The Weight Is a Gift

Recording

The album was produced by Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla and mixed by Geoff Sanoff. The album features vocals from the Long Winters frontman John Roderick. The album was recorded in two sessions at Hall of Justice in Seattle and Tiny Telephone in San Francisco.

Release

The album was met with moderate success and favorable reviews. Critic Marc Hogan of Pitchfork wrote that the album is "another often-compelling set of melancholic post-Coldplay guitar-pop, made grittily optimistic by the tribulations of post-hipster existence".

Details

The song, "Always Love", was featured in the film, Disturbia.

According to NPR's program, All Songs Considered, the band says the album "answers questions of lust and deception, greed and love, joy and regret and the rites of passage you weren't quite ready to pass through." In another interview, Matthew Caws described the imagery in the song "Your Legs Grow", saying: "When a challenge presents itself to you, it is so easy to have a kind of panicky feeling where you think, 'Oh my god – if that happened to me, I would die. If I have to stay in this job I’ll die, or if I lose that person, I’ll die.' And once in a while, those things you think will kill you happen. You know, someone breaks up with you, or one of your parents gets really sick or something. But you make it through anything, really. And the image that was in my mind was that if you were out at sea, and you were freezing and thought you were going to drown – somehow we have the capacity to get over anything and the image that I had in mind was that your legs would just grow down to the bottom and you’d walk out. We are capable of rescuing ourselves. I was holding onto that thought or being hopeful about it, since I was going through a hard time in a relationship."

Track listing

All tracks written by Matthew Caws, Daniel Lorca and Ira Elliot, except where noted.

1. "Concrete Bed" – 2:29
2. "Do It Again" – 3:39
3. "Always Love" – 3:18
4. "What Is Your Secret?" – 3:26
5. "Your Legs Grow" – 4:00
6. "All Is a Game" – 3:26
7. "Blankest Year" – 2:12
8. "Comes a Time" – 4:58
9. "In the Mirror" – 3:41
10. "Armies Walk" – 3:28
11. "Imaginary Friends" – 9:40

Bonus disc

Many albums included a four-track bonus disc.

1. "From the Rooftop Down" – 2:44
2. "Fools" (Peter Perrett) – 2:54
3. "Concrete Bed (Original Version)" – 2:10
4. "Au fond du rêve doré" (Françoise Hardy) – 2:05