Today my friends in Death Cab for Cutie released the first song and video from their forthcoming album, Thank You for Today. Featuring a sample from Yoko Ono’s “Mindtrain,” the tune is a fantastic, funky, soulful shuffle with Ben Gibbard singing about the Seattle neighborhood of Capitol Hill that he’s called home for two decades but now feels increasingly foreign. Not necessarily better or worse. Just different.
“As I’ve gotten older,” Ben told NPR, “I’ve become acutely aware of how I connect my memories to my geography and [how] the landscape of the city changes. I’ll walk down Broadway and walk past a location that used to be a bar I’d frequent with friends, or somewhere where I had a beautifully intense conversation with somebody that I once loved very much. The song is not a complaint about how things were better or anything like that. It’s an observation, but more about coming to terms with the passage of time and losing the people and the moments in my life all over again as I walk down a street that is now so unfamiliar.”
Death Cab for Cutie’s ninth album, Thank You for Today, will be released August 17.
As a bonus, here’s the sample source, Yoko Ono’s Mindtrain from the album Fly (1971):
