Last Monday, I spent the day watching the presidential inauguration on TV, feeling wistful of my time in 2009, standing out in the cold in D.C. to watch President Obama get sworn in the first time around. It was such an once in a lifetime-type experience and one of my favorite memories of living in Washington. As the day went on, I wished I was there to be part of it again, and that this time meant the same as it did before. Four years later there was simply less of that magical feeling, like the enthusiasm had burned just a tad less bright. There was a less ecstatic hopeful tone and more of a tempered, pragmatic and strategic sense of “Let’s get to work!”
I realized that even if I had gone, there’s just no way it would’ve been the same, and like they say, sometimes you just can’t go home again. We grow up and we change and we see things different the second time around.
It made me think about certain pieces of music and how I sometimes wish I could hear it again anew with fresh ears. And there are some albums that dig even deeper when they come out, hitting at just the right time in our lives. For me I’ve had a handful: Kid A in 2000, Sea Change in 2002, Illinois in 2005. These musical landmarks got me through hard times, but also through some of the best moments of my life.
I regularly listen back to these records and still identify with them, still appreciate their masterpiece status on a musical level, and know them inside and out. But, If I had to be honest, I do feel a twinge of sadness because I don’t feel them as viscerally and with the same level of enthusiasm and even heartache as I did back when they meant so much more to me. Sometimes you just can’t go back to who you were at those snapshot moments.
In 2003, it was Give Up.
So when news broke last week that The Postal Service — Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and Dntel’s Jimmy Tamborello — are getting back together this spring, I found myself nostalgically trying and failing to recall when I first heard the long-since dormant duo’s first and only album Give Up.
When the record dropped I was 21, in my junior year of college. I’m sure I came to it after hearing it was made by the guy from Death Cab For Cutie, and it was made by sending tracks back and forth with electronic musician Jimmy Tamborello (a.k.a Dntel) via the mail — a concept that at the time seemed incredible, but now in the age of Dropbox, seems quaint.
But honestly I can’t remember where I was because it feels like I’ve always known this record front-to-back.
Give Up, like so many near-perfect records tend to do, soon found itself everywhere, not just in commercials and covered in movie soundtracks, but as a backdrop to that specific time in my life: I listened during quiet walks on campus and on drives along bleak stretches of I-70 in Kansas between school and home — where I could let my mind wander while staring at flat farmland that went on far into the horizon.
Give Up was one of those late night records we put on as a party wound down, when you were maybe a tad too drunk and sleepy, but not ready to go home just yet. I it played in my car on night drives with a college girlfriend. And I played these songs over and over on my very first iPod while I was studying abroad in Germany, where it filled my head with a wistful familiarity as I explored new places Europe, often alone, for the first time.
And the opener, “The District Sleeps Alone Tonight” was a theme of sorts when, in 2005, I took a chance on a new job and moved to D.C. without knowing anyone — I was equally nervous and excited about the unknown.
Give Up had a perfect blend of electronic sounds and indie pop lyricism that captured those tiny, universal notions of love, loneliness and growing older. And yet, as personally important and influential this record was for a time, I actually haven’t listened to it in years. As Ben Gibbard went back to Death Cab full-time, I guess I moved on to other things. Maybe I just was so over-familiar with songs like “Such Great Heights” and “We Will Become Silhouettes” that they began to mean less to me.
So The Postal Service is gonna do some shows and festivals, that’s great. But I, like many fans, am not-so-secretly hoping for more, like say, I dunno, maybe a new album (!?!?). Gibbard has been asked about a new record for so long, and has frequently denied that it will ever happen, so that that may be unlikely. (Like that elusive new My Bloody Valentine record or the eagerly-anticipated, finally-happening new season of Arrested Development, it’s fair to keep those expectations tempered until the artifact is firmly in hand.)
These nostalgia reunions often rarely the mega-events we picture in our head and tend to fall short, if only because we are older and wiser and it’s difficult to recapture the magic. Still, it’s welcome news for fans who have long pined for activity from this long-distance collaborative side-project. And for me, it’s the perfect excuse to revisit this band and those songs again, and maybe now that I’m older and have a little distance, hear something new. Maybe we can’t go back and revisit an album that at one point meant so much. But we can always move forward.