We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes


We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes is the second studio album by American rock band Death Cab for Cutie, released on March 21, 2000 through Barsuk Records. The band—composed of singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard, guitarist/producer Chris Walla, bassist Nick Harmer, and drummer Nathan Good—formed in Bellingham, Washington in 1997. The quartet issued their debut album, Something About Airplanes, in 1998 through Seattle-based independent label Barsuk, after which Good exited the band. Between albums, both Gibbard and Walla released music through side projects, ¡All-Time Quarterback! and Martin Youth Auxiliary, respectively.
We Have the Facts was developed over a period of five months between the three, and recorded at the members' parents' homes. Its recording came at a transitional time for the band, who were on the cusp of adulthood with little idea of what was to come. Gibbard infused these post-collegiate anxieties into his lyricism, with his songwriting melding narratives with abstract imagery for the first time. We Have the Facts is sonically downbeat, with its despondent sound and spindly guitar work heavily influenced by the slowcore genre.
Upon its March 2000 release on Barsuk, We Have the Facts received praise from music critics. The band supported the LP with its first full nationwide tour, with drummer Jayson Tolzdorf-Larson joining. No singles were released from the album, though the LP was followed by an extended play, The Forbidden Love EP, several months after its release.

Background

Death Cab for Cutie originated with singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard, formerly of the power pop outfit Pinwheel, during his time attending Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. During a break from the group, Gibbard put together a demo of songs under the name Death Cab for Cutie, named after a song by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. It was produced by multi-instrumentalist Christopher Walla, whom Gibbard had met a concert. The cassette, You Can Play These Songs with Chords, attracted significant local attention, prompting Gibbard to assemble a lineup. Roommate Nick Harmer joined as bassist, along with temporary drummer Nathan Good. Within a year, the quartet were signed to Seattle label Barsuk Records, which released their debut album, Something About Airplanes.
Bellingham lacked employment opportunities or a real music scene, leading the band to relocate southbound to Seattle. Gibbard—an environmental chemistry major—had been working at a testing lab in Bellingham, while Harmer and Walla were making ends meet at a coffee shop. Both moved back in with their parents, while Gibbard rented an apartment with his girlfriend. Good's situation was different: he was getting married, and had accrued significant student debt. In addition, he lacked the support of his musical interests from his parents that Gibbard, Walla, and Harmer shared. Good departed the band in early 1999, and the three-piece soldiered on with an interim drummer in his place between April–September 1999.
The trio struggled to find a suitable and "competent" percussionist who would agree to tour. Their lack of financial stability hindered matters; at the time, the group would make only $50 per show, which mainly went to fueling the Econoline to drive to the next city. Gibbard has characterized this period in the band's history as "interstitial", lacking assurance of what was to come: "It was made at a time when we didn’t have any sense of what the future held for us as individuals, let alone as a band," he recalled two decades later.

Recording and production

We Have the Facts, like its predecessor, was recorded in a home environment than professional studio spaces, over a span of five months. Much of the LP was tracked at Harmer's mother's house in Puyallup, Washington. She was working to obtain her doctoral degree at the time, spending her time in one half of the home. The three lived there for one month, working on the album at "all hours of the night." Recording of the album later moved to Walla's parents' home in Bothell. To record the album, the band were loaned a 16-track half-inch tape recorder from fellow Northwest musicians and label-mates Sunset Valley. The group worked intently and with a unified purpose; Gibbard remembered the three were "in the zone" because there was little else in their lives at the time.
Like past efforts, Walla served as producer. He initially attempted to follow one of his idols, engineer Steve Albini, who holds a studio approach similar to realistic photography: simply document what is occurring with little intervention. Walla found this perspective unsatisfactory due to the constantly evolving nature of his recording locales and equipment. In the end, he viewed his job as doing what best serves the song, and letting production flourishes complement the songwriting than distract. Recording drums proved to be somewhat difficult; the snare drum went out of tune two days into recording, and with Gibbard possessing only mild skill of the instrument, no one knew how to tune it. He played drums for the bulk of the LP, having steadily spent time practicing to sufficiently improve his expertise. On the album, he plays to a click track to ensure his timing. Former drummer Good contributed percussion to two tracks, "Company Calls Epilogue" and "The Employment Pages". The group decided to record these two songs the day before mastering was set to begin. Good returned at the trio's insistence to record drums for the songs, both of which were fully tracked and mixed at the last minute.
The album was finalized and mixed in Walla's bedroom. The liner notes for the album credit its recording and mixing to the Hall of Justice, a Super Friends reference. The Hall of Justice was simply Walla's name for "just a bunch of half-broken stuff that roves around from place to place at my direction." Later in 2000, the band's label, Barsuk, would purchase Reciprocal Recording in Seattle, and let Walla manage the building; he renamed it Hall of Justice Recording. After the LP was completed, Tony Lash, an engineer from Portland, Oregon, mastered the LP.

