Deep Cut Friday: ‘Stable Song’ by Death Cab For Cutie

Each week, SPIN digs into the catalogs of great artists and highlights songs you might not know for our Deep Cut Friday series.

Death Cab For Cutie’s fifth album Plans recently turned 20. The Seattle band’s major label debut was their first and only album to go platinum, powered by the radio hits “Soul Meets Body” and “I Will Follow You into the Dark” as well as the prominent use of their music in the primetime hit The O.C. Frontman Ben Gibbard was on a prolific streak after releasing both Death Cab’s fourth album Transatlanticism and his electronic side project the Postal Service’s Give Up in 2003, but he revisited an earlier composition for the closing track on Plans.

“Stable Song” as it appears on Plans is a slow building waltz that runs three and a half minutes, but its lyrics and melody were already familiar to longtime Death Cab fans as “Stability” from 2002’s The Stability EP. With an extended instrumental coda, though, “Stability” is over 12 minutes, making it the longest track in the Death Cab For Cutie catalog. “Stability” was among the last songs Death Cab recorded with drummer Michael Schorr before he left the band. It also features keyboards by John Vanderslice and the Prom frontman James Mendenhall, who died in 2019.

A 2021 deluxe edition of 2001’s The Photo Album included a demo of “Stable Song.” It’s closer to the length and structure of the Plans version, revealing that the band simply chose to release “Stability” first, while the shorter version waited in the wings for a few more years.

In a 2015 Vulture piece, Gibbard singled out “Stable Song” as one of his favorite Death Cab For Cutie songs, calling it a “companion piece” for the Photo Album single “A Movie Script Ending.” “It’s a song about transition, leaving something familiar and departing into the unknown. When we were doing Plans, Chris [Walla] and I floated the idea of trying to record a more definitive version of this song for the record.”

Three more essential Death Cab For Cutie deep album cuts:

“Champagne From a Paper Cup”

“Champagne From a Paper Cup” is one of the five songs from Ben Gibbard’s 1997 solo demo You Can Play These Songs with Chords that was re-recorded with a full band lineup for Death Cab For Cutie’s proper debut album, 1998’s Something About Airplanes. Consider The Photo Album’s “Styrofoam Plates” a thematic return to the subject of disposable tableware.

“Lightness”

The rotating soundport of a Leslie speaker is often used in studios to give instruments a swirling or oscillating texture. Chris Walla took the creative step of using the sound of “a mic’d up squeaky Leslie speaker” to give the Transatlanticism track “Lightness” an eerie ambiance.

“I’ll Never Give Up On You”

The members of Death Cab sent files back and forth during the early days of the COVD-19 pandemic to make the 2022 album Asphalt Meadows, echoing Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello’s creative process for Postal Service songs. The result was a little more collaborative than the band’s previous albums, and the closing song “I’ll Never Give Up On You” is a rare Death Cab track with four credited songwriters.