Death Cab For Cutie Talk Inspiration Behind 'New Moon' Song

'Meet Me on the Equinox' is 'based on tones' of the 'Twilight' series, Ben Gibbard says.

Given that their song "Meet Me on the Equinox" is the first single off the upcoming "New Moon" soundtrack, you would think that Death Cab for Cutie would be flush with information about the much-anticipated "Twilight" sequel.

Well, you'd be wrong.

"I think they're still trying to find a place for the song in the film," DCFC frontman Ben Gibbard laughed. "We keep hearing either the beginning or end ... we have about as much information about this movie as [MTV] viewers do. We wrote a song for the thing and we don't know what's going on. So I guess we'll just have to wait and see."

Luckily, the Death Cab guys were a little more forthcoming with information about the song itself, as we discovered when we visited the set of the "Equinox" music video last week in Toronto, Canada.

The inspiration behind the tune is drawn more from Gibbard's own life rather than the lives of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, he explained.

"The song at its core is just about meeting another halfway, because life is very short, because there's only a brief period of time to really connect with people, and that it's important to recognize that," Gibbard said. "I haven't read all of the 'Twilight' books, but I know a bit about them, and I think the song is really based on tones of the series.

"Like, I think it would've been really easy to write a song that was like a book report, and I've always kind of disliked book report songs, even though I'm guilty of a couple myself over the years," he continued. "I just wanted something that kind of tonally matched the story and the scenes within the film, so they could kind of be put alongside but not be telling a narrative you're watching on the screen."

Then again, all of that might change next week. Seems that — as is the case with anything he writes — Gibbard is constantly trying to understand the inspiration behind "Equinox."

"Whenever we make a record or finish writing a song, [and] it ends up in the world, I feel like I'm always in a process of trying to understand them myself," he said. "Because you kind of write songs from a particular place in your consciousness, and then you have to later make sense of why you wrote things the way you did, because you're kind of channeling it as you write it."

MTV