LaunchDaily
7/18/2012
Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard has announced that he will release his first solo album this fall, according to Billboard.com. Titled Former Lives, the disc is due out on October 16th. Gibbard said that the dozen songs featured on the disc were written over the past eight years, telling Stereogum, "It certainly wasn't a reaction to any sort of dissatisfaction to recording with Death Cab or anything like that. It certainly doesn't come out of like 'I have all these songs to record and I'm not getting my fix with the band'... I'm a songwriter and that's my job."
Gibbard continued, "With every record that we've made there would always be a couple of tunes that just didn't seem to fit in with the band. If people wanted to be dismissive of the record, they could just say 'Oh these are leftovers,' but they're really not. They're not songs that weren't good enough to make Death Cab records as much as they were things that ... well, there's not really place on a Death Cab record for a song that sounds like Big Star or Teenage Fanclub."
While Gibbard has never recorded a full solo set before, he has collaborated with various artists and even has a side act called The Postal Service.
Gibbard did tell us that after Death Cab completes its current touring cycle, he plans to take some time off before starting work on the band's eighth album: "You know, I love music as much as I ever did, but I don't need to fill every waking moment of my life with it. Because we're playing hours and hours and hours of music every day between soundchecking and shows and other performances and things like that, I just need to kind of get a break from music. I need to kind of retreat from it and rediscover it."
Gibbard apparently plans to do some solo touring behind the release of Former Lives, although he has yet to announce his plans.
Death Cab For Cutie is still on the road behind 2011's Codes And Keys, with the band scheduled to stop in Montclair, New Jersey on Thursday night (July 19th).
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