Chris Walla - “Death Clock”

Time was on Chris Walla’s side for the assembly of Field Manual

“The hardest part of making a solo record is actually finishing it,” Chris Walla reveals by phone from his Portland home. With only a couple weeks until Field Manual drops, the Death Cab for Cutie guitarist and producer—whose extra-band production and co-production credits include Tegan and Sara’s The Con, Hot Hot Heat’s Knock Knock Knock and the Decemberists’ Crane Wife—seems relieved that his first proper solo release is a done deal… understandably, given that he started writing it in 1999.

“When you’re working with another person,” he continues, “there’s always someone else to bounce ideas off of. I have a job to do. I can adapt to whatever’s required to get the performance we want. When it’s just me, and my blood sugar gets a little low, I’m suddenly not as into it as I was 20 minutes earlier. That’s part of why I hired Warne Livesey to help me produce the thing.”

A master facilitator adept at coaxing optimum results from anyone he works with, Livesey (The The, Midnight Oil, Beth Orton) was an inspired choice. So light is the veteran producer’s touch that it’s often hard to ascertain where it ends and Walla’s begins, as with the piano part that sends delicate closing ballad “Holes” gloriously off into the sunset.

“The piano was Warne’s idea,” Walla says, “but Tucker Martine [Decemberists, Bill Frisell, Mudhoney] mixed the song. When I give someone something to mix, I don’t like to give them a lot of instructions. Even though I’d intended the piano to play second fiddle to the guitar, when I heard Tucker’s mix, it took me about two minutes to decide it was perfect.”

Apart from apocalypse lament “Two Fifty,” which easily packs enough notes and lumens to fill any Death Cab space, Walla eschews bandmate Ben Gibbard’s Baroque attack in favor of less convoluted gambits. (Read: rock.) And, while he devotes plenty of breath to personal relationships, he’s a political animal at heart. “Everyone Needs a Home” explores Katrina’s aftermath and its implications more incisively than any song since Legendary K.O.’s “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People.” And “Archer’s Light” finds a librarian confronting a senator with surprising vigor.

“‘Archer’s Light’ pretty much came to me in a dream,” Walla says. “Not verbally, but the situation. I dreamt [author, critic and librarian extraordinaire] Nancy Pearl in a shouting match with Arlen Specter, drilling him on why the Seattle Public Library has to close two days a week for lack of funding, and everything just escalated. I don’t even know why it was Specter, who’s among the most reasonable Republicans, the ones most willing to compromise. I think I just get hung up on him ’cause he’s got such a fantastic name.”