Ben Gibbard is a singer/songwriter best known as frontman for Pacific Northwestern indie rockers
Death Cab for Cutie.
Gibbard was raised in Washington and got interested in music due in part to the explosion of grunge and its roots in his region during his formative high-school years.
Gibbard's first band was the fledgling Pinwheel, who released one self-titled album in 1996. Pinwheel's Justin Kennedy would go on to front
Army Navy.
Gibbard began
Death Cab for Cutie as a solo project in 1997, taking the name from a song by cheeky classic rockers
the Bonzo Dog Band. He released a cassette of his sentimental acoustic-leaning songs called
You Can Play These Songs with Chords under the new moniker later that year, and the reception was warm enough to merit expanding the project into a full band.
Death Cab for Cutie would go on to enormous popularity and release records for years to come, but
Gibbard's itch to work solo continued. Between 1999 and 2002, he worked on several solo releases under the name
¡All-Time Quarterback! Collaboration became standard for
Gibbard early on as well. In addition to joining friends
Pedro the Lion as a bassist for one tour,
Gibbard has collaborated in some form or another with
the Long Winters,
Jenny Lewis,
Jay Farrar,
Styrofoam,
Andrew Kenny of
American Analog Set, and others. Perhaps his most fruitful collaboration came in the form of adding guest vocals to the
Dntel song "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan" on the 2001 album
Life Is Full of Possibilities.
From that meeting,
Gibbard began trading sound files with
Dntel beatmaker
Jimmy Tamborello for what would become the immensely popular project known as
the Postal Service, thusly titled because the two would send each other song ideas through the mail.
The Postal Service's 2003 debut,
Give Up, was well received critically as well as in terms of sales, going gold in two countries.
Gibbard married actress/singer
Zooey Deschanel in September of 2009 and the couple remained together for two years before divorcing in the fall of 2011.
In 2012
Gibbard issued
Former Lives, the first collection of songs under his own name. Two years later he supplied the score to the romantic comedy film The Laggies, and he returned to
Death Cab for Cutie for 2015's
Kintsugi, which earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rock Album. In 2017 he delivered
Bandwagonesque, a reworking of
Teenage Fanclub's breakthrough 1991 album of the same name. ~ Fred Thomas