How Ben Gibbard Carries Grief on Death Cab For Cutie’s “I Built You A Tower”

On the title track of Death Cab For Cutie’s latest LP, I Built You A Tower, singer Ben Gibbard tries to contain grief. Rather than simply get over it, he chooses to enclose it inside an emotional locker.

Once there, he can transport it or pull it out and revisit the past anytime he likes. But as the song unfolds, Gibbard realizes that harboring grief inside a mental closet isn’t sustainable. Because grief is the proof of joy. And joy’s absence will always be felt regardless of how it disintegrated or where it ultimately gets stored.

I Needed You Contained

After a painful separation, Gibbard stores his ex in the back of his mind. This is wrangling the chaos of a breakup and filing it away somewhere in the deep corners of his brain.

I built you a tower,
A tower in my mind.
A place that no one else,
No one else would ever find.
’Cause I needed you,
I needed you contained.
You’d run circles ’round,
Circles ’round my brain.

Silence is a suitable replacement for this person. But Gibbard knows that he’s deluding himself. Quiet also comes with the volume of a dam breaking, and the pain rushes back.

At first the silence felt,
Felt like an old friend.
From whom I was estranged,
But finally made amends.
But into this void,
Into this empty space.
All my sleeping fears,
They began to race.

Compartmentalize Grief

“I Built You A Tower” is Gibbard compartmentalizing grief. It’s how he stores the trauma to make space to carry on with the rest of his life.

“So when I started really writing in earnest for the record, something I was meditating on a lot was how we have to compartmentalize these painful parts of our lives just so that we can get through the work that we have to do or raise our families, or whatever we have to do,” he told The New Yorker.

In so many words, it’s how he’s trying to move on, which is what most people mean when they say they’ve gotten over it.

I thought that I could keep,
Could keep you locked away.
That in this soundless spire,
Was where you’d always stay.

Photo by Dana Jacobs/FilmMagic