"Crooked Teeth" video is a Peter Gabriel homage

Death Cab for Cutie weathers their major label transition with grace

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It sounds fine! So, the "Crooked Teeth" video is a Peter Gabriel homage [after his video for "Sledgehammer"]. Who in the band is the big prog fan?

Chris [Walla, guitarist/keyboardist] is the biggest prog fan. He's like a library of prog bands. I didn't realize in the world how many members of King Crimson have been all over the place. He's always, "That's a Robert Fripp thing." [But] I'll give a lot of credit to Ace Norton, the guy who directed the video. He came up with the concept, put it all together. We just sort of read the treatment and we were like, "That's great! Let's totally do that."

This video is part of Directions. What was the genesis of that project for you guys?

It was an idea that I actually had with one of my friends, Aaron, who I had grown up with. We came up with this idea and brought it back to the band, and said, "Hey, would you guys be into this if we could get it together?" and everybody seemed pretty excited about it. There's actually thirteen total videos. Eleven for the record and then we made two videos for two B-sides. [For] all thirteen videos we ended up hand-picking the director and treatment we really liked. We are so incredibly proud and happy of how the videos have come out and how the project has taken shape.