‘Why You’d Want to Live Here’

Death Cab for Cutie| / 2001

“AN anti-L.A. song? Well, I’ve never seen it that way.” Ben Gibbard, the Seattle-based singer for Death Cab for Cutie, insists he isn’t a Los Angeles basher. “This song is a conversation. It’s a lover trying to convince his loved one not to move to L.A. He’s saying anything he can think of. It could be anywhere she’s going, it just happens to be L.A.”

That may be, but the song -- with its images of trash-lined freeway medians and toxic skies -- is still the most poisonous letter to Los Angeles in recent music memory.

It’s a lovely summer’s day

I can almost see a skyline through a thickening shroud of egos.

Is this the City of Angels or Demons?

And here the names are what remain: Stars encapsulate the golden lame

And they need constant cleaning for when the tourists begin salivating

And I can’t see why you’d want to live here.

Gibbard grew up in Washington state, and his first trips here left him sullen. The sprawl and disconnect of the place were disorienting and, lost, he kept stumbling into “weird little pockets of irony and old-man bars.” There were too many Seattle transplants too, who had come south for their careers but only found narcissism amid the smog.

We are not perfect, but we sure try.

As UV rays degrade our youth with time

The vessel keeps pumping us through this entropic place

In the belly of the beast that is Californ-i-a,

I drank from a faucet and I kept my receipts

For when they weigh me on my way out

Here nothing is free.

Gibbard’s own view has softened. “The more time I’ve spent there, the more great places and great friends I’ve found. It’s not as bad a place as the person in the song thinks.” That doesn’t mean that the slurs are false, however: “It’s all pretty obvious stuff, there’s nothing contestable about those observations.”

The song was recorded in Seattle and, at the suggestion of bassist Nick Harmer, Gibbard went up the block and bought a paperback copy of “The Day of the Locust,” Nathanael West’s bitter portrait of low-rent Hollywood. After reading it, Gibbard decided to change his lyrics in a nod to the title. “I really don’t do stuff like that, it was the first and last time it ever happened. But I loved the book and it fit.” West himself might have appreciated the song’s sense of dread.

The greyhounds keep coming

Dumping locusts into the street

Until the gutters overflow

And Los Angeles thinks,

“I might explode someday soon.”

-- Geoff Boucher