Anarchy in the OC

Ben Gibbard just woke up, and he’s in no mood to talk to anyone, let alone a reporter, let alone a reporter asking about a certain TV show-slash-pop-culture icon with which his band, Death Cab for Cutie, has become hopelessly tied. The last thing someone talking to Gibbard should do is mention Death Cab in the context of Fox teen melodrama The OC.

Whoops.

“Frankly, I’m so talked out about it that I don’t even want to talk about it,” he says with a curtness that might have something to do with the night he just spent sleeping in a tour bus on the side of the road somewhere near Minneapolis. For a guy noted for his heartfelt sentimentality on albums such as 2003’s downbeat indie breakthrough Transatlanticism, that year’s shockingly successful laptop-pop side project the Postal Service and, most recently, Death Cab’s 2005 joy-through-melancholy epic Plans, he can’t help but come off grumpy. “It’s a TV show, they used a song, and it seems that’s all people want to talk about. If it’s all the same, I’d rather just not talk about it.”

Usually, though, a statement like that would suggest that he does, in fact, want to talk about it. “I think somewhere around the late ’90s, the parameters of how well your band can do changed,” Gibbard rants with an uncharacteristic touch of bitterness. In a world where it’s virtually impossible for indie bands to draw attention through radio or MTV, he’s glad that the musical tastes of filmmakers, TV producers and commercial makers now favor less lacquered sounds. “With that being said, I think with Garden State for the Shins or The OC for us, it’s just a way to get people to music and not a strategic alignment or anything like that. If they want to use a bunch of my songs or name-drop, that’s fine. But it’s certainly not by our design or desire, so that’s an important distinction we have to make. There’ve never been any backroom meetings between our organization and The OC to try to get more attention for us.”

Sensitive, ain’t he? But the melancholy songwriter makes a point: Death Cab was making headlines long before fictional dweeb-hunk Seth Cohen started pimping the band to America — in fact, Death Cab’s first four albums have sold a combined 700,000-plus copies on Barsuk, a once-teeny Seattle label. Yet every article written on the Pacific Northwest quartet seems to finger the TV show as the out-of-nowhere key to the band’s success.

Death Cab is not defined by a teen soap opera, people. “The more I talk about it,” Gibbard concludes, “the more it devalues all the work we put into the band over the years.”

Still, the band’s signature brand of densely layered mope-pop is more prominent than ever, thanks in part to a highly publicized major-label deal. Though Plans is produced, as every other Death Cab album has been, by the band’s guitarist, Chris Walla, it’s out on Atlantic Records. Some questioned the logic of such a move, especially considering the success the band had with Barsuk, but Gibbard is as unrepentant about this as he is indifferent to whatever contributions The OC might have made to his fame. “If we can’t be a cool indie band because we’re signed to Atlantic Records, then that’s fine,” he says, dismissing critics he claims he never considers. “I never thought we were cool to begin with.”

Hear that, Seth? You idolize nerds.

It’s getting to be a tired story these days, anyway — the midlevel band bemoaning the success of former peers who have graduated to the big leagues. After all, isn’t the point of creating art to affect as many people as possible? Gibbard sees it that way. “If a band wants to be somebody’s secret indie band for the rest of their career, that’s fine,” he says. “We, however, make decisions that feel best for us — and that might not be good for the little indie bands that think major labels are evil corporate conglomerates and like to shop at co-ops.”

He pauses, then backpedals a bit. “I’m a little crotchety and hungover this morning,” he admits. “People want it to work like ‘major label bad, indie label good.’ It’s not that simple. The lines are too blurred.”

Especially before Gibbard has had his first cup of coffee.