As the Postal Service neared the end of its set at Just Like Heaven on Saturday, singer-songwriter Ben Gibbard paused to thank fans for their love and support of an album, 2003’s “Give Up,” the group’s only studio release, that no one in the band expected to become the huge hit it did. “When Postal Service made this record, we thought it would be a tiny little record that our friends would like and then go away,” Gibbard told the crowd that filled Brookside at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena to hear “Give Up” played in full. “We never imagined we’d be here 21 years later playing it for you.
“You’ve taken it and brought it into your lives, and this song goes out to you,” he said as the band slipped into “Brand New Colony,” the ninth of 10 songs on the album. Just Like Heaven filled its two stages on Saturday with a host of indie rock favorites whose careers mostly started in the late ’90s and ’00s – Phoenix , the War on Drugs, Tegan and Sara , Phantogram, even a surprise appearance by Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend – but it was Gibbard’s that delivered the biggest emotional rewards. The band Metric performs during the Just Like Heaven music festival at Brookside at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024.
(Photo by Drew A. Kelley, Contributing Photographer) Phoenix performs during the Just Like Heaven music festival at Brookside at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Saturday, May 18, 2024. (Photo by Drew A.
Kelley, Contributing Photograp.
