Sun Kil Moon's Mark Kozelek is known for stirring up trouble. Ben Gibbard? Not so much.
The pair traded emails in a recent Thread feature and discussed the incidents when they angered fans at shows, and Kozelek discussed his time working on Almost Famous.
"To be honest, in the moment, when I make jokes, people seem to respond well," Kozelek said. "If you're there, you get the context of where I'm coming from. I truly believe that 95 percent of my audience is with me from the beginning to the end of my shows, because I don't recall a show in recent years where I've seen anyone leave, and my shows are two and a half hours long!
"I think people choose to be offended by things as a way of bonding, as a hobby. They embed some piece of information into their brain without thinking it through, because it's easier. 'Mark Kozelek is an a--hole.' It's lowest common denominator stuff. Things get taken out of context. The bummer is that the banter ends up eclipsing the music. People are more excited to read about me knocking 'hillbillies' or the band The War on Drugs than they are to hear about the music."
Surprisingly, Gibbard — Death Cab for Cutie's mellow frontman — has also gotten on the wrong side of fans's tempers. He described an incident in Boston when he ripped on green-and-pink Red Sox hats before trying to play "I Will Follow You into the Dark."
"People were not amused," he said. "In fact, the booing was so vitriolic I thought the show might be over. Thankfully I was able to wiggle out of it, backpedal and get on with the song. Awkwardly, of course.
"Boston, man, they just don't play over there. There's a particular aggressiveness on the East Coast that I've just never been down with. I'm way too much of a Northwesterner to live over there."
Kozelek also has a short acting résumé. He played the Stillwater bassist in Almost Famous and also had parts in Vanilla Sky and Shopgirls.
"When I lived in L.A., I was in a pretty cocky phase — 32 years old, the only single guy on the Almost Famous set — but at the same time, I felt an inferiority complex the whole time," he said. "It was strange, being around 20-year-olds who owned their own homes or drove into the movie set with a different car every month. During my time there, like you, I was trying to sell myself on it, but it wasn't me."
Kozelek has recently been throwing shade at The War on Drugs, while Gibbard recently discussed the loss of departed DCFC member Chris Walla.
"Oh, there is undoubtedly a line in the sand here," he said. "The position we're in — it's a blessing and a curse — is that people feel very strongly about the period of this band in which they got into us. We're fighting against people who say, 'Why can't you make a record like the one I heard when I was 20 years old?' And the answer is we can't. We can just move forward, and create a new period."
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