John Congleton

We just felt like we had stronger material.

Uh, and then we got into the studio, and our producer, John Congleton, was like, "Hey guys, this song right here, this demo, this, you guys need to record this." And w- uh, even then, we were like, "I don't know, man.

All right.

Well, you're the producer.

you know, ethic and, and it worked.

And I, you know, we definitely our producer, John Congleton, he works that way, naturally as a producer.

And I think he really harnessed that in our band.

And, and that helped infuse a lot of this material with that kind of rawness that you're talking about, that feels either either nostalgic, or just in the end, just to us, to me, just feels very Death Cab just feels like us, you know,

I am going to recommend an album that I checked out because of a connection to our previous episodes, a couple episodes.

John Congleton, who produced the last couple of Death Cab records, did a video with Earthquaker Devices where he kind of did a tour of his studio and talked about, one, all the crazy gear that he owns, but also a little bit about his previous band, The Paper Chase.

And this band I...

Heard the name before.

I can definitely hear it.

And, like, that is more, you know, even more deeply informed by John Congleton, again, coming back to produce this record, him being a student of Steve Albini, who famously is a person who made people sound like a really good version of a band in a room.

Yeah, and that's how they wrote this record, which is the opposite of how they wrote Asphalt Meadows.

Interestingly, they both turned out so great.

there is an element and then Ben talks about this as they maybe were trying to do too much with those songs too many tracks especially when they tried to play them live uh and and maybe an element of getting back to the we're just a band playing together element is also uh this is just Ben performing and not being hidden by all these vocal effects and and something about that makes this song feel so much more personal and so much and so much closer

Definitely, yeah.

And I think part of that is a result of, like, I feel like John Congleton gets it.

Oh, absolutely.