Plans is the fifth studio album by American rock band Death Cab for Cutie, released August 30, 2005 on Atlantic Records. Emerging from the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s, Death Cab first rose to prominence on the strength of its confessional lyricism and textured indie rock sound. Following a longstanding partnership with indie label Barsuk, the band made the leap to a major label, Atlantic, for Plans. The LP was the band's first time recording outside of their Seattle home; it was produced at Long View Farm, a rural Massachusetts property.
Plans propelled the band into the mainstream, reaching the top five of the Billboard 200 and scoring a Grammy nomination for Best Alternative Music Album. The album spawned three singles, including "Soul Meets Body" and "Crooked Teeth". The third single "I Will Follow You into the Dark" became the band's most popular song to date, also garnering a Grammy nod for the Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. Plans was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2008. Their overseas distribution was complex, with at least seven indie imprints handling their albums in different countries.
The move suggested a shift in the perception of "indie" bands in the mainstream, and triggered accusations of inauthenticity. The move polarized fans, who took to message boards to worry that creative control would be diminished with the corporate expectations of a major. The band, with its softer, sometimes piano-led sound, was frequently compared to Coldplay, one of the biggest alternative rock groups globally at that time. Harmer agreed: "It really didn't change the way we worked creatively, but there certainly was enough psychological pressure that was kind of soaking in and seeping in, and I think we were carrying a lot of that stuff around with us, whether we knew it then or not."
Writing and recording
thumb|Plans was largely recorded in the Massachusetts countryside.
Plans came at a time of professional transition for the quartet. The group had been promoting themselves relentlessly, touring nonstop. Gibbard found it difficult to write during the exhaustive touring cycle. Inspired by Nick Drake's songwriting process, he rented an apartment in Seattle and filled it with a piano, guitars, and his laptop to focus in. "I'd treat it like a job and just go to my office. It has a view of the Space Needle and the mountains," he told Rolling Stone. Death Cab opted to rent a month at Long View Farm Studios in North Brookfield, Massachusetts, their first recording locale outside their home in the Pacific Northwest. Founded three decades prior by a Clark University professor, Long View was a popular facility at the time, utilized by other indie artists such as LCD Soundsystem and Brand New to track their albums. Its rural location led Gibbard to joke that it was "the kind of place a label sends a band if the singer's a junkie and they need to get him away from the bad things in the city." He and his bandmates lived in a converted barn while working, rising by 10 A.M. each day to track guitar, bass, and drum tracks. The isolation grew boring for the group, particularly Harmer and Gibbard, who frequently took trips to the only local liquor store. Walla claimed to work for twelve hours per day behind the recording console, where he felt most at home. with additional recording taking place at Avast!, Robert Lang Studios, the Hall of Justice and Skrocki there. The album was mixed at Smart Studios in Madison, Wisconsin. Though Gibbard considered its tone optimistic, he conceded a meditation on mortality runs through the album.
Gibbard wrote "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" about succeeding a lover in death; he wrote the song for his girlfriend at the time. it depicts a trip to the hospital to see an ill loved one. The record's closing track, "Stable Song", is a rearrangement of "Stability", which was released on an EP in 2002. Plans was properly announced in July 2005. Barsuk remained involved in the band, with the label's logo appearing on the back cover of Plans, and the label retaining the rights to release it on vinyl. Its general retail and digital releases followed on August 30. "Soul Meets Body" represented the band's biggest radio hit at that time.
Plans became the band's first top-10 album, peaking at number four on the Billboard 200 and moving 90,000 copies in its first sales week. In all, the set spent fifty weeks on the chart, never selling less than 1,000 copies in a week in the first three years of release.
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Plans received generally positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 66, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Jonah Bayer of Alternative Press stated that Plans "seamlessly picks up right where 2003's Transatlanticism left off" and praised its "cinematic" scope. The A.V. Clubs Josh Modell wrote that the band "wears grandiosity with grace, miniaturizing and polishing big, broad moments into tiny triumphs that, like audible illusions, feel simultaneously intimate and huge." David Turnbull of musicOMH deemed Plans to be "an album of progression that is likely to win the band plenty of new fans, but it shouldn't alienate their fanbase either." Rhyannon Rodriguez, writing for Kludge, regarded the album as "a melodically mellow masterpiece" which expresses the "absolute epitome of this generation's pop." While stating that "at times, the writing feels almost too weightless", Ann Powers, writing in Blender, nonetheless contended that "repeat listening makes these songs reliably addictive." Nick Sylvester of The Village Voice wrote that "Death Cab succeed by refusing to offend", which "can be an admirable trait in a person, but never in a musician." In his Consumer Guide column for the same publication, Robert Christgau selected "I Will Follow You into the Dark" as a "choice cut", indicating a "good song on an album that isn't worth your time or money."
Reviewing the album for AllMusic, Rob Theakston declared that, "Plans is both a destination and a transitional journey for the group, one that sees the fulfillment of years of toiling away to develop their ideas and sound. But it's with the completion of those ideas that the band is faced with a new set of crossroads and challenges to tread upon: to stay the course and suffer stagnation or try something bold and daringly new with their future." The band also performed at several festivals, including domestic gigs at Summerfest in Milwaukee,
Legacy
Death Cab for Cutie was among the first indie acts to break through on a mainstream level, garnering consistent radio airplay and touring arenas in the aftermath of Plans. In the mid-2000s, the quartet became one of the biggest names in alternative rock.
All song from Plans were adapted into short films, creating an anthology titled Directions. The project was developed by Harmer and Aaron Stewart-Ahn, a filmmaker from the production company Otaku-House. Each piece was helmed by a different director. The shorts debuted on Death Cab's website in January 2006.
Track listing
Personnel
Death Cab for Cutie
- Ben Gibbard – vocals, guitars, piano
- Nick Harmer – bass
- Jason McGerr – drums
- Chris Walla – guitars, keyboards, production
Production
- Produced, recorded and mixed by Christopher Walla
- Additional recording by Mike Lapierre, Kip Beelman, Robbie Skrocki, Beau Sorenson
- 'Crooked Teeth' mixed by Chris Shaw at Sound Track, New York, NY
- William Swan – Trumpet (on "Soul Meets Body")
- Sean Nelson – Harmonies (on "Crooked Teeth")
- Recorded in the barn at Longview Farm, North Brookfields, MA
- Additional recordings at Avast!, Seattle; Robert Lang Studios, Seattle; The Hall of Justice and Skrocki, Seattle
- Mixed at Smart Studios in Madison, WI
- Mastered by Roger Seibel at SAE Mastering in Phoenix, AZ
- Artwork and layout – Adde Russell
Charts
Weekly charts
{| class="wikitable sortable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"
|+Weekly chart performance for Plans
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! scope="col"| Chart (2005–2006)
! scope="col"| Peak<br />position
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! scope="row"| Canadian Albums (Nielsen SoundScan)
| 17
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Year-end charts
{| class="wikitable plainrowheaders" style="text-align:center"
|+Year-end chart performance for Plans
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! scope="col"| Chart (2006)
! scope="col"| Position
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! scope="row"| US Billboard 200
| 147
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