“Sing Again“
from the album Field Manual
2008
iTunes
The Beatles, in their last years, grew tired of their hysterical fans and stopped doing live shows. The Texas singer-songwriter known as Jandek and a few other reclusive artists have released albums without touring.
While Chris Walla is neither a hysteria-producing sex symbol nor a mysterious recluse, he is staying home and not giving tour support to his new solo album, Field Manual, being released by Seattle’s Barsuk Records yesterday. He’s simply too busy.
Walla, a charter member of indie-rock heavyweights Death Cab for Cutie, has been immersed in the new Death Cab album. So rather than getting out on the road with his new record, the Death Cab guitarist-producer is promoting Field Manual with a few phone interviews while he tinkers away at the final mix from a basement studio in his Portland home. That’s where he settled last year, fleeing his longtime home of Seattle.
You might say that, like death, taxes and spam, solo albums are inevitable. The 32-year-old Walla, after a string of increasingly successful Death Cab albums, decided he needed to get bits of songs that had been floating around in his head written and recorded.
“More than any specific direction for the record, what was more important for me was to finish the record by any means necessary,” said Walla, who is also a highly in-demand producer, working with bands like the Decemberists, Tegan & Sara and Nada Surf.
He describes his Field Manual lyrics as “political but still really personal. With the exception of ‘The Score’ they’re mostly not protest songs, [but] observations of stuff at the forefront of what’s on my brain.” He sings all the leads on the dozen songs, and played most of the instruments himself.
The solo album, he said, is “a little schizophrenic, all over the map. The Death Cab record feels much less like that. I was trying to explore all those places that I’m interested in, all sorts of different things Death Cab never gets near. That’s the biggest thing. I think it’s a really sort of scatterbrained variety of stuff. Sometimes it works to its advantage, sometimes it’s more like a mix tape.”