Catching Up With... Chris Walla

After years of holding it down as the guitarist and producer for Death Cab for Cutie, not to mention lending his ear to numerous other production endeavors, Chris Walla releases his full-length solo debut, Field Manual, this week. Despite the much-publicized detainment of the hard drive containing the album’s masters at the U.S.-Canada border in October, the record has found its way to shelves via Barsuk. Layered, clear, and alternately ethereal or driving, the record bears the trademark tapestry-of-sound quality found on many of Walla's projects.

The apparently tireless musician is also currently preparing the upcoming Death Cab album, to be released this May on Atlantic. The band had finished tracking by the beginning of the year, and Walla, the perennial producer of all Death Cab efforts, began mixing the record on Jan. 8. It was recorded at Two Sticks Audio in Seattle (the studio built by Death Cab drummer Jason McGerr), Tiny Telephone in San Francisco (owned and operated by John Vanderslice), Robert Lang Studios in Seattle and in Portland at Walla’s own studio, Alberta Court, where mixing is taking place.

Paste caught up with Walla to speak about both of his upcoming releases.

Paste: Tell me a little bit about Field Manual.
Chris Walla: I’m kind of still learning how to talk about it. I’ve talked about Death Cab records for years, but it’s different when they’re my songs. I guess I never really realized that. It’s my first solo-type record, and it’s a pretty reasonably full-rock-band affair. It’s just that the rock band is mostly me, I guess.

P: You’ve done some solo stuff over the years as Martin Youth Auxiliary. What made you decide to use your own name on this recording and not call yourself anything else?
Walla: It started to feel like it would be disingenuous to call it anything else. Nobody knew that I was in [Martin Youth Auxiliary], and that’s totally fine and good, but I worked so hard with this record to make sure that all the words that were coming out of my mouth were words that I actually connected to. I think I’m just really certain of the songs and what their jobs are and what they do. I didn’t realize until I got all the songs done, but they are really all just the things that I obsess about all the time anyway. My hope is that I’ve turned some of that stuff into some sort of poetry, I guess. It’s hard to tell.

P: You address some political subject matter on the record. Is that what you mean?
Walla: That’s a lot of it. That’s so much of it. Anything that’s not that is exploring the idea that it’s really all tied together, whether you’re thinking about politics, or whether you’re thinking about your relationship, or your place in the world, or not.

P: Last year you had your hard drive with the masters for this record confiscated by border security. In the end, did that hold up the overall production process?
Walla: Yes, I learned technically [that it wasn't] “confiscated.” My hard drive was “detained.” Having something “confiscated” is a more serious thing, and having something “seized” is even more serious. That had a measurable, significant effect on the way the record unfolded. In fact, one of the things that it did was that the record that [was sent out to press as an advance] is, in large part, mixes that didn’t make it to the record people will buy in the stores. When that whole thing happened and the drive got hung up, there was a really small window in which I was able to finish mixes. And that event sort of erased that window. That was kind of a big drag because the record, to me, in the form that [the press received], it feels like from about the fourth song to about the tenth song it’s got a really similar color. It doesn’t feel like it’s totally engaging through the whole length of the thing.

P: Do you think it’s your experience as a producer that’s making you look at it so closely?
Walla: I think so. I sort of feel like my job as a producer is half discipline, like, “Sing the vocal again, it’s out of tune,” and, “You rushed that part.” Really concrete stuff. And then the other half is really esoteric crap. Kind of like what I’m talking about when I’m talking about it being one color through the middle of the record. I can identify the problem and try different things to figure out what’s happening. It turned out in this case it really was just mixes. Fully half of the record is pretty different from the one that you have. It’s got a lot more depth to it, I think, the one that you will be able to buy in the store.

P: So you did end up ultimately getting your hard drive back?
Walla: Yes. The whole thing was a huge series of misunderstandings that all kind of hilariously coupled with one another. But yes, I did end up getting them back. And I did learn a lot about DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and border security in the process. It was a good experience ultimately. It’s not what I would choose again, I don’t think, but I certainly am the better for having had to deal with it.

P: You ended up bringing in an outside producer for this record, Warne Livesey. What made you decide to do that?
Walla: It was starting to seem like I was going to get three songs done that I was totally happy with and then the rest of it was going to fall by the wayside. Which is sort of always what happens to me, and that was sort of the impetus for putting up all those songs on my website. I had all these collections of two and three and four songs at a time stretching back to like 1995. Those are all false starts of records. The songs were feeling together enough to me this time that I didn’t want that to happen. It was really feeling like a thing.

When you’re a producer and you’re working with another band, there’s always other energy to play on, and there’s always somebody else you can turn to. Not having any of that feedback or interaction was really weird and tricky, and after three or four songs it was starting to damage the progress of the record. Enter Warne Livesey. He’s produced a few of my favorite records. He had moved to Victoria a few years ago, just up the street, so it just seemed like I should give him a call. We just ended up diving in and doing it. And that’s why there was a border thing, because we recorded a bunch of it at his house in Victoria. It’s his fault; that’s what I’m saying [laughs].

P: You called your forthcoming Death Cab record “creepy and heavy” on your website. Do you still think that’s true?
Walla: I do think that’s true still. It’s kind of…damaged. The demos came in as they always do from Ben [Gibbard] and there were fully 28 or 30 songs this time. Like with anyone’s demos, not all of them are great—not all of them are even good. But there were 15 or 16 that we ended up tracking that were good enough to at least dive into. A few, the ones we all really gravitated toward, were pretty weird even in demo form, but he definitely grew to love them pretty quickly. So did we. There was this theme of trying to figure out how this stuff could work without making a Death Cab cover record, if that makes any sense. It got made a little differently than anything else we’d done. We tracked a lot of the stuff completely live, which we’d never done before. There are a couple songs where we have all four of us; we got a vocal off the floor and everything, which never happens.

P: Is it a big departure from Plans?
Walla: Absolutely. Plans is very much a construction project. It’s a huge building built out of really, really tiny pieces.

P: Can you assign a value judgment to that at all?
Walla: I don’t think either one’s better. I’ve done other records with bands like this one, where everybody tracks in the room together. Like on [The Decemberists’] The Crane Wife there’s a little of that, where Colin [Meloy]’s vocal is the vocal off the floor and everybody’s playing live. In fact, a lot of that record went down like that, and I love how that record came out. It’s easier to hold it all together and it’s easier to make musical decisions when the whole band is playing together because everything already has context. It demands a lot more of the band. It takes a lot more time. When you’re setting up for something that’s got a bunch of weird sounds and everyone’s going to play live, you set up for two-and-a-half days and then you get in and start playing, and 35 minutes later the song’s done. It’s kind of hard to build momentum that way if you’re customizing sounds for each song.

P: You’ve worked for, or worked with, both major labels and indies at this point.
Walla: “Worked for” is fair [laughs].

P: Which is better?
Walla: I don’t feel like either is better than the other in any really significant way. I will say that I’ve had experiences at both majors and indies that really feel open and collaborative in the way that a good label relationship should. And then I’ve had experiences at both where somebody who shouldn’t have any creative involvement in a project has creative involvement in a project for some unknown reason. Our experience at Atlantic has been really good, so that’s the coolest thing that we could hope for in the major world. Particularly as the climate… I mean, talk about climate change. I feel like the record industry is fully 100 years ahead of whatever is happening with global warming. The buildings are already starting to float away.

Download Field Manual's first single, "Sing Again."