Composition

Music

We Have the Facts is stylistically regarded as an indie rock album; Gibbard himself classified the band as indie pop. The bleak point of view in the lyrics and despondent tone led many to categorize We Have the Facts as emo; the album has been called an "emo classic". Gibbard and Walla's guitar parts on We Have the Facts are different than on later efforts; Gibbard later highlighted their "cool, spindly guitar-work" in a ranking of the band's albums. In his early twenties, Gibbard was influenced by the downbeat, slowcore music of Bedhead and Codeine. He felt inspired by Bedhead in particular, and incentivized intricate guitar lines on We Have the Facts that "weave" and "work through each other" over simpler chords. He also conceded his longtime love for fellow Northwest rockers Built to Spill led to "flagrant" appropriation of their sound in early Death Cab work, while Jon Pareles of The New York Times also suggested the LP aurally reminiscent of Pavement.
Walla mixed the album on an Allen & Heath MixWizard console, a 16-channel board with an array of different EQ settings. Walla had fun adjusting the EQ to extreme ranges, "overloading the channel" and creating a "gritty, awful, brittle sound." The board also had built-in presets, and though Walla found them "cheesy," the group ended up utilizing a "cathedral" setting for bombastic effects. Otherwise, the album is mostly authentic room tone, with some delay effects on vocals produced via a delay pedal. Journalist Ian Cohen felt that Walla's nascent production skill displays "distinct sonic character, everything obscured by a mid-fi mist, the pine scent of the Pacific Northwest and gin breath." Walla also utilized a portable sampler, Dr. Sample, to distort samples and re-incorporate them in a creative way. For example, the pulsating tone on "405" was sampled from a Yamaha keyboard, distorted into the sampler, set to repeat and lined up with the click track.

Lyrics

Gibbard's songwriting differs from its predecessor, possessing a more novelistic approach, frequently utilizing full sentences. Much of this songwriting was informed by his "post-collegiate neuroses" and general uncertainty regarding his path in life. In a later interview, he acknowledged his privilege as a "middle-class college-educated white man in America": "In reality, not something one should garner too much sympathy about." Cohen interpreted We have the Facts as a concept album chronicling a decaying relationship. Gibbard saw this evaluation as a "complete misconception," noting that the album is only conceptual in that it complies his feelings about entering adulthood. Gibbard cited musicians Elliott Smith and Blake Schwarzenbach of Jawbreaker as lyrical influences.
The first half of "Title Track" contains a softer, more lo-fi sound; Cohen assumed it was run through a low-pass filter, and likened this effect to "being heard through a thin apartment wall." After a minute and a half, the production abruptly adjusts to a higher-qualiy sound. In actuality, the first portion was recorded live together with one microphone, double-tracked, and mixed separately. The two pieces were put together in mastering; Tony Lash narrowed the stereo image for a more "drastic" effect. Walla had the idea to trick listeners into believing the album no different than its predecessor, letting its lower-quality sound cycle for too long before improving. "Title Track" emulates the writing style of beat poet Jack Kerouac, one of Gibbard's favorite writers. The second track, "The Employment Pages", documents Gibbard's job hunting upon his move to Seattle, from which he was routinely rejected. "I remember thinking, 'I have a degree in environmental chemistry, I worked in a lab and I can’t get a job stocking shelves?'", he said in an interview. Gibbard summarized the song as a "transition of going from idyllic, easy, college-town living, to trying to become an adult for some reason, but you're not quite sure why."
"Lowell, MA" was a holdover that was penned during the development of 1998's Something About Airplanes. It touches on Gibbard's love for Kerouac, with its localized title a reference to his hometown, Lowell, Massachusetts. The title of "405" stems from the several freeways that bypass Interstate 5, the major north–south Interstate Highway on the west coast, but specifically references Interstate 405 in Seattle. In college, Gibbard saw a girl whose family lived off the 405; the song makes reference to a shared weekend smoking cigarettes and drinking red wine. The lyric "hide your bad habits underneath the patio" originates from the fact that the two hid the cigarette butts underneath the patio in order to fool her parents, who were religious and more straight-laced. "Little Fury Bugs" utilizes a demo that Gibbard recorded at home on a four-track recorder, and gave to Walla, who contributed additional elements. In the song, Gibbard performs in an odd tuning, the result of an inexpensive toy guitar he was playing on.
Gibbard had a creative breakthrough upon writing "Company Calls Epilogue", which he has frequently labeled one of his favorite songs he ever wrote. Prior to its creation, he had viewed his lyricism on earlier efforts as too obtuse and emulative of R.E.M., which was a big influence. He considered "Epilogue" a proper marriage between this imperceptive imagery and storytelling, and a "benchmark" by which later songs would be judged. It has little in common with its predecessor, "Company Calls", besides incorporating unused lyrics meant for the original. This iteration of "Epilogue" was recorded only one day before mastering was set to begin; an alternate edition was later released on the Forbidden Love EP a few months later. The album version contains an outro that was culled from a scratch demo of just Gibbard and his guitar. It was recorded with a microphone that cost only four dollars. "No Joy in Mudville" is a tribute to musician Lou Reed, while "Scientist Studies" stems from the home the group had previously inhabited in Bellingham, that had no heating. Gibbard titled it after his study material at the time.

