The Decemberists: Prog Rock is Back in Style, Right?

[Welsh Rich]

Nice interview...

 

Bands fight, bands break up, bands litigate and then, a few years later, bands reunite to pay off the lawyers and ex-wives.

 

The cycle of rock

[Welsh Rich]

And another one from Pitchfork today...

 

Among indie bands, the Decemberists weren't the most obvious candidates to build a large following. While they had the outsized melodic chops of Death Cab for Cutie or the Shins, their fiercely anachronistic and conceptual songwriting seemed like a lot for major-label rock, with its emphasis on concision and broad appeal, to swallow. Nevertheless, Capitol Records picked up The Crane Wife, the Decemberists fourth and arguably finest album to date, allowing the band to retain its quirks and furnishing them with a budget ample enough to realize their most ambitious, epically proportioned ideas. Pitchfork recently caught up with Decemberists bandleader Colin Meloy to get the skinny on playing in the major leagues, the mythology of The Crane Wife, and the impact of fatherhood on someone who writes so often and so vividly about children in grave danger.

 

 

Pitchfork: The Crane Wife seems more lyrically direct and sonically ambitious than your previous albums. Do you think signing to Capitol helped you achieve this; maybe having the funding to make the musical tracks more ostentatious took some of the pressure off of your lyrics to carry the dramatic weight of the songs?

 

Colin Meloy: Yeah, to a certain degree. I think it was always up our sleeves. I agree that the musicianship on this record is more impressive, from my standpoint, and I think that happened because, yeah, we had a bigger budget, so we were able to take our time building the songs, and also to scrap and rebuild them if we needed to. On other records, maybe we had to go with whatever we got on the first shot, because we had too much area to cover. That said, we also did this record on 24 tracks. And on Picaresque, we were pushing into the sixties on some songs, which is crazy.

 

The first thing [Crane Wife producer] Chris Walla said to me going into it was, "I really want to scale this one back." At first, I was leery, because our whole approach to getting at big music had been adding as many tracks and layers of instrumentation as possible, as we did on Picaresque. It actually worked out in our favor; there's an openness and space on Crane Wife that lets a lot of the instrumentation breathe. I also think that the big reason this record sounds a little more musically confident is that we've been playing together for long enough that we really understand what kind of players we are. It's gotten easier for me to write to people's strengths, understanding what the arrangement will sound like and what direction to push a song knowing what my band can and can't do.

 

Pitchfork: Assuming that the lyrics come first, the music sounds really mimetic. It's not just complementing the lyrics, but actually telling or amplifying parts of the story. Do you think about that when you write the music?

 

CM: I think the music should definitely underscore the sentiment of the song, and it can work for or against it. It has just as much power in creating a kind of perpendicular sentiment in the music, creating a nice friction that also plays up some of the tension in the song.

 

Pitchfork: You're talking about irony in the literary sense.

 

CM: Exactly. Pop music has always adopted the style of marrying upbeat melodies to dour lyrics. But I think there's less irony [on The Crane Wife] than the previous records; it's more earnest. The music is there to really push up the sentiment of the songs and underscore the drama.

 

Pitchfork: Can you amplify the symbolism of the crane wife? Not the album, but the actual story.

 

CM: It's a story about a peasant living in, I assume, rural Japan, it being a Japanese folk tale. He finds a wounded crane on the road as he's walking one night. It has an arrow in its wing, and he pulls out the arrow and revives the crane. A couple of days later this mysterious woman shows up at his door and he brings her in. Eventually, they fall in love and are married. Although they're poor-- she's a seamstress, a weaver-- she suggests that she can make this cloth that he could sell and make money. But the one condition is that when she's weaving he can't look into the room at her weaving. This goes on for awhile, until eventually the peasant's curiosity gets the best of him and he looks in. It turns out that the woman is a crane, and she's pulling feathers from her wings and putting them into the cloth, which is what makes it so beautiful and soft. Apparently, having looked in at her breaks the spell and she turns permanently back into a crane and flies away.

 

Pitchfork: Wow. That's almost identical to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, isn't it? Where he's leading her out of Hades and he's not allowed to look back, and finally his doubt and curiosity get the best of him, and he looks, and she fades away forever. It's the same narrative arc unfurling in a different culture.

 

CM: Yeah, and having read the crane wife story, it's tough to pull a lesson out of it. It has something to do with greed, or curiosity, but why his looking in at her breaks the spell is a little ambiguous. The thing that I could tie it to was the Greek myth. It's interesting how they can be divided by centuries and continents, and these stories still manage to say these same things. It just shows you the universality of certain stories.

 

Pitchfork: Let's jump back a little and talk about your relationship with Capitol. What do you think it is about Decemberists that interested Capitol?

 

CM: They have a history of putting out album-oriented music, being the home of Pink Floyd and Radiohead.

 

Pitchfork: Sure, but Pink Floyd existed in a very different musical climate.

 

CM: Definitely, and I'm not all comparing our band to Pink Floyd or Radiohead. But I think there is an experimental side to Capitol. Although even with Radiohead, I doubt there's a single staff member who still works at Capitol who was there for OK Computer. The turnover at major labels is insane. But when our A&R people were really pitching this to the powers that be, they were kind of playing on Capitol's reputation, in the past, for having released more crafted, album-oriented music, rather than just turning out Chingy singles. And I think that getting back to that definitely appealed to the folks at Capitol. They obviously weren't signing us to get a big hit single out of us; they just wanted to be involved in it, to be a part of the project.

 

Pitchfork: You did a Pitchfork Guest List recently where you said you worried Lily Allen might get "too big." Can you talk about what you mean by "too big," and do you think Decemberists are in a similar danger?

