More on Death Cab

There’s something about listening to Death Cab that makes me want to write. There are some folks out there—writers, friends of mine—that are just brimming with ideas. I’m not like that. I’ve written exactly one story in the past five years, and in part that’s because I don’t make the time to write, but largely that’s because I don’t have ideas burning away in my brain.

More than reading, more than watching movies or television, more than real life, I’m inspired to write when I listen to music. I don’t know why. Back in University, I wrote a novel based largely upon the song City Full of Cowards (which, if you haven’t already read, you’ll never read). It’s not god-awful; certainly it’s better near the end than at the beginning, but I could never be bothered to go back and make it good enough to show anybody. It’s also baldly autobiographic in parts.

But back to the point, there’s something about Death Cab’s lyrics that give me an itch to write a story. And it’s not in the poetry, it’s just a line here or there that I can really see. “So everybody put your best suit or dress on. Let's make believe that we are wealthy for just this once.” These are lines that make me suffer a fake nostalgia; they aren’t scenes from my past but they feel like they are, or maybe I just want them to be. A Death Cab album is just one miserable song after another, but it’s a romantic kind of wretchedness. “You may tire of me as our December sun is setting, because I'm not who I used to be.” It’s about lost loves, and bad times, growing old. It’s riveting misery, which is the kind of thing I love to read, and the kind of thing I'd like to write.