Ten Years On - The Decemberists

In the world of Colin Meloy, mythic characters stride gargantuan across wild, untamed landscapes, seeking (and occasionally receiving) love, while being undone by malign authority, inner flaw or other tragic circumstance.  Unlike so many songwriters of note, the Decemberists’ scoundrel-in-chief has built his band’s reputation not on soul-baring angst but by spinning grand narratives set to raucous and insistently good-humoured folk-rock tunes.  That said, there’s a definite tendency for the guy not to get the girl and for the pair of them to wind up fish food.

“I guess I just have kind of a penchant for tragedy,” explains Meloy from his home in Portland, Oregan, ahead of the release of the group’s sixth LP The King Is Dead.  “The pathos of life in a narrative is more interesting to write about.  I find protagonists who are either tragic or have a kind of core vulnerability tend to be more dynamic and interesting to me, rather than just singing about myself – [there are] plenty of vulnerabilities there but none that I’m really interested in singing about.”

At best, his approach has produced rambling yarns that are both sophisticated parables, laden with delightfully erudite flourishes, while being instantly accessible foot-stomping singalongs.  Think the Victorian sea-shanty kitsch of ‘The Mariner’s Revenge Song’ from Picaresque (2005) or the retelling of the titular Japanese folk story on The Crane Wife (2006), Meloy revelling in rolling ballads that sometimes extend in excess of ten minutes.

This predilection for the grandiose reached its logical apex with the band’s last album The Hazards of Love (2009), a sprawling hour long rock opera complete with key characters being voiced by guest vocalists including Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) and Jim James (My Morning Jacket).  For many however, Meloy had perhaps bitten off more than he could chew, the song-writing often failing to match the album’s lofty ambitions.

Not that he seems too worried.  “I think that every time that we’ve made something big, the point [has been] to make it overblown.  I think that that’s what’s sort of clever about it, kind of funny, to toy with bigger and bigger horizons … it’s just toying with genre, toying with approaches, creating new signifiers, different places, different people, using the trappings of older kinds of music.  I think we are prepared to do that in a little more subtle way this time around than we have in the past.”

Fans overwhelmed by the excesses of Hazards will be pleased that The King Is Dead sees the Decemberists scaling things back, each song being its own self-contained entity, with only one exceeding the five minute mark.  Taken as a whole, the collection seemingly reflects more modest aspirations on the part of Meloy, the theatrical gestures of past releases giving way to more straightforward folk-inflected indie that self-consciously pays homage to one of the songwriter’s formative inspirations, R.E.M.

“I think that they’re one of the bands that first helped me create my own musical outlook,” says Meloy of the latter.  “Them and the Replacements and Husker Dü and the Smiths, those are the bands that were incredibly influential for me, not only in discovering what music was like, but what kind of person I was and my own desires creatively … Inevitably, I feel like everything I do musically is indebted to R.E.M. – I think I just wear it a little more on my sleeve on this record.”

Indeed, the album even features one of the band’s members, guitarist Peter Buck contributing to three songs including rootsy first single ‘Down by the Water’, although ‘Calamity Song’ pays more obvious homage with its unmistakable mix of drivingly upbeat melody and apocalyptic lyrics.  Meloy is enthusiastic about working with one of his idols.

“He’s a really sweet, kind man, and works very quickly, professionally and is a really fun guy to be around.  I first met him in 1991 when I was 16.  I snuck into The Crocodile in Seattle after a My Bloody Valentine / Yo La Tengo show and R.E.M. were in town – I think they were mixing or mastering Automatic for the People – and Michael Stipe and Peter Buck were both in there.  I bought a glass of red wine for Peter Buck and chatted with him.  He didn’t remember that exchange, but he still treats me very nicely.”

As well as its back-to-basics approach, The King is Dead also marks the ten year anniversary since the release of Decemberists first effort, the 5 Songs EP, back in 2001.  With a decade of music-making under his belt, Meloy seems ready to let the band sit on the backburner for a while in order to pursue other creative avenues.  “Having been at this now for ten years, it’s been pretty constant in what we’ve done creatively, but there are other things I’d like to do.  I’m not putting the Decemberists away completely but I would like to step away, take a longer time away from the band and focus on other things.”

Such as?  “Certainly working on something with theatre, but I’ve also been working on a series of books with my wife Carson, who does all the illustrations for the band and we are working on a series of illustrated novels and the first one, Wild Wood, comes out next year, so that’s probably where my head will be for the foreseeable future after the touring cycle is done.”

First Published in The Brag, Iss. 394, January 10th 2011