The Postal Service
Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello made an album by shipping burned CD-Rs between Seattle and Los Angeles, named the project after the method, and never made another. Give Up went platinum on Sub Pop, "Such Great Heights" opened Grey's Anatomy and sold UPS ads, and the real Postal Service sent a cease-and-desist.
The collaboration began when Gibbard, frontman of Death Cab for Cutie, sang on "(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan" for Tamborello's 2001 Dntel album. Gibbard suggested an EP. Tony Kiewel, a college friend of Tamborello's newly working in Sub Pop's A&R department, talked them up: "If you're going to do it, do a full album. People will review it, and you can sell it for three times as much." Work began in December 2001.
Tamborello, in his Silver Lake bedroom studio, built the tracks on a Kurzweil K2000RS sampler and mailed them north as burned CD-Rs. Gibbard collected each disc at Sub Pop's office, walked his Capitol Hill neighborhood with a Discman humming melodies into a notebook, then added vocals, guitar, keyboards and live drums on his laptop and sent it back — two or three songs a month. Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley, who met Gibbard for the first time when she picked him up at the Burbank airport, sang on more than half the tracks in Tamborello's bedroom. The discs actually traveled by FedEx and UPS, and Kiewel later called it one of the cheapest records Sub Pop ever made.
Give Up came out on February 19, 2003, got a short tour, and was then left to fend for itself while both men went back to their main bands. It fended fine: gold by 2005, platinum in 2012, 1.2 million copies in its first decade and the label's second-biggest seller ever. "Such Great Heights," which Gibbard called "the first time I've ever written a positive love song," got a clean-room video shot inside a real Skyworks chip plant, an Iron & Wine cover on the Garden State soundtrack, a run of UPS ads, and the first Grey's Anatomy theme in 2005. In August 2003 the United States Postal Service served a cease-and-desist; the settlement had the band promote the agency, play its executive conference in Washington in 2004, and sell CDs on usps.com.
There was never a follow-up — Gibbard called it "the second Postal Service record that will never come out" in 2008 — only reunions: a 2013 tenth-anniversary reissue and tour that ended with a declared final show in Chicago, then a 2023–24 twentieth-anniversary run with Death Cab for Cutie playing Transatlanticism, with the last date set for HFStival in Washington, D.C., on September 21, 2024.
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