“Ben Gibbard is afraid,” writes Ricardo Buca in Sunday’s (4/8) Denver Post. “He said it himself. ‘It’s a little terrifying,’ the Death Cab for Cutie frontman said last week, right before his band embarked on rehearsals for its spring tour of intimate venues with the Magik*Magik Orchestra. ‘There are so many variables. The entire show is a series of variables, for the first time in a long time. And that’s a good thing. The first handful of shows, at least from our end, will be like walking through quicksand.’ Guess where Gibbard and the gang—backed by the underground Magik*Magik Orchestra—will kick off their tour? In Denver. At the Ellie Caulkins Opera House. On Tuesday.” On the collaboration with Magik*Magik, Gibbard says, “Magik*Magik is a collective run by a woman named Minna Choi, and they’re based in San Francisco. We met her through John Vanderslice, because he’d brought her into his studio, Tiny Telephone. … Chris (Walla, a Death Cab band member) was talking about, ‘A couple of these songs could use the strings, but not the kind of arrangement where they come behind the band and play the changes—like, boring strings—but something dynamic and interesting.’ Minna’s a pretty avant-garde composer, and the arrangements she brought to the record—for ‘Stay Young, Go Dancing’ and ‘Codes and Keys’—were great. And now we’ve had her write a number of arrangements for the rest of our catalog—some of which we’ve never played live before.”
Posted April 11, 2012
