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The Postal Service talks about resurrecting a band from the dead after 10 long years

The Postal Service talks about resurrecting a band from the dead after 10 long years

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The Postal Service
The Postal Service

The Postal Service had a pretty strange trajectory — Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard, Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis, and Jimmy Tamborello (the sole creative force behind electronic music act Dntel) joined together to do a side project from their main acts in 2002 and 2003. The album, Give Up, didn't really register when it came out, the band played a small, short tour, and then the band members went back to their main gigs. However, over the next decade, the band slowly but surely built up passionate fanbase, thanks in part to the mythology behind it — Tamborello would mail Gibbard recordings for him to add vocals and guitar work to, hence the name. Slowly but surely, Give Up sold over one million copies and spawned a question that Gibbard can't get away from: when is the next Postal Service album coming out?

"It's been really humbling to see how much this record means to people."

While the band still has no plans for creating new music together, they did decide to get back together and hit the road for their first tour in 10 years this spring. The Creators Project (a partnership between Intel and Vice) has just released a 15-minute documentary on the tour, the making of the album, what it was like to get back together all those years later, and why it was finally time to bring The Postal Service back from music limbo. It's all interspersed with great footage from recent performances, and some great looks at Tamborello figuring out how to re-create the electronics that he recorded over 10 years ago. There's even a shot of his old Apple PowerBook G4 that he used to make the album — since it died years ago, Tamborello had to scramble through boxes of archived hard drives to get the album's music back. For more details behind indie-rock's reunion of the year, check out the video below.