Izzy Stradlin and the Ju Ju Hounds. The Joe Perry Project.
Slash’s Snakepit. Johnny Marr and the Healers.
The list don’t lie.
It’s a perilous world out there for guitar players who embark on
solo recordings and leave their bandmates in the wake. This being the
case, why is Portland’s Chris Walla, the painstakingly polite guitarist
for Death Cab for Cutie, releasing his first solo
recording—Field Manual, out January 29—as quietly as
possible? No tour dates whatsoever have been planned, his press
schedule is deliberately bare, and besides a certain newsworthy
incident at the US-Canada border (more on that later), there seems to
be more focus on the early summer release of a new record from Death
Cab than Walla’s initial foray into solo waters.
But if anyone is behind the deafening silence that surrounds
Field Manual—a near flawless pop record that doesn’t stray
far from the Death Cab template of perfected pop songs, pristine
recordings, and intelligent lyrics—it’s Walla himself. “Death Cab
has an agreement about it. Once it’s time to be on rock band time, it’s
what we do, and everyone understands that.” Walla continues, “Were this
a different world and I wasn’t part of Death Cab, of course I’d be
touring, and of course I’d be promoting it more. It’s an eternal
understanding that we all do willingly.”
It’s a practical way of thinking, one that illustrates the
deliberate and well-planned rise of Death Cab, which Walla joined over
a decade ago in Bellingham, WA. And while the band has emerged as one
of the last big rock bands in the dying days of the music industry,
Walla himself has developed into a masterful producer (the
Decemberists, Tegan and Sara) and an occasional solo artist under the
handle Martin Youth Auxillary. But with the exception of a lone
homemade cassette and a few scattered MP3s, Field Manual is the
true product of Walla’s solo work. Deliberately tempered and pristinely
assembled, the songs on Field Manual are a coming-out
celebration for an artist who is not unfamiliar to the masses. But to
hear Walla in the forefront—as a skilled songwriter, a
soft-voiced singer, a musician who performs nearly every note and sound
that grace the album—is a new experience.
“This whole project for me was as much therapy as it was making a
solo record.” He continues, “I felt like the time was right to do it,
and when I started to work on it, things came together.” And they did
come together—that is, until the master hard drive of the
recording was seized from a courier while crossing from Vancouver,
British Columbia back into the States. What ensued was a maelstrom of
controversy; Walla’s initial comments included a quip about
Guantánamo Bay being the punishment for the album’s political
tone, while border officials pleaded ignorance of any political
undertones to the seizure. For Walla, it was little more than a hurdle,
since the recordings has (thankfully) been backed up before falling
into the vast abyss of seized border items.
As always, Walla is a beacon of grounded calm, and his outlook
toward the record is about as realistic and genuine as it can be:
“People don’t buy records anymore, and the thing is, I don’t care. I
bemoan the death of the album as a creative piece, a 40-minute-long
cohesive medium, and of course it would be nice if people bought my
record, but again, I don’t really care. They can take everything away
from you, but they can’t take the song out of your head.”
To read a longer version of our interview with Chris Walla,
please visit endhits.portlandmercury.com.