“Such Great Heights” by The Postal Service, Wednesday, July 26, 2023

 

After 20 years, an album and a band can become legendary. However, in the case of The Postal Service, the legacy is attached to one album, Give Up, even centered on one single, "Such Great Heights." The Postal Service was a side project of Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard, producer Jimmy Tamborello, and backing vocals from Rilo Kiley's guitarist and singer Jenny Lewis. But like older Death Cab for Cutie, The Postal Service and "Such Great Heights" is a bigger hit in the nostalgia of eventual fans, as Death Cab for Cutie's heyday with Plans in 2005 and being featured on television shows like The O.C.

EVERYTHING LOOKS PERFECT FROM FAR AWAY. Ben Gibbard's venture into electronic music is a musical arc at least as old as The Beatles. But unlike The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Strawberry Fields Forever, Gibbard didn't take the electronics to Death Cab for Cutie in 2003. Instead the same year that Death Cab released their organic classic Transatlanticism, Gibbard released the synthetic Give Up with The Postal Service. Gibbard took some of that sound into later Death Cab albums, but at the time, The Postal Service's synth-based indie pop was distinct from Death Cab in every way except for Gibbard's unmistakable voice and poetic lyrics. And to clarify my earlier argument about nostalgia making "Such Great Heights" a bigger hit, the song was a minor hit in 2003 and the record charted on Billboard's 200 Albums and Heat Seekers; however, I wonder how many eventual fans, like me, first heard the song on Garden State original soundtrack, covered by Iron & Wine and thought that the song was an Iron & Wine song? Even worse for my credit, I don't think I had heard the original until boarding a (gulp) American Airlines flight back to the States in 2015. At the time, I thought that Ben Gibbard had covered the original by Iron & Wine. 

WHEN YOU SCAN THE RADIO, I HOPE THIS SONG  WILL GUIDE YOU HOME. I've gone through times listening to a lot of Iron & Wine  to times when I absolutely cannot take another note of singer Sam Beam's voice. That being said, I think that the acoustic version of "Such Great Heights" conveys an emotion that The Postal Service doesn't convey. The acoustic version is much more laid back, fitting with much of Iron & Wine's music when Beam isn't disguising disdain for toxic expressions of patriotism or faith. The Postal Service's version, though, focuses on the adventure of the song. That's why it's such a great song for American Airlines to try to distract us from the fact that our knees are in our face. Listening to yesterday's song "Fireflies" and today's song "Such Great Heights," it does seem that Owl City was influenced by Gibbard's voice and even the sound of the track itself. Gibbard's classic, though, provides a more mature lyrical approach. But it might be Gibbard's hipster appeal on the outskirts of pop culture that influenced the sounds of pop music enough to make a song like "Fireflies" familiar enough to top Billboard's Hot 100. But this argument would be hard to make. While Owl City's writing is emotional and on the nose, Gibbard's ability to write nuanced emotion into lyrics may not get him a number one hit, but twenty years later, we're still talking about "Such Great Heights," which didn't even chart on Billboard's Hot 100. 

Read the lyrics on Genius.