Ben Gibbard Exits Death Cab for Solo Run
Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard will leave the band behind this fall as he heads out on the road to support his upcoming debut solo album.
The tour will kick off September 26 with a show at the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, Calif. and is scheduled to run through a November 14 show at the Wilshire Ebell in Los Angeles. In between, Gibbard will visit Toronto, Minneapolis, New York, Atlanta and San Francisco.
Most of the tour will feature support by Advanced Base, though the San Francisco and Los Angeles shows will feature Damien Jurado in the opening spot.
Former Lives, the aforementioned debut solo album, will be released in the middle of the tour on October 16. No songs from the album have yet been released, though Gibbard did recently speak to Stereogum about what we can expect.
“I definitely approached it on a song-by-song basis,” he told the music website. “It really comes down to a matter of personal preference, but I kind of like that the record is something of a mixed bag. The songs themselves are not all of a particular mode – they’re not all about one subject – and they’re not from one definitive era of my life.”
Gibbard also said that the solo album does not in any way imply he is done recording and performing with Death Cab, and went on to say that the songs on his solo album are not “leftover” songs.
“[W]ith every record that we’ve made there would always be a couple of tunes that just didn’t seem to fit in with the band,” he said. “They’re not songs that weren’t good enough to make Death Cab records as much as they were things that… well, there’s not really place on a Death Cab record for a song that sounds like Big Star or Teenage Fanclub.”
