Give Up
Give Up is the only studio album by the American electronic duo the Postal Service. The album released on February 18, 2003, through Sub Pop Records. The Postal Service was a collaboration between singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard, best known for his work with indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie, and musician Jimmy Tamborello, who also records under the name Dntel. Gibbard rose to prominence in the early 2000s as frontman of Death Cab, while Tamborello gained a cult following as a pioneer of contemporary glitch music and electronica. The two first collaborated with the song " The Dream of Evan and Chan", for Dntel's debut album, Life Is Full of Possibilities.
The album is a long-distance collaboration between Gibbard, who lived in Seattle, Washington, and Tamborello, who resided in Los Angeles, California. The duo named the project for their working method: the pair would send demos on burned CD-R's through the mail, adding elements until songs were complete. The LP's sound contrasts manipulated samples and keyboards with live guitar and drums—a sound some have described as "indietronica". Tamborello was responsible for the programming, while Gibbard wrote lyrics, provided vocals, and contributed additional instrumentation. Give Up also features guest appearances from vocalists Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley and Jen Wood, as well as musician Chris Walla, who was an instrumentalist, songwriter, and producer for Death Cab for Cutie.
Give Up was released with little promotion—the group embarked on a brief tour together, but otherwise returned to their main projects. Despite this, the album grew in popularity steadily in the ensuing years, bolstered by the singles "Such Great Heights" and "We Will Become Silhouettes". By the end of its first decade, it had sold 1.2 million copies in the U.S., making it Sub Pop's second-biggest selling album in its history. It also courted a trademark battle with the United States Postal Service and a dispute with Apple. Despite its popularity, Give Up stands as the duo's only studio album. In 2013, the group briefly reunited for an anniversary tour and reissue of the album. In 2023, the band embarked on a 20th anniversary tour.
Background
The Postal Service is a collaboration between singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard and electronic musician Dntel. Gibbard rose to prominence in the early 2000s as frontman of the indie rock band Death Cab for Cutie, while Tamborello gained a cult following as a pioneer of contemporary glitch music and electronica. In 2001, Tamborello released his first album under the Dntel moniker, titled Life Is Full of Possibilities, which features several guest vocalists. The LP featured the duo's first collaboration, with the song " The Dream of Evan and Chan". The pair had met through Tamborello's roommate, Pedro Benito, who was in the indie rock group the Jealous Sound, a band that had toured with Death Cab. When Gibbard stayed at their apartment for several days, Tamborello recruited him to contribute to the album.Gibbard and Tamborello came from distinctly different musical backgrounds, and did not know each other well. Tamborello—then based outside Los Angeles—came up as a member of the electropop band Figurine, with whom he'd released two albums. Gibbard, meanwhile, had released three albums with his indie rock outfit Death Cab, who were based in Seattle, Washington. The band nearly disbanded after an argument on tour in October 2001; after returning home, the group decided to take a brief hiatus, setting the stage for a side-project. Though the pair did not initially connect on a personal level in a strong sense—with Gibbard more sociable and Tamborello often reserved—they continued to collaborate. Gibbard suggested the two release an extended play of their work.
Tamborello had contacts at famed Seattle-based record label Sub Pop, best known for releasing albums by Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney. Tony Kiewel, who had gone to college with Tamborello, had recently began working for Sub Pop in their A&R division. He proposed that they release a full-length album as opposed to an EP, noting that the former received more attention than the latter. "If you're going to do it, do a full album," he told the duo. "People will review it, and you can sell it for three times as much." The duo signed a joint record deal with Sub Pop, and work on what became Give Up began in earnest in December 2001.
Recording and production
The production process behind Give Up involved Tamborello, based in the L.A. community of Silver Lake, sending Gibbard, living north in Seattle, pieces of instrumental music on burned CD-Rs. Gibbard would pick up the disc from Sub Pop's corporate office and return to his home in the Capitol Hill district. He would insert the CD into his portable Discman player and walk around his neighborhood, humming melodies to the music. He also carried a notebook to compile his ideas, which he would use when home to write lyrics. Gibbard would then manipulate the recordings on his laptop, augmenting the beats with additional guitar, keyboards, and live drums. He dubbed his home studio "Computerworld". Gibbard, who had always found composing music to be more difficult than writing lyrics, found the arrangement particularly appealing. "It was really great to get a little package every month or two – 'Two new songs!'" he noted in 2002. "Sometimes I'd say, 'I want to move that part and this part,' and it was really fun to have such autonomy in the writing; I could pretty much do whatever I wanted."Tamborello, operating from his L.A. home studio he called Dying Songs, contributed more-or-less finished bed tracks. The first two songs he sent developed into "Brand New Colony" and "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight", which were completed over the course of a week. The pair worked at a pace of two or three songs per month. As Gibbard did not know Tamborello very well, he was nervous he would not respond to his contributions positively. "I really thought he was gonna be like, 'How dare you do this to my songs?'" he said. Initially, Tamborello was challenged by Gibbard's vocal suggestions. "When you're just writing the music, you come up with your own vocal melodies. But Ben's ideas were totally different," he told the BBC. The two were relative strangers from distinctly different musical backgrounds; "It was like having to work on the album and make friends at the same time," he admitted. Tamborello admitted he expected the album to be more experimental than it turned out to be.
