A few months ago, Ben Gibbard, Jenny Lewis, and Jimmy Tamborello got fans excited as they teased what was looking like a return for The Postal Service. It turned out the trio just reunited to make a video to help encourage voting and no new music was on the way. In fact, the way the Death Cab For Cutie leader sees it, it’s more likely that there won’t ever be more new material from The Postal Service.
Gibbard spoke about the band’s future with NME, saying that the circumstances were perfect for the band’s one album, Give Up, to come together, and that he just doesn’t think a second album is going to happen:
“I love Jimmy and Jenny so much, but the dream or idea of doing more music kind of died when we attempted to make the second record in 2004 and 2005. I was writing for [Postal Service’s] Give Up and [Death Cab For Cutie’s] Transatlanticism at the same time in 2001 and 2002. The Postal Service obviously didn’t exist at that point, but Death Cab wasn’t touring a lot — we were still very self-contained as just four of us in a van with a merch person. The workload and expectations weren’t anything like what they became later so I had so much free time to have these things going at the same time.
Being 26 and cocky enough to think, ‘Oh, this is fine — I’ll just do five records at the same time,’ means you have a lot more runway in front of you creatively. Give Up was put together so relatively effortlessly that there weren’t a lot of second thoughts and it flowed so naturally. When we started working on a second record, it became very obvious that this was going to be very difficult to find the time to follow up a record that had had such an unexpected moment. Plus, Death Cab was touring for nine or ten months of the year, so there was just no way to give the time to both.
You want to never say never, but no one should be holding their breath waiting for Postal Service music coming any time soon. We haven’t worked on anything. We stay in touch as friends, but that’s kind of the extent of it.”
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. .
