Music
Interview
The Postal Service: “It’s cool to have an excuse to relive the glory days”
Jimmy Tamborello on the making and influence of their album Give Up ahead of a joint headline performance at All Points East festival
Just over two decades ago, two new acquaintances and musical collaborators released an album that was the culmination of song ideas they had sent to each other in physical form over the post. Neither expected it, but The Postal Service’s Give Up became Sub Pop Records’ second most popular album, beaten only by Nirvana’s Bleach. Tracks such as ‘Such Great Heights’ and ‘The District Sleeps Alone Tonight’ reflected an appetite for a newer, softer and emotive form of indie rock, which opened its doors to electronic influences.
Seemingly only touring it every ten years, Give Up is the only album Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard released as The Postal Service. Yet, its influence resounds. The band is set to perform it in its entirety at All Points East festival this weekend alongside Transatlanticsm from Gibbard’s Death Cab For Cutie.
Here, Tamborello gifts us a rare interview to look back at Give Up‘s making and its enduring influence.
Talk to me about when you first began to realise how influential Give Up was becoming. Or is this realisation ongoing?
Yeah, it’s surprising that it’s endured for so long. I mean, I think it grew kind of slowly. The first thing we noticed was when we went on tour for the first time 20 years ago, they had to keep changing the venues to bigger venues as the tour went along. That was just a few months after the album came out. So that was the first time where it felt like more people were noticing it than we expected. But then, yeah, it’s been a slow, kind of steady series of events that have happened over the years.
It’s not just a cult classic. It’s Sub Pop Records’ second most popular album and has topped several Billboard charts. The label persuaded you both to do more than just a few songs and develop an album, right? Do you remember when this went from a casual project with a new acquaintance to a fully-fledged artistic pursuit?
It was fast. Ben was in town in LA visiting me. We were recording the vocals for the DNTL song he did with me, ‘(This Is) The Dream Of Evan and Chan’, and that was the first thing we did together. Just that weekend we realised that we liked working together and had fun together. I think that weekend we brought up the idea of doing more songs. We were first talking about an EP. But I feel like even during that weekend, we were talking to Tony [A&R at Sub Pop] on the phone – he was like a friend, he used to be a roommate so it wasn’t like a business call – and I feel like he switched it into the idea of making a whole album right then. This was before we started making any songs. Once we started we knew we were working towards the whole album.
![The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight [OFFICIAL VIDEO]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xUIBnmdJJ50/0.jpg)
As much as this album means to fans, your respective projects always came first. In fact, there’s a direct quote from Ben in 2008: “The anticipation of the second record has been a far bigger deal for everybody except the two of us.” Do you think, in a way, that attitude or approach has added to The Postal Service’s mythology?
Yeah, I think it definitely fuels it. Like for these tours it definitely fuels more interest that it’s such a rare occasion. And yeah, we could have made more records that weren’t as good and tarnished our legacy. I mean, that’s not why we didn’t do it. We tried to make more stuff later; around 2006, we were sending some stuff back and forth. It just wasn’t coming out the same, the momentum kind of left, and it just never happened. A couple of those songs ended up on the deluxe version of Give Up on the 10-year anniversary. I think that we just missed the moment.
On a Song Exploder episode a few years back, you admitted that you thought ‘Give Up’ would be much more experimental than it ended up being. Why do you think it ended up differently from what you imagined?
It’s hard to figure that out because, yeah, I went into it thinking I wanted to do it more like the DNTL album I had made, which was a little weirder. But the first songs I sent him were ‘The District Sleeps Alone Tonight’ and ‘Brand New Colony’. Those were two instrumentals, and they were right away, pretty poppy. I don’t know why that happened. I was just picturing his voice and what would be good with it. Maybe I thought that they were still pretty weird at the time. Once I got back his vocal contributions to those songs it made sense that we followed that path. So yeah, from there it just kept getting poppier, although there’s still a lot of elements of weirdness in there.
