I have an assumption that hanging out with Ben Gibbard would probably be as awkward as hanging out with Jack Kerouac. I’ll never know. Well, not with Kerouac anyways. But by reading the opening pages of Kerouac’s Big Sur I get the drift that he didn’t take to becoming the “it” guy in town. He left his digs in Northport and headed west, landing in a cabin in Big Sur where he would eventually lose his grip on reality. Was it him…or the cabin? Ask Ben Gibbard.

More than forty years after Kerouac’s novel was published, and long after his liver failed him, Gibbard, lead singer of the ephemeral pop/alt band Death Cab for Cutie, found himself in the same cabin looking for the same thing.The result is overtly different, yet eerily the same: in the cabin where Kerouac painfully wrote twenty-two pages enumerating the precise sound of the ocean’s voice, Gibbard has written some of his darkest songs yet on Death Cab For Cutie’s new album, “Narrow Stairs.”

I get the same feeling listening to the album that I do when reading Kerouac’s work. Gibbard’s track “Bixby Canyon Bridge” states: “I descended a dusty gravel ridge/beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge/until I eventually arrived/at the place where your soul had died.” I envision Gibbard searching aimlessly for answers to questions that he never asked aloud on this lonesome bridge. Did Kerouac ever think the same thing, at the same place?

The closest Gibbard gets to sounding upbeat again is in “Grapevine Fires,” which depicts a wildfire engulfing the local vines as he shares a quiet moment with a bottle of wine. I bet Kerouac had a similar lonely moment here, even after On The Road was published. But unlike the medium in which Kerouac operated, Gibbard has the ability to hide dismal lyrics like behind poppy music. Kerouac’s prose never had the opportunity to camouflage itself in such a way.

As a fan of both literature and music, I can’t think of a more interesting way to infuse the two than how Gibbard has on “Narrow Stairs.” Echoes of Kerouac stir behind the album’s production, much the same way his ghost must have stirred in the cabin. But then again, I may be assuming too much. Just as Gibbard could only imagine Kerouac’s thoughts, I do the same with “Narrow Stairs.” Luckily, for me or any other fan of Death Cab For Cutie, the end product doesn’t disappoint.

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