"Home Is a Fire" by Death Cab for Cutie, Thursday, November 11, 2021

Codes and Keys was a very different Death Cab for Cutie album. The records prior to the band's 2011 album were guitar-based, but the band's producer and guitarist Chris Walla and lead singer Ben Gibbard decided to make guitar a secondary feature of the band's seventh album. Furthermore, the band broke with the melancholy, producing what listeners found to be a decidedly more upbeat, positive Death Cab record. Codes and Keys was written and released in a time when Ben Gibbard was married to actress Zooey Deschanel. But just as everything seemed to be going well--a number 1 Alternative hit and a number 1-selling rock album--the success wouldn't last.

PLATES, THEY WILL SHIFT. I’ve talked about how Death Cab for Cutie was so influential on my college experience. I don't think I'm in a unique position, though, because Death Cab was the cool band for twenty-somethings for half a decade before Plans. The spiritually ambiguity of the record seemed to speak to millennials and millennial Adventist youth coming of age, possibly at the end of the world. In 2008, Death Cab released their follow up to plans, Narrow Stairs, which wasn't as popular with the Adventist college kids, but to me it was an in-the-moment record I could enjoy of a band that I had just gotten into. I didn't listen to Keys and Codes very much, though. I remember hearing "You Are a Tourist" on the radio, but my musical tastes were shifting away from Death Cab in 2011. The fact is, though, I never bought a Death Cab album. I was able to listen to their music because of friends and friends of friends in college who had several Death Cab albums. In 2011, I was about to graduate and not always seeking out the newest music. But thanks to AppleMusic, I started listening to some songs from newer Death Cab albums, including today's song "Home Is a Fire." The moody track was a bit of a sleeper in my Coffee playlist, but the forlorn guitar and keys today struck me. This led me to revisit Keys and Codes and The Narrow Stairs and listen to a few tracks on the band's 2015 record Kintsugi. I was impressed by the difference between Narrow Stairs and the two following albums. It wasn't like it was two different bands, but I was impressed by the layered sound and drums on the albums in the first half of the ‘10s. 

CARS ON THE FREEWAY ATTEMPTING A CLEAN BREAK. Death Cab for Cutie recorded Keys and Codes in eight different studios, three weeks at a time. Band members wanted to spend more time with their families, rather than being hulled up in a studio for a month, like when the band recorded Plans. The decision to shift Death Cab's sound from guitar-based rock to layered, composed music may have been the reason why Chris Walla lost inspiration by their 2015 record, first stepping down as the album's producer and then walking away from the band itself. Lyrically, while this record has been called the band's happy record, the opening track "Home Is a Fire" is rather unsettling. Lyricist and singer Ben Gibbard had married Zooey Deschanel in 2009, between this album and Narrow Stairs. Code and Keys was released on May 31, 2011. On November 1st, the couple announced their separation. The couple divorced by the closing of 2012. While their second track on Kintsugi, "Black Sun," seems to address Gibbard's break up, "Home Is a Fire" uses imagery that portrays an unstable environment. We have the imagery of an earthquake shaking the house before it's engulfed in flames. The "agnostic, lapsed Catholic" Gibbard who celebrated his sister's lesbian wedding may be telling some truth about family disagreements in the past. Or is it the house that he built with the New Girl actress? Either way, it's a melancholy realization when you start to question the stability of a relationship. 

https://genius.com/Death-cab-for-cutie-home-is-a-fire-lyrics