Chris Walla still talks like a college DJ—half philosophy major, half guy who hasn’t slept since the last Joy Division record ended. “I played the longest, most difficult music I could find,” he says, remembering his slot on a barely audible campus station. “Side two of Disintegration, side three of Tales from Topographic Oceans. Just sit back and… peruse the quandary that was my life.”
It’s the kind of thing only someone like Walla—Death Cab for Cutie’s founding guitarist, producer, and general tone scientist—could say with a straight face. He’s in Louisville to play the Palace, guest DJ a little on WFPK, and reflect on what public radio means to a guy who once mailed sixty bucks of lawn-mowing money to Seattle’s KCMU (now KEXP) just to feel like he belonged to something bigger than his bedroom. “They sent me a Swerve Driver record as a thank you,” he laughs. “It was the best sixty bucks I ever spent.”
Walla’s voice lights up when talking about radio, especially the kind without sponsors screaming in your face. “There’s just so much noise now,” he says. “Everything’s cranked to eleven. Public radio is the one place that still gives you a little space between the ads and the anxiety.” He remembers growing up in Seattle’s unusually rich radio ecosystem—classical, jazz, experimental—all of it publicly supported, all of it forming the backdrop for the scene that would later launch Death Cab. “It was amazing. The weirdest, craziest stuff you could imagine, and it was all there on the dial. It really shaped who I was.”
That civic-mindedness has followed him through his career, whether he’s producing indie bands, running his label Trans Records, or taking Death Cab on the road with a small orchestra of conservatory-trained players. “Magic Magic Orchestra,” he grins. “They’re real deal classical musicians. Fifteen of them on stage with us, no backing tracks, no samples. Just humans playing together. It’s wild.”
The collaboration came about after Walla hired the orchestra to play on The Lonely Forest—a band he loved so much he started Trans Records just to release them. “Life’s too short to work with people you don’t like,” he shrugs. “I only sign bands that hit me emotionally. Doesn’t matter if it’s electronic, acoustic, whatever. If it feels honest, I’m in.”
If that sounds idealistic, it’s because Walla’s always chased ideals over trends. “When you’re twenty-one, you’ll live in a van and play anywhere. But after a while, people’s lives change. Somebody gets married, somebody has a kid. The trick is figuring out how to keep the center from falling apart.” He remembers the moment Death Cab almost didn’t. “October 31st, 2001. Baltimore. We were like, what are we doing? Why are we even arguing? But every day’s a choice—you wake up and decide if you’re still in it. We decided we were.”
That decision paid off. By the time Codes and Keys arrived, Death Cab were headlining arenas and still making records that sounded personal. Walla credits part of that to moving the sessions around—L.A., Vancouver, San Francisco—each place changing the record’s mood. “Dragging a record around changes how you hear it,” he says. “It’s like weather. Songs react to their environment.”
He should know. Walla’s a producer at heart, one who once joined his own band carrying a tape deck instead of a guitar. “I didn’t come up in studios. I just figured things out by plugging wires together. I liked tape machines more than I liked singing along.” That self-taught curiosity turned Death Cab’s lo-fi beginnings into studio master classes, each album more intricate than the last. “It’s funny, people talk about big leaps between records, but to me it’s all one soggy continuum,” he says, grinning at the word “soggy” like it’s a sonic descriptor.
He’s now rebuilding his old Seattle studio—the legendary Hall of Justice, where early Nirvana and Low sessions once happened—after reclaiming it from the Fleet Foxes. “It had some mold and rats,” he admits, “so I’m fixing it up. I’ll be my own guinea pig—finish the solo record while I figure out what the place can do.”
Ask if he knows when a song belongs to Death Cab or to himself, and he shrugs. “I never know. I just start. Halfway through, maybe I think, ‘This could be something for Ben,’ or maybe it’s just mine. Sometimes I love being a singer; sometimes I’m mortified. It’s good I’m not the frontman,” he laughs.
Before wrapping the session, Walla pulls out his iPod Nano—“the tiny one you can’t even see”—and queues up a track. It’s not one of his own, but a deep cut by Chaz Jankel, the old Blockhead-turned-funk-king of France. “He ruled the French charts for years,” Walla says, eyes lighting up like it’s 1982 again. “This is Get Myself Together. It’s so good.” The song bursts through the studio speakers, slinky and strange.
That’s the essence of Chris Walla—eternal tinkerer, loyal to curiosity, and perpetually trying to make sense of sound. “Public radio was the first place I heard music that made me feel like part of something,” he says. “I still feel that way every time we plug in.”
Listen to the full interview above and then check out the video below.
