Worth Hearing: Ben Gibbard's "Couches in Alleys"

This is the first of what I hope will be a recurring post entitled, "Worth Hearing." Pretty straightforward. Any song or band that strikes me in a way that I feel is worth telling another person about, I'll spare my friends and family the conversations they won't care about and just post my thoughts here.

I'm a big fan of Ben Gibbard, the lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie and the Postal Service. While some may be turned off by Death Cab's quirky, indie style or the Postal Service's techno backing music, his songs are, in my opinion, some of the best this generation may have to offer to the history of American songwriting.

Last year, Gibbard spent a good deal of time on the road doing a solo tour, just him and his guitar with the occasional guest.

I have been lucky enough to download the recordings of a few of these shows and I have a newfound jealousy for anyone who attended the one at the 9:30 Club which apparently was broadcast on NPR as well.

I'm jealous because in addition to all the charmingly earnest Death Cab and Postal Service songs that he played for most of his audiences over the course of the solo tour, he played his song, "Couches in Alleys", that he recorded with Styrofoam.

On the recording he admits it is the first time he's played the song live and proceeds to play the song as any avid listener of Gibbard would hope he would; earnest, honest, and a bit melancholy, really.

He substitutes the catchy, categorically elusive backing music that Styrofoam provided for his remarkable lyrics on the initial recording with a somber chord progression on his guitar.

The song is an "open letter" to Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation's icon and author of "On the Road", among other novels.

Gibbard's appreciation of the beatnik Kerouac and his transient lifestyle during the 1950's and 60's is apparent in this song. Gibbard relates to Kerouac's struggle with aging. As one who lived a famously free flowing life, Kerouac had a hard time retreating to sedentary life in his later years and died at the ripe age of 47 of cirrhosis of the liver caused by years of drinking.
Gibbard doesn't come off as one to live as, I'll say recklessly, as Kerouac, but he certainly has spent years on the road.

Like Kerouac, getting older doesn't seem to have been so easy on Gibbard and this song is evidence of that. It must be hard for the ever-traveling type like touring musicians to realize that their nomadic, adventurous lifestyle must come to an end at some point.

Here is one of the portions of the song that I am referring to:

At the end of this road that climbs the horizon
we’ll be reached in a matter of miles.
And when the wheels cease to spin,
The walls and the fences will grow taller
Than redwood trees.
And I know your demise
And I fear what will happen
When the world fails to flow under me.

I especially like the line, "When the wheels cease to spin, the walls and the fences will grow taller than redwood trees." When the traveler stops his incessant moving, he must feel boxed in by his surroundings. Like most of Gibbard's lyrics, I just can't imagine a better way to articulate that notion than he does in this song.

This may also be an allusion to the cabin on Big Sur, California, where Kerouac, on the verge of a nervous breakdown as a result of his newfound literary stardom, wrote his novel "Big Sur."

I'm imagining the cabin on Big Sur in California would be surrounded by redwood trees. I draw this conclusion because I know Gibbard himself retreated to the exact same cabin on Big Sur where Kerouac sought refuge, to write Death Cab's new album, "Narrow Stairs."

I'll bring up another part of the song,

I felt like your mirror with the wind whipping through my hair.
When the wheels cease to spin
And I cased my surroundings I realized I hadn’t gone anywhere.
And the problems I’d left, were couches in alleys
That no one would ever claim.
And the hardest part, was sifting through the pieces
Of the rainsoaked and rotten remains
when I got home.

After the years of traveling, feeling like Kerouac out on the road, he realizes he's back where he started. I'm not sure just what problems Gibbard is reffering to as the "couches in alleys", but I think the metaphor is really incredibly bright and appropriate.

But enough of what I think, here's the same recording of "Couches in Alleys" that I'm talking about.