Exclusive: ‘New Moon’ Song By Death Cab For Cutie To Be Unveiled On MTV.com September 13

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DCFC bassist Nick Harmer talks about ‘Meet Me on the Equinox,’ to premiere on Video Music Awards day.
By James Montgomery

Death Cab for Cutie

Photo: Larry Busacca/ Getty Images

Death Cab for Cutie’s contribution to the “New Moon” soundtrack, “Meet Me on the Equinox,” will premiere on MTV.com on September 13, the day of the Video Music Awards.

In an exclusive interview with MTV News, DCFC bassist Nick Harmer talked about the song — which will be the lead single from the second film in the “Twilight” series — and the mysterious way it ended up on the most-anticipated soundtrack of the year.

“We didn’t expect it would be chosen for the first single — we were thinking it would be a part of the soundtrack, maybe,” Harmer laughed. “I have no idea if ['Twilight' author] Stephenie Meyer approved it or what. It’s been an exciting process, because we’ve been so removed from it. We were in L.A. for a week and we went into the studio and wrote and recorded the song and submitted it. We didn’t know where anything stood, and then we just got a call last week like, ‘Guess what — your song has been chosen as the first single.’ ”

Harmer is the first to admit that Death Cab and “Twilight” seem like an unusual pairing (only guitarist/producer Chris Walla has read the entire series), but upon closer inspection, they actually have plenty in common: most of which has to do with geography and, of course, matters of the heart.

“The big connection for us is ‘Here’s a wildly popular book series about vampires — which are awesome — set in the Northwest,’ and we happen to be from the Northwest as well, so there’s this sort of hometown pride kind of thing going on,” Harmer said. “I’m kind of happy that Stephenie Meyer put Forks, Washington, on the map for the entire globe.

“I think that a lot of our songs in general concern a lot of the things the main characters in the books are going through: There’s a lot of stuff about relationships beginning and ending, and the questioning that happens around being in love and falling out of love,” he continued. “That’s a comfort zone for us, so a lot of the lyrical content [frontman] Ben [Gibbard] writes also happens to line up with what the characters are going through in the film. Basically the ‘Twilight’ series is about love, and that’s a major theme for us. So, it wasn’t difficult for us at all.”

As for the song itself, Harmer describes it as “pretty dark and brooding, lyrically,” and though it was written specifically for the “New Moon” film, don’t expect it to vary much from the Death Cab formula.

“I’m pretty sure Ben didn’t try to write a song from the perspective of one of the characters from the novel. The emotional stuff is what he homed in on, because that’s what we do,” he said. “It’s an uptempo song … it fits right into the Death Cab canon. The lyrics are darker and brooding, the music is a little more up. I don’t know if it’s a rock song … when you hear it, you’ll think, ‘Yep, that’s a Death Cab song.’ ”

The 2009 MTV Video Music Awards will take place September 13 at 9 p.m. ET. Additional celebrity presenters and performers will be announced in the coming weeks. To be the first to find out the inside scoop, follow the Inside MTV Twitter account at Twitter.com/InsideMTV.

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