Tegan and Sara's New Album Has a Producer!!

There are a couple of reasons why indie rock sounds so good right now and one of them is Chris Walla.

The guitarist for the Seattle outfit Death Cab for Cutie has produced albums for Hot Hot Heat, The Long Winters, Nada Surf and, most recently, The Decemberists.

Walla took what he learned from producing Death Cab albums and passed it along to other bands, creating indie rock nirvana in the process. Nada Surf’s The Weight is a Gift was surprisingly good and The Decemberists The Crane Wife is on the way to becoming one of the best albums of the year.

And it’s all come from Walla, a friendly vegetarian with a passion for voter registration causes during his free time.

“If you had asked me five years ago if I wanted to produce full time, I’d say yeah, just to get me the fuck off the road,” Walla said. “Now I’m at a point where I don’t really like one more than the other. I do wish I had more time to produce since I’ve had to turn down a lot of things.”

Right now all his time is with Death Cab as they take their final tour in support of last year’s Plans, the band’s successful major label debut.

At the tour’s end, Walla will be heading back to the studio to produce the new Tegan and Sara album in January. Then it will be time to put the final touches on his first solo album, which is slated to come out in August of next year.

Yet amid all the good music, purists have questioned whether bands like Death Cab and the Decemberists have sold out – pointing out that their most accessible music in years comes at the heels of joining a major label.

“We wouldn’t have moved to Atlantic if the decision wasn’t unanimous,” Walla said. “It took a long time. We had decided before we recorded Transatlanticism that it was something we wanted to pursue if the door opened. It had to be the right deal.”

So far that deal has been working. The tour has been a success. It will finish up in the band’s hometown of Seattle at Key Arena, the city’s professional basketball arena.

It’s definitely a high point for Walla and Death Cab – to play in the arena where they each saw so many of their favorite bands growing up. For Walla, it was The Cure, a band that taught him how an album should sound.

“You have to commit to Disintegration,” Walla said. “The first song feels like an invitation and the last song feels like the band leaving the stage. And everything in the middle is placed so well and carefully.”

Walla takes this same approach today and makes sure to have the running order (the song placement) of the album before any recording takes place.

“One of the most important things for records is some sort of arc, from beginning to end,” Walla said. “I love, particularly in the iPod age, the idea of a linear record. It starts and takes you some place else.”

As for the band, Walla doesn’t feel like there is a definite destination for them.

“I still don’t have much of a sense of what we’re doing,” Walla said. “It’s been a state of suspended animation for the last six years.”