Benjamin Gibbard

With his warm, wistful tenor, Benjamin Gibbard has been one of the most comforting voices in indie music since forming Death Cab for Cutie in the late '90s. Born in 1976 in Bremerton, WA, across the Puget Sound from Seattle, Gibbard grew up on grunge and indie rock, eventually writing and recording his first demo under the Death Cab name in 1997 and dropping a handful of lo-fi recordings as All-Time Quarterback. While his main band has kept up a steady, successful pace, the singer/songwriter has spent much of his free time exploring love, loss, and melody alongside his closest peers and through the eyes of his greatest influences. In the 2000s, he teamed up with electronic producer Jimmy Tamborello for the short-lived but highly influential indie-pop duo The Postal Service, and later with alt-country vet Jay Farrar for 2009’s sparse acoustic soundtrack One Fast Move or I’m Gone (Music from Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur). He released his first solo collection, the intimate Former Lives, in 2012, followed by a faithful, elegant homage to Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque in 2017. Gibbard has continued to thrive as a collaborator, lending his tender touch to songs alongside artists like Tycho and Noah Cyrus.