Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).
Such Great Heights (2003)
Artists will often get involved with projects outside their main bands and many of these don't come close to matching the success of their regular gigs. But sometimes, those side projects blow up. It happened in 1995 for Lou Barlow, who had plenty of indie success with his bands Dinosaur Jr. and Sebadoh but scored a top 40 hit ("Natural One") with his side project the Folk Implosion. And several years later, it happened for Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello.
Both were well known in indie circles for their main gigs: Gibbard was the frontman of Death Cab for Cutie and Tamborello was better known as electronic music artists Dntel. Gibbard had contributed vocals for a song on the 2001 Dntel album Life is Full of Possibilities; the song, "(This is) The Dream of Evan and Chan," was so well received that Gibbard and Tamborello decided to collaborate on more music. They brought in Jenny Lewis, lead singer of Rilo Kiley, to provide backing vocals on several songs and eventually made her a full-fledged member of Postal Service.
The band got its name because of how it made its songs, sending songs on digital audio tapes through the mail to each other. The Postal Service's debut album Give Up was released in February 2003 on Sub Pop; it also featured contributions from Jen Wood and Gibbard's Death Cab bandmate Chris Walla.
"Such Great Heights" was one of the last songs the duo recorded, featuring backing vocals by Wood, and became the album's first single. The single was released along with two covers, one by Iron & Wine of "Such Great Heights" and one by The Shins of the Postal Service song "We Will Become Silhouettes." Both versions of "Such Great Heights" were popular at the same time, with Iron & Wine's downtempo version used in the film and soundtrack of the movie Garden State.
Gibbard went against type with the song's lyrics, opting to write about being in love instead of his usual focus on heartbreak.
"I am thinking it's a sign/That the freckles in our eyes/Are mirror images/And when we kiss they're perfectly aligned/And I have to speculate/That God himself did make/Us into corresponding shapes/Like puzzle pieces from the clay/And true it may seem like a stretch/But it's thoughts like this that catch/My troubled head when you're away/And when I am missing you to death/And when you are out there on the road/For several weeks of shows/And when you scan the radio/I hope this song will guide you home."
The Postal Service is airy and delicate, with Gibbard's vocals riding on top of the bleep bloop of electronic sounds bubbling underneath.
"They will see us waving from such great heights/Come down now, they'll say/But everything looks perfect from far away/Come down now but we'll stay."
The song hit #21 on the Billboard Hot 100, but it became ubiquitous thanks to judicious licensing by the band. In addition to being featured on Garden State, the song was used on commercials for M&Ms, Target, Ask.com, UPS and Kaiser Permanente. It was the original theme song for Grey's Anatomy, was used in the Broadway production of Moulin Rouge! The Musical and was in the teaser trailer for Disney/Pixar's 2025 film Elio. And it has been covered by Ben Folds, Amanda Palmer, Streetlight Manifesto and Joy Kills Sorrow. The album became Sub Pop's second most successful release behind Nirvana's debut Bleach.
"I tried my best to leave/This all on your machine/But the persistent beat/It sounded thin upon the sending/And that frankly will not fly/You'll hear the shrillest highs/And lowest lows with the windows down/And this is guiding you home."
The Postal Service toured for the album before Gibbard and Tamborello went back to their main projects, but the song kept rolling. In 2007, it was announced that they were working on a new Postal Service album, but Gibbard and Tamborello were so busy with their other projects that it never happened. However, in 2013, the two reunited with Lewis and recorded two new songs that were included on a 10th anniversary reissue of Give Up. They put a band together and did a world tour, and also released a hilarious video directed by Tom Scharpling of fictional 2002 auditions for the band featuring some great guest stars (see below). They called it their final tour and released a documentary concert film called Everything Will Change in 2014.
In 2020, the Postal Service released a live album, Everything Will Change, and in 2023, the band reunited to do a co-headlining tour with Death Cab for Cutie. The Postal Service performed Give Up in its entirety while Death Cab played its Transatlanticism front to back, in celebration of both albums' 20th anniversaries. The tour lasted into September 2024.
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