Release and commercial performance

The album's title stems from musician Herbert Burgle, a Seattle contemporary that formed the band Rat Cat Hogan. At one of his concerts, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with the title phrase, which referenced a legislative initiative in Nebraska at the time.
Barsuk issued We Have the Facts in March 2000 on compact disc and vinyl. Two vinyl variants were issued: a standard black edition, which was later re-issued in 2014, and a limited white-colored wax. Expectations were higher for We Have the Facts for the band. Though they band were largely outsiders to the music industry, the album was commercially successful, though muted in comparison to later efforts. We Have the Facts was supported at college radio stations, and debuted "strongly" on CMJ New Music Report Top 200 at number 51. It premiered eleven positions higher on the magazine's Core Radio ranking, which measured airplay. Barsuk initially pressed 20,000 copies; it had sold 32,000 by November 2001. These numbers were considered "staggering" for Barsuk, which was essentially a "one-man operation" ran by founder Josh Rosenfield.

Critical reception

We Have the Facts debuted to a positive critical reception. Chris Parker of Indy Week wrote that like its predecessor, it received "glowing critical accolades," while Kimberly Chun of the San Francisco Chronicle said that it received "effusive critical reception in the national music media." AllMusic reviewer Jack Rabid viewed it the band's "best and brightest LP" yet, a "superb" effort marking Gibbard's emergence as a "sublime" songwriter. Brent DiCrescenzo of the then-emerging website Pitchfork likened it to the work of an experienced, mid-career band, lauding its "warm, rich tone" and "delicate beauty". PopMatters critic Steve Lichtenstein praised it as "something you want to discover and cherish with no strings attached, and pass it on as eagerly." A Rolling Stone editor found the melodies superior to prior releases, complimenting its "smattering of psychedelia."
Stephen Thompson of The A.V. Club called it a marvelous improvement, opining that it "gets better the longer you listen to it, improving over its predecessor at every turn and revealing a surprising mastery of pop's many languages." A CMJ New Music Report editorialist called it an "impressive collection In an otherwise flooded genre, DCFC stands out as one of the more innovative and skillful of the pack." Jon Pareles included it in a New York Times listing of "Worthwhile Albums Most People Missed" at the end of 2000, proposing that " wiry songs aren't as uncertain as their lyrics pretend to be."

Legacy

For its twentieth anniversary, several publications published retroactive pieces celebrating the album, including Stereogum and Spin. The band has generally looked back at We Have the Facts fondly; Gibbard ranked it as his second favorite album the band made, remarking, " by far the biggest point of entry for the OG fans. Facts felt like we were a proper band in the world. I just feel like that record represents the best of that era." Likewise, Walla has reminisced positively about the making of the album, as evidenced by this 2011 quote:
We Have the Facts and We're Voting Yes was ranked the 14th greatest indie rock album of all time by Amazon.com. It was ranked 27th on Pitchforks list of "The 50 Best Indie Rock Albums of the Pacific Northwest."

Track listing

Personnel

Death Cab for Cutie
Additional personnel