VMP Magazine

It’s unclear whether Death Cab For Cutie’s modest origins were hiding the band’s big ambitions, or whether those ambitions were only realized when they started to find some well-earned success. But at the beginning, they were college-rock guys from a college town: Bellingham, Washington, is about 90 miles north of Seattle, closer to its northern neighbor, Vancouver, than Grunge City, USA. Singer-guitarist Ben Gibbard was studying environmental chemistry at Bellingham’s Western Washington University when he started playing and recording his own music, first with a band called Pinwheel and eventually as Death Cab For Cutie — the name is taken from a song by British weirdos the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, who performed it in the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour film.