Chris Walla
The Art of the Solo Album
By Bob Ham
Photo by Autumn de Wilde
"It’s not hard to find time to really let myself write songs. When I finally give myself enough rope to hang myself, I actually do it."
-Chris Walla
If the frontman of a wildly successful band announces the release of a solo album, there’s nary an eyebrow raised in doubt; if any of the other members of that band make a similar move, the end product gets put under the microscope, inspected like a gem for flaws, cracks, and any marks that might make it suspect. Such skepticism is a common feeling amongst music fans and critics and one that is not lost on Chris Walla.
I‘m starting to discover that people’s expectations are sort of shockingly low. Most of the reactions have been something like, ‘Wow! Ben doesn’t do everything in Death Cab For Cutie! This is like ... a record!’”
The Ben he’s referring to is Ben Gibbard, the lead singer and songwriter for the famous Seattle quartet, and the record is Field Manual, the solo debut that Walla released late last month.
Field Manual marks a return to Death Cab’s first home, Barsuk Records, and is Walla’s first foray outside of the long shadow cast by his career as DCfC guitarist and as one of indie rock’s most sought-after producers. It is a sumptuous pop record, one that starts with a blast of sunny Beach Boys-like harmonies (“Two Fifty”), with stops along the way at “Geometry &c.”‘s chugging power chords and the sunset shimmer of “St. Modesto,” before ending its journey with the lilting ballad “Holes.”
It’s such a strong collection of songs that it raises the question of why it took Walla so long to put out an album of his own. The young songwriter has made a number of demos available for download from his website under the name Martin Youth Auxiliary, but the majority of his musical efforts have been made on behalf of his band and others.
“There are plenty of things that I write and love, but that doesn’t have any meaning outside of an instrumental and I’m happy to turn it over to someone else,” says Walla. “There was a supposed solo record I started making four years ago that I never finished the writing of. I ended up giving those pieces to [Harvey Danger singer] Sean Nelson and he wrote some really awesome stuff around those.”
After working with such vaunted songwriters as Gibbard and The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy (as a producer for both Picaresque and The Crane Wife), it stands to reason that Walla would feel a little intimidated at the prospect of presenting his own material up for scrutiny, a fact that he acknowledges as a major “stumbling block.”
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With that, Walla subjected his work to a great deal of personal analysis during the writing process, poring over not the music but the lyrical content of Field Manual‘s 12 songs. “These were all really song and story and voice first. I spent a lot of time tying everything together and removing all the seams,” he says, “to make sure every lyric worked and every story unfolded exactly how I wanted it to.” In addition to sweating over each syllable, making sure he wasn’t “singing a strong sound or a strong consonant on a weak beat,” he also paid careful attention to the meaning of those syllables. “I wanted to make sure that anything I was saying was something that I could say in a conversation and not feel bad about.”
Judging by the lyrical content of the album, what has been making
up much of Walla’s conversation is the uneasy state of the world. A voracious newsreader and advocate for liberal causes, he is only able to turn the headlines and reports that he reads into songs when he is “disconnected for any point of time. When that happens, I can take that stuff and process it, singing versions of headlines to myself. Weird stuff like that,” he explains.
Walla also notes that his need to sing about more topical issues is one of the most significant ways he can separate his own material from what he brings to his band. “‘The Score’ [a metaphor-driven look at globalization] is something that we would never ever do. A lot of the writing like that Ben has as yet been unable to commit to or been able to stick with. It is stuff that he feels the same about and toys around with, but he hasn’t really been able to say it in a way that is comfortable to him.”
Not surprisingly considering Walla’s role in crafting DCfC’s signature sound, the backing tracks and instrumental melodies for Field Manual came together quite quickly, many written over the last year. “It’s not hard to find time to really let myself write songs. When I finally give myself enough rope to hang myself, I actually do it,” Walla says.
He also attributes the ease with which he can craft a memorable piece of music to working with so many different people over his career as both a musician and producer. “The best thing about watching other people work is that there are so many different versions of excellent, workable and kind of poor,” says Walla. “Everybody has supposed strengths and actual strengths and things that they are clearly not good at. It is really great to be able to decode all of that music and those musicians and figure out what makes everything they do work or not.”
For Field Manual, this decoding extended to musicians that Walla hasn’t worked with as well. “There was lots of pretending to be other people and trying to figure out, ‘What would Bread play here?’ or ‘What would INXS play?’” he recalls.
The place where Walla worked out a lot these ideas and laid down the basic tracks for the album was The Alberta Court, his Portland-based studio. Although it was a comfortable enough situation, it became apparent to Walla during the recording process that he couldn’t go it completely alone. (Walla plays everything but drums on Field Manual, for which he recruited DCfC’s Jason McGerr and Kurt Dahle of The New Pornographers). He realized he was going to need to concentrate on being a performer instead of a producer. “Part of the record, I knew where I wanted things to go,” he says, “but for the rest I needed someone there to tell me to sing it again and tell me to play it again and tell me that it’s out of tune.”
Walla had plenty of contacts in the recording industry to choose from, but through his work with Tegan and Sara he was able to score a personal coup with Warne Livesey, the producer known for his work with such luminaries as Midnight Oil and The The. “I got wind of the fact that he had moved from London to Victoria, B.C.,” says Walla, “and that he’s been making records in his basement for the last couple of years.” The British ex-pat brought Walla to his studio, The Command Centre, and helped shape the last batch of songs for the album over the span of a few weeks.
Working in another country (albeit one that is literally closely linked with the U.S.) ended up being momentous for Walla on a number of levels — one of these being the well-publicized detainment of a hard drive containing the basic tracks for Field Manual at the U.S./Canada border by the Department of Homeland Security. It’s a story that Walla retells with an obvious air of bemusement over the absurdity of what happened: “The person bringing the drive across the border was not a professional courier as I was previously informed, but an intern at The Command Centre. So he had as much of the paperwork in order as he knew to have, but it was not enough and they detained the drive and turned him away with the tapes that had the mixes on them.”
What followed was a several week process of trying to get the right information from both the intern and the DHS, as well as getting a crash course in international commerce. “If you are a recording musician in another country, you are leaving all of your income in that country,” Walla explains. “It’s sort of the equivalent of shopping in that country. But you are still a professional musician and doing business in their country, so there’s a lot of rigmarole about what you can bring in and take out of the country, which put us in this weird grey area.”
The hard drive spent so much time in the hands of the U.S. government that no one was able to hear a finished version of the record until early this past December. Walla notes that even advance copies of the album sent to reviewers and record stores didn’t have “all the mixes or even all the performances on it.”
With that debacle long since past, Walla can now fully concentrate on the tasks at hand, which include finishing up the latest DCfC album and doing as much promotion as he can for both that record and his own. “There’s going to be some cross promotion and cross pollination, that’s for sure,” he says. “I hope to do a tour at some point though I don’t know how feasible it is to make that actually happen.”
If putting his solo work out in the world wasn’t intimidating enough, Walla has also had to go through the nerve-wracking experience of letting his bandmates have a listen. And what did they think of Field Manual? “There were percentages of it that they liked and not others. They pointed out things that needed to be tweaked out in the mix, things that have been addressed. But they like about as much of it as I expected that they would,” says Walla. “That‘s the best thing about a solo record — I get to put out all of these ideas and some of it is stuff that they aren’t going to care for.”
Above all else, Walla is most pleased that he was able to “finally figure out how write and sing all the things that are blowing around in my head at any given time. It’s just in this last year that it’s fallen into place.” Confirming that the biggest critic is often the one inside, Walla admits, “It’s nice to know now that I’m clearly capable of making a record.”
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