The first annual Life and Death Matters International Multimedia Festival — better known as LADmatters — promises to be a thought-provoking, engaging event with plenty to prick the senses. Running Sept. 1 to Sept. 4 at various venues in Boulder, the event encompasses speakers (including famed autistic writer and teacher Temple Grandin), panels, seminars, workshops, films and short plays.

Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard is all about change. The singer/guitarist, currently on tour with his bandmates in support of their seventh album, Codes and Keys, once wrote a driving, gritty, guitar-fueled pop tune about the ills of Los Angeles called “Why You’d Want to Live Here.” Gibbard now lives in L.A. with his wife, actress/musician Zooey Deschanel.

'I guess I could have forced the issue, but it didn't seem like a good idea,' he says. 'Basically, through that period of time, my girlfriend moved to New York, lived there for five years and then moved back to San Francisco, where she had been living before that.'

'I had the big estate and I saw that it didn't pay,' he says. 'I had that kind of awakening moment in my first Beverly Hills house where I realized, 'Oh, this didn't do what they told me it would do.' I had been walking into different models and experimenting, and something spoke to my heart about a very simple space.

When I was a 12-year-old aspiring musician and daydreamer, music flowed through my mind like heroin in William Burroughs blood. I wanted to play hard and crazy like the metal bands I idolized.

Eventually we had our chance to prove ourselves to the local rock scene at a major battle of the bands at an area high school.

"I'm on my second transplant now," he says. "I've had it since 2007, a little over two years. I didn't find a donor. It was a kid who passed away in a car accident. He was such a good match for me it shot me to the top of the waiting list. I had only been on for one year, and I had about five more years.

It was in the larger-than-life era of music video when I discovered former Kinks frontman Ray Davies, decades after he had constructed the timeless 1964 rock anthem “You Really Got Me.” The Kinks had just released their 1984 album Word of Mouth, and the clip for “Do It Again” — with Davies at his power-pop best — was in heavy rotation. The post-punk power chords, monster hooks and energy-packed drumming had me grinning like a Cheshire cat.