The album has several guest musicians, including Jen Wood, a solo artist formerly of the band Tattle Tale, and Jenny Lewis, then known for her work with Rilo Kiley. Wood had previously toured with Death Cab, and she and Gibbard were longtime friends. He invited her to contribute via e-mail, and the resulting session took only two hours. Wood provides backing vocals on "Such Great Heights" and "Nothing Better". Next, Gibbard phoned Lewis to gauge her interest, who was at that time recording with Rilo Kiley in Omaha, Nebraska. She excitedly agreed to join the project, and the two met for the first time when she picked Gibbard up from the Burbank airport. She recorded her contributions over a period of several days; on the final LP, over half of the album's track listing features her backing vocals, which were recorded in Tamborello's bedroom. Additional recording on the LP took place at the Hall of Justice, a studio in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, during the spring of 2002. Chris Walla, a member of Death Cab, had purchased the studio two years prior. Walla recorded the live accompaniment, and guested on piano on "Nothing Better".
Though the initial press release for the album states that it was completed in ten months, other sources claim it was completed in half that time. Gibbard flew to Los Angeles only twice during the production of the album. The first was to oversee Lewis's contribution, and also record additional vocals. The duo came to feel that Gibbard's original demo vocals were better, and they discarded much of the new vocal takes. The second trip was to be involved in the mixing process. Both musicians mixed the album in Tamborello's bedroom; he noted that it was simply too involved a process to conduct via the mail. Ironically, despite the final name they chose for the project, they did not use the United States Postal Service as a courier; the CDs were sent through either FedEx or UPS. Kiewel remarked in a 2013 interview that Give Up was one of the "cheapest records Sub Pop ever made." Though he withheld the final number, he revealed the project had a very small budget, and that when combined, the five LPs the label distributed that year cost less than $50,000.
Composition
Give Up is considered a combination of indie rock and electronic music—dubbed by some "indietronica". MTV's Brian Wallace described the sound of the album as a collision between "moody indie rock with the manipulated samples, keyboards and beats of IDM electronica." Programmed elements are accentuated with acoustic guitars and live drums. Critics compared it to the eighties synthpop and new wave genres. Pitchfork Media's Matt LeMay and AllMusic's Heather Phares both commented on the contrasts between the "cool, clean synths" and Gibbard's vocal melodies. Nearly every synthesized element on the album uses the Kurzweil K2000RS, a sampler. The device came with bass and synthesizer presets, though Tamborello would significantly alter each preset to make it more original. His computer at the time was a Macintosh Quadra, which was not sufficiently powerful enough to record audio with. Tamborello used it as a sequencer, controlling the K2000RS with MIDI. He would program the drum patterns in the computer. He also used an Apple PowerBook G4, a small laptop computer, to record the album.Lyrically, the album touches on themes of love, as well as fame, history, and friendship. On both Give Up and Transatlanticism, the Death Cab for Cutie album released the same year, Gibbard lyrically explores distance and "the ability of relationships to survive ." Gibbard noted that "District", "Brand New Colony", and "This Place is a Prison" were the only strictly autobiographical songs: "Everything else is just kind of daydreaming and coming up with ideas for songs that aren't necessarily based in reality, and I think that was a lot more fun for me to do because I'd never really done that before," he said in 2002. Alexia Loundras of the BBC observed that the album offers a melancholy but hopeful sentiment. Portions of Give Up were inspired by the break-up of what Gibbard called his "first real adult relationship." The split occurred because of how much time Gibbard devoted to music. Afterwards, his former partner relocated to Washington, D.C., which inspired "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight".
"The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" opens with a series of moody, deep-sounding chords designed to emulate the sound of an organ—an edited version of a K2000RS preset called NeoProfit. The first half of the song's drum programming was inspired by the Björk album Homogenic, while the second half, with its four on the floor pattern, was inspired by the work of Lali Puna and the German record label Morr Music. Gibbard wrote "Such Great Heights" as a love song for a girl he was interested in at the time. He noted that the relationship ended rather quickly, rendering the song's meaning rather pointless. The song came together late in the recording process, and was one of the last songs the duo completed in June 2002. Its genesis came together "incredibly quickly," according to Gibbard, who felt it "seemingly came out of nowhere. It did feel that there was some sort of spiritual transcendence happening and the song being beamed down to me." For Gibbard, the song was a thematic departure from his more melancholy subject matter: "I think 'Such Great Heights' is the first time I've ever written a positive love song," he told Rolling Stone, "where it's a song about being in love and how it's rad, rather than having your heart broken."
"Sleeping In" alludes to Lee Harvey Oswald, the man responsible for assassinating U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1963. "Nothing Better" is a duet with Wood, and functions as a conversation between the two. The track was directly inspired by the Human League's "Don't You Want Me". In "Clark Gable", named after the famed twentieth-century actor, Gibbard sings of making home movies with a former lover. "We Will Become Silhouettes" centers on an impending apocalypse. It was inspired by a survivalist phase Gibbard went through after the September 11 attacks, where he felt convinced the world was soon to end.