Indie pop outfit Death Cab for Cutie formed in Bellingham, WA by frontman and guitarist Ben Gibbard.

Taking their name from a song performed by a group in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film, Gibbard would join up with Chris Walla and bassist Nick Harmer and release the 1997 cassette, You Can Play These Songs With Chords, which was reissued in 2002 on compact disc and included rare songs.

The band would soon sign with Barsuk Records to release 1998's Something About Airplanes. 2000's We Have the Facts And We're Voting Yes and 2001's The Photo Album would follow.

The band would then take a break that found Walla develop a more than respectable career of record producing whose clients included the likes of Nada Surf, the Decemberists, and the Thermals, and Gibbard collaborate with Rilo Kiley's Jenny Lewis and Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello on the wildly successful electro-indie pop side project the Postal Service, whose sole full-length to date, 2003's Give Up, was released on Sub Pop and has sold over 600,000 copies to date.

2003's Transatlanticism "broke" the band, sotospeak. Magazine features and frequent references on Fox's "The OC" propelled the band into the hot spot; they would sign with Atlantic Records in 2004, who would release the band's major label debut, Plans, in August 2005.

The band also has a tour DVD under their belts entitled Drive Well, Sleep Carefully, as well as the impending release of the music video compilation Directions, a project of the same name that involved individual directors shooting videos for each of the tracks off Plans.