Walla-gate: controversy, reaction and plenty of free publicity :: Music News :: Articles

UPDATE (Oct. 19):
Following the rash of news items that appeared regarding Chris Walla's new album and its unfortunate encounter with U.S. border security, the folks at The Daily Swarm offered a nice editorial piece on the publicity hurricane that has surrounded the incident. Today, the site added some comments from Walla, a rep from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and Barsuk co-founder Josh Rosenfeld to the end of the story. The latter two sources arrived courtesy of MTV.com's follow-up.

As one of the 131 news outlets that picked up this story and ran with it (and ran, and ran...) we at Paste thought it was well worth linking to additional information about these recent events.

What follows is the original news item that we posted on Wednesday.

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For awhile there, it seemed like Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla would never get a solo record out there. Between slinging his mighty axe in the employ of Ben Gibbard, producing groups like the Decemberists and Tegan and Sara, and running his own recording studio (The Hall of Justice!), Walla's hardly had any time to himself lately. But once the Walla Walla Express gets rolling, it just doesn't stop. He'll release his official solo debut, entitled Field Manual, on January 29 by way of Barsuk Records.

This, despite the fact that a hard drive full of song demos for the album is currently in the steely hands of U.S. customs officials.

Walla had been working on the album up in Canada (where most good music comes from these days), and Barsuk brought aboard a courier to take the hard drive full of song sketches down to the home of the free and the brave. Unfortunately, the hard drive caught the eye of border guards, because, you know, they've seen 24 and all: terrorists always start trouble with seemingly innocent technological gizmos.

Chris Walla's blog picks it up from there:

"I'm told [the hard drive] is at 'computer forensics in Quantico' but I wouldn't be able to tell you what that means in any real way; you see, there's exactly no customer service element to our federal government."

But don't worry, fans, Walla's staying strong, and he's even got a dose of snark for the jerks who did this dastardly thing to his work:

"It's not a Kafka novel, and I'm not a prisoner at Guantanamo. My life isn't so bad. But still, this situation is a concrete and real reminder of what fuels the world we live in: It's fear and mistrust and suspicion. And oil."

Oddly enough, the album's press release hit just after this drama, and mentioned "a strong political thread" running through the lyrics sheet, including "more than a few shots at U.S. policy, both at home and abroad."

Conspiracy? Pitchfork is curious.

As we've previously published in this space, Death Cab is just getting to work on its new record. Walla reports good progress:

"The DCfC record is in full swing; we're six songs in. Thus far it's pretty weird, and pretty spectacular; lots of blood. It's creepy and heavy... We've got a ten minute long Can jam, and had you suggested that possibility to me in 1998, I'd have eaten your puppy's brain with a spoon."

Krautrock's due for a comeback...

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