believe it was 2020 when Letter To You came out. And I think at that point everybody expected Springsteen to make a Nebraska type record after four years of the Trump years. And I got to interview both Steven Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren, and we talked at length about the fact they expected him to make a record like that as well. Do you feel like there's been a little bit of a shift and that the role of the musician maybe has changed a little bit to become more of a distraction from daily life?
Gibbard: I think the role as a musician can be both things. Let's say we're playing in Phoenix, people pay 50 bucks, they buy the tickets, they have them on their phone or maybe they print them out, or however they have them, the name is on the list, and they're like talking to their friends, they're getting ready for the show, they're maybe gonna get dinner beforehand. What do you think they're discussing? They're discussing, "I wonder what songs they're gonna play tonight, if they're gonna play this thing for that record, or this and that."They're not wondering, "I wonder if Ben is gonna talk about the January 6th hearings for 10 minutes tonight." That's not the place, that's not what people want. They're here to hear music, they're here to be entertained and people are paying to hear me play music. They're not paying to hear me go on a political rant for 10 minutes. Having said that, our role is also to use the sphere of influence we have to motivate people at least in our view, to kind of at least consider some of the things that are very important to us, be it reproductive rights, voting rights, queer, trans rights, whatever it might be, and on and on and on. And I think when artists get too preachy, they're easily dismissed. Because if every time you're climbing on stage, you're rambling about some s**t, eventually people are just gonna stop listening. But I believe that as an artist, that these two things can live together insofar as they're not competing for the same space in the same time.
Baltin: It makes perfect sense. Obviously there's been this seismic shift with social media, so now you have great artists like Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift, who have been very politically active, but you don't hear protest songs anymore. Do you feel like social media has allowed artists to interact with their fans in such a different way that you're right, you can use your social media to speak about the things that are important to you, but when you're on stage that night, you don't have to address those issues?
Gibbard: I would agree with your point 100 percent. I think that one looks no further than Billie Eilish when discussing that. As an older person, myself, I'm 46, she's one of those people I look to and I think the kids are all right. Like the fact that at her age, she's brought mental health, suicide prevention and animal rights to her fan base. The reality is, as a pop star, you can either use social media show off your shoe collection, or you can use it to raise awareness and funds on things that are very important to you. And I am never not in awe of the kind of work that Billie Eilish is doing on that front. Because she has such a massive influence and it's clear that she's using her platform for good and in our much smaller way we're trying to do the same thing.
Baltin: When you think back to mixing music and politics as Billy Bragg put it, who inspired you to do that?
Gibbard: R. E. M.'s a band that was incredibly important to all of us growing up. One of the things I really appreciated about R. E. M. and still do to this day was, especially in the height, their creative peaks were absolutely transcendence. But they brought to their shows and to the culture of their band a political awareness that was like, "Hey, this song might not be about X, but now that I've got your attention, I want to talk to you about X." I feel like they were one of the first bands at least on a larger level. I mean there were punk bands and stuff I grew up loving that did a similar thing but on a much smaller scale. But like, as far as a band that was able to like reach hundreds of thousands of people with political messaging that mirrored my values, I think R. E. M. is on the top of Everest to those bands for me.
Baltin: What are the greatest political anthems of all time, those songs that fire you up every time you hear them?
Gibbard: Number one's "Fight The Power," Public Enemy. It's over 30 years old now but that's just a call to action, like the ultimate call to action. For people in my generation, I think that song is massive. I think another song which is adjacent but it's different in its messaging is "Whitey on the Moon," by Gil Scott-Heron. I think that we get so caught up in this country. I'm sure you're familiar with that song but the whole thing is like people are starving in the streets, but Whitey is on the moon. Talking about like, we're spending money to send somebody to space in some like dick measuring contest with the Soviets, and at the same time the inner cities are dying. To me it's an important reminder that the issues we have in this country is not financial. We don't have a problem coming up with the money to solve these problems. What we don't have is the political will to do it. And for me, that song I come back to that song so often. Sadly, I keep coming back to it. It's like, it's not a matter of being able to do it. It's a matter of wanting to do it and allocating the funds and the resources to a place where these systemic problems can be solved.
Baltin: Now you have the billionaire space race with Bezos and Musk and whoever else and 53 years later it hasn't changed. They could give all of that money and feed the entire country and instead they go to space.
Gibbard: Yeah. And I think that's a fundamental difference between the original space race and what's happening now. In 1969 it was the American government spending American's money to go to space to beat the Russians. And now as we move deeper into this, it's kind of a buzzy word, but I don't know another way of stating it, kind of a late stage capitalism. We are hitting peak capitalism where seven people have 99 percent of the world's money or whatever it might be. I'm exaggerating, but you understand my point. What's worse, the American government spending billions of dollars to send some white dudes to space so we can sit to the moon so we can say we beat the Russians or maintaining and kind of assisting a system that allows four multi billionaires to like race each other to the moon? What's worse, I don't know. They're both pretty bad. But it's very clear that one kind of cause the other. We're at a point now where it's almost too late to take this money back from these people. It's like we created the system that allowed this to happen in this first place. I don't like the rules they were playing with. I don't like who they seem to be as people. But having said that, the system exists and is able to be exploited because they're playing by the rules that were set.
Baltin: How do you best use your time coming up to this election?
Gibbard: With this election looming we believe the best use of our time has been to double down with Headcount. Make sure that we're getting people out to register to vote at the shows, as long as the windows are open. I think reproductive rights is becoming a larger and larger part of our kind of arsenal at this point. We just worked on a comp with our manager, we're getting deeper into working with organizations that are helping to kind of try to turn the tide on this, like just archaic return to a pre-Roe world. But I think that all of us will have clearer marching orders after this election is done. Because we're gonna see a lot of state elections, be it governorships or senators, hinge on the overturning of Roe. We are here to be a tool to be used in a positive way by the organizations that are fighting for reproductive rights. I think we'll collectively know a lot more after this election, which is kind of painful because you want to be doing stuff right f**king now. But the reality is, I think that a lot of states are gonna sway either way based on the overturning of Roe. I like our chances because I think that if there's one thing that unites all Americans, David Cross had a bit about this, but it's basically like, don't tell me what to do. All Americans in their own way believe that's a fundamental part of being an American. And I I think that the overturning of Roe is gonna have far worse consequences for the right than they even imagined. Maybe not in this initial election, but certainly in the years coming up.
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