Song Exploder - The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

Episode Date: January 1, 2014

Our first guest on Song Exploder is Jimmy Tamborello, aka Dntel, aka one half of The Postal Service (the other half being Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie). Jimmy breaks down the song The District Sleeps Alone Tonight, and talks about his instruments, his influences, and accidentally making a loop out of Jenny Lewis's backing vocals.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hurway. The Postal Service was formed by Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard in 2002. They lived in different cities and would mail recordings back and forth between Seattle and Los Angeles. They only made one record, give up, but it sold over a million copies. It's considered a landmark album for the way it combined indie rock and electronic elements. In this episode, Jimmy Tamborello breaks down the Postal Service. song, The District Sleaps Alone Tonight.

Hi, my name is Jimmy Tambrello from the Postal Service. Postal Service was a project that I did back in 2002, 2003, with a friend Ben Gibbard, who was also the singer for Death Cab for Cutie. And this was kind of like an electronic side project we did together. All the music that I was making back then in the early 2000s, I was using mostly one sampler slash synthesizer called the K-2000 from Kurzweil. Almost everything on the Postal Service album came out of that machine. It comes with a lot of preset bass and pad and bell sounds and all sorts of synthesizer sounds that you can edit. Any sound I used, I would try to change it from the preset

just so it would be more original. So this is most of the synthesizer sounds that I used on District Sleep Sloan tonight. the time. I think it was a Mac, like a Quadra or something. Maybe. It was an old Mac. It still wasn't really powerful enough to record audio into it. So I'd mostly use it as like a sequencer. It would control the K-2000 with MIDI. So I would sequence and kind of program the drum patterns in the computer. Since this is one of the first songs that we worked on, I still had this idea that this album was going to be more experimental than it ended up being. I think in this song, the drum programming definitely is indebted to Bjork, the album Homogenic.

Even though I guess it was a couple years before that, I must have still been stuck on that style of programming. So I think when I was making this song, I was kind of imagining it as a song for Bjork. German label, More Music, was another big influence on this song. I think I was trying to copy Lollipuna. and especially the second half of the song when the kind of four on the floor beat kicks in. So it's like the first half of the song is Bjork and the second half is Lollipuna. So if I solo just the drums, this is what it sounds like. In addition to me and Ben, we also had Jen Wood and Jenny Lewis do some additional vocals on the record.

So I sent Ben the instrumental track for the song and he came up with like a demo. So he did the main vocal as well as a bunch of harmonies and kind of background vocals, but it was all his own voice. Once we got further into the recording process, we decided there should be some other voices besides just all Ben. Maybe it was nice to not have it be a one-man band type of sound. Maybe it would be too lonely or something if it was just all Ben's vocals. I think it really helped that there was some other people in there.

So here's some of Ginny's background vocals soloed out. I am a visitor here. I am not permanent. When we recorded them, Ben came down to kind of oversee and help with the recording, which was nice because it was also a time where we could all get to know each other. Because we really, none of us had hung out very much. In some of the songs, I felt like maybe there needed to be a little bit more variety in the sound, so I would add parts.

And in this song, it might have been just an accident with a delay pedal, but I looped a little bit of Jenny's vocals and made it into a texture in the song that was one of the last things that we put into that into district. I can play that part by itself. This vocal loop comes in after the second verse when it's kind of going into the

more dancey outro part. We put out one record on subpop and that came out in 2003 and now we're at the 10-year anniversary and we're going to do like a deluxe reissue and we're also going on tour this summer. And now, here's the District Sleeps Alone Tonight by the Postal Service in its entirety. Homes are sweaty.

It's at SongExploder.net for more information on the Postal Service. You'll find links to their record Give Up and the video for the District Sleeps Alone tonight. Jimmy mentioned some influences. Björk's album Homogenic, the band Lollipuna, and the record label More Music. I've included links to all of those as well. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length. and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way.

I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me.

So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. And then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co.

Or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. You can subscribe to Song Exploder on iTunes or wherever you download podcasts. You can also find Song Exploder on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. My name is Rishi Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening.

Radiotopia.