I guess you were bridging electronica and indie just as the latter was about to reallu take off in its heyday. Perhaps not necessarily in exactly the same vein, but it’s also true that the electronic side of indie rock hasn’t left. I’m interested to hear who you think has been pushing those boundaries today and who inspires you in that regard?
I really like all the PC Music stuff, I definitely consider that indie. I guess Charlie XCX is more in pop but from an indie heart, I think.
Everyone knows the story behind your namesake. That you would send musical ideas to each other in the post. But I wonder if your friendship was also blossoming over correspondence? Were you writing to each other too?
We weren’t, really. I don’t remember writing much of anything. I’d send the CD-Rs, and there must have been some kind of notes or little jokes back and forth, but not much. I’m sure we were talking on the phone a bit, too. But really, we weren’t together for most of it; we weren’t in a lot of communication. We probably grew closer as it got closer to being finished and we had to actually figure stuff out about how to finish the songs and stuff. But yeah, we took a while to get to know each other.
There’s a band in the UK who had to change their name from Easy Life to Hard Life after a cease-and-desist from an airline. Is it true that part of the terms of The US Postal Service letting you keep your name was if you played their annual staff conference?
I mean, it did happen, but it wasn’t just about playing the conference. That was just thrown in there. They did file a cease and desist but luckily we were with Sub Pop, who’s a decent- sized label and had lawyers who knew how to deal with that. The US Postal Service was really friendly and easy to to make a deal with, and so they gave us a license. I think they could take it away if we committed crimes or were bad people. They also started selling some of our CDs at the Postal Service stores. And then they invited us to play at their conference. It wasn’t like an ultimatum, like if you don’t do this… But we still have to renew the license every certain amount of years.
Let’s talk about the live show today – How has the live iteration changed from both the 20 and 10 year mark?
Well, the first time we toured, 20 years ago, it was a real DIY situation. I mean, it was a van tour. Nick from Death Cab came with us and was running a projector with some visuals and we’d just hang a sheet from the back of the venues. We didn’t have a sound guy even. I’m sure it wasn’t great sounding.
For the ten year anniversary, I had to kind of rebuild a lot of the tracks. We didn’t really have all the instrumentals and stuff together from the first tour. So a lot of that kind of stuff took a lot of time to rebuild. But Death Cab already had a pretty great crew of people that they worked with, including sound guys and lights and everything. So, it was a much more professional tour, with a lot more people helping us make it big and to fit the scale of the venues. The first tour we were playing for 100 to 200 people clubs, so it was a big jump to the ten year.
And so then for this one, it’s less of a jump, and I luckily saved all the files so I didn’t have to totally restart from zero again. The big difference this time is we’re just doing the album straight and in order, so it’s a different feel to last time when we were playing all the b-sides and anything else we have mixed into a different setlist.
You’ve been ending your sets recently with a cover of Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy The Silence’. Is that just a favourite song of yours, or a message to fans that after this run of anniversary shows, that is it?
I didn’t even think of that, ha! That’s good.
You mentioned those early shows; you both seem like pretty chill guys, but these massive festivals and sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden and Hollywood Bowl, for example, do you take all of this in your stride, or do you find it hard to believe?
It’s a kind of both. It’s hard to believe, and it’s pretty shocking to me. I don’t really do any of this between these tours, so it goes from DJing in a bar to playing at these giant venues and traveling on a bus. The Death Cab guys and Jenny all do a lot more of this, or it’s much more their normal lifestyle.
Lastly, the 10- and 20-year anniversaries make sense as they’re landmarks that everyone scores their lives by. But I wonder if you’re a nostalgic person at all, and if it’s made you more nostalgic as the years go by?
I think I’m decently nostalgic and it’s nice to have an excuse to be nostalgic and to remember, to have a reason to talk about the early days. It’s nice that all these people want to come out and see us relive what we were doing in our 20s. I think it’d be a sad thing if we were, or if I was just alone at a bar trying to tell you what I did 20 years ago. But it’s cool to have an excuse to, yeah, relive the glory days.
