The Death Cab for Cutie song written about Zooey Deschanel
The marriage between Death Cab for Cutie lead singer Ben Gibbard and 500 Days of Summer actress Zooey Deschanel was one of the quirkier relationships to pop up in the indie community at the start of the 2010s. One was a man who had plumbed a lifetime’s worth of confusion around love into a successful music career, and the other was on the cresting wave of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl wave. However, her role in 500 Days was more a deconstruction of the archetype than an example.
In any case, it seemed as though the relationship would have had just as strong a chance as any other celebrity pairing. Fans and listeners even believed they were getting an inside glimpse of the couple’s interior dynamic since Death Cab for Cutie was set to release an album in 2011, Codes and Keys, their first since the pair married in 2009.
When Codes and Keys was released, it seemed as though Gibbard had a strong about-face from the darker and more depressing tone of the band’s previous album, Narrow Stairs. Songs like ‘Monday Morning’ and ‘Underneath the Sycamore’ were the closest out-and-out love songs that Gibbard had ever written. Lines like “She may be young, but she only likes old things / And modern music it ain’t to her taste” seemed like they lined up with the public perception of Deschanel.
But only one song was referenced by Gibbard as having directly come from his marriage. During a filmed concert for VH1 shortly after the album’s release, Gibbard claimed: “As a newly married man, I think I’m allowed at least one love song”. He then broke into the final track on Codes and Keys, the light and optimistic ‘Stay Young, Go Dancing’.
“Everything I write is reflective of my own life and the lives of those people around me,” told Spin in 2011. “They reflect the conversations you have and the rumblings of life around you. But when somebody gets married, people assume that they’re going to get a certain thing out of an album”.
Featuring what remains perhaps the sunniest and most straightforward lyrics of any Death Cab for Cutie material, ‘Stay Young, Go Dancing’ sounds like Gibbard was solidly caught up in the romance of his marriage when he composed it. Unfortunately, the relationship was not meant to last: just five months after the release of Codes and Keys, Gibbard and Deschanel announced their intentions to divorce.
Gibbard went on to express mixed feelings towards Codes and Keys in later years, likely due to the strong association most of the songs had with his first marriage. “Because of the company I was keeping in Los Angeles, I was becoming very closed off, personally,” Gibbard explained while ranking Death Cab’s albums to Vice in 2018 (Codes and Keys was ranked last). “I found myself not wanting to share as much of myself that I had historically shared on records”.
Check out ‘Stay Young, Go Dancing’ below.