 

CM: I was just listening to Lily Allen this morning, and while most of [Alright, Still] is really amazing, there are a few times when she kind of dips into really mainstream pop. She toes the line between this really funny sense of humor married to really smartly put together samples and melodies that don't feel mainstream, and the mainstream pop she dips into here and there. And I can't fault her; it's certainly the most successful pop record that I've been into in a long time.

 

Pitchfork: Is mainstream pop anathema to you in general?

 

CM: Your Fergies and your Justin Timberlakes have never really appealed to me. But for some reason [Allen's] sensibility, melodically and lyrically, appeals to me. And then also, the first video, "LDN" (and this is what I said in the Pitchfork interview), had a nice DIY feel to it that kind of offset the pop stuff a little bit. But in the hands of our record label, who knows? Maybe she'd be doing 15-minute epics. [Capitol Records is releasing Alright, Still in the U.S.- Ed.]

 

Pitchfork: In that same feature you remark on a Long Winters song having a "phenomenal melody." The concept of melody is really hard to quantify critically, but it's one of my favorite things about The Crane Wife. Can you talk about what makes a melody phenomenal to you; how much is grounded in musicological knowledge and how much is intuition?

 

CM: I think it's all intuition. I'm not at all theory minded. I rely on Nate [Query] and Jenny [Conlee] for that stuff. For me it's completely intuitive; it's just finding a melody that's striking, that moves in that way that appeals to whatever part of the brain is attracted to pop melodies, and yet is within my kind of limited range. That's when it gets tricky, when I have ideas I can't quite execute. So you have to try to wrangle with it, get a semblance of it, but in a range that's possible for you. I wish I had a better range, but I really have a super-limited one. Barely a tenor, dips into baritone-- that's about it.

 

Pitchfork: But it's nice to stumble over that melody that really hits you right in the heart.

 

CM: Absolutely, and I think that has to do with having listened to countless pop records, R.E.M. and the Smiths and XTC-- all these people for whom melody is king.

 

Pitchfork: If you were a fiction writer, it would seem fair to regard your previous albums as short story collections. They're a series of hermetic narratives based around mostly unconnected characters. The Crane Wife doesn't quite seem like a novel, but it's closer, with all the interconnection between songs. Do you think this is what you're moving toward-- the musical novel, the album-length narrative?

 

CM: Well, then you're moving into concept record territory, which has a bit of a bad reputation. That ground is best trod very carefully. But I don't know, if the weather seems safe to do a concept record next summer...some of my favorite parts of The Crane Wife are the parts where songs feed into other songs.

 

Pitchfork: You don't regard The Crane Wife as a concept album?

 

CM: It's more of a story than a concept record. You can't really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness. I don't know, we'll see. I really enjoyed piecing this record together, the way the sequencing worked out; it's certainly the most satisfying work that I've done as a co-producer in the band. We were all able to work together on this and I think we're all really happy with how it came out.

 

Pitchfork: It's interesting that you mention the 70s, because a lot of the press for the album has been focusing on those bands-- Jethro Tull, Genesis, Yes, ELP. You can here a little bit of that on the record, although it's so song-focused that the comparisons don't really scan. Nevertheless, were you listening to any of that stuff during the recording; did any of it filter in?

 

CM: I was listening mostly to British folk revival stuff from the seventies; I was listening to a lot of Pentangle and Shirley Collins and Fairport Convention. I think that really is what drove me in this direction. But Jenny is a huge Jethro Tull and ELP fan, so I think she was really excited to go crazy all over the album. This record, more than any other, has showed off the various influences of the other members of the band as much as mine.

 

Pitchfork: You seem as interested in the basic forms of storytelling, the way narrative elements play out toward an inevitable denouement, as you are the stories and characters themselves. Do you think the two constructs-- stories and how they're told-- can even be bifurcated that way, or are they inextricable?

 

CM: As important as it is, in novels or short stories, to have well-developed characters, it's just as important to abide by a strong narrative arc, where you have development and crisis and conflict and resolution. I think it's just another universality, that people like to have their stories given to them that way. So yes, the way the story is told is really important, because I think the story then dictates the lives of the characters.

 

Pitchfork: It seems pretty obvious that you're a fan of Victorian literature and histories in general. Are you interested in modern literature as well?

 

CM: I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff. I'm reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell right now. I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read your average Jeanette Winterson book or something.

 

Pitchfork: Are you interested in classical tale cycles as well, the tales-within-tales thing? I'm thinking of things like Boccaccio's Decameron and the 1001 Arabian Nights. It seems to have a lot of utility for records like The Crane Wife, being filled with trapdoors that plunge you deeper and deeper into the story.

 

CM: Yeah, I read that stuff in school; I don't know if I've gone back to it. But I think it's a nice literary concept.

 

Pitchfork: In "Shankill Butchers", you took a real, specific event and stripped away every ounce of sociopolitical content, then remade it as an abstract meditation on violence and terror. Can you tell our readers about the real Shankill Butchers and how you became interested in them?

 

CM: I was reading the Van Morrison biography by Johnny Rogan last summer; I was in Ireland, and there's a section where he talks about the political issues in Northern Ireland, which included a section on the Shankill Butchers. The Shankill Butchers were a group of Protestant men who at night would get wasted and then get cleavers and butcher knives and go out to attack Catholics; this was in the 70s. At least one of their victims was hung up by his feet and skinned alive, really horrific. Apparently, parents at the time would actually use it as a cautionary tale and tell their kids that if they didn't eat their greens or do what they were told, the Shankill Butchers would come and get them. I've spoken to Irish people who remember that as kids growing up in that time. So it struck me as something that has such fairy tale proportions that it's timeless in its horror.

 

Pitchfork: The way you tell it is very much a Brothers Grimm-type fairy story, a morality tale to frighten children. And these guys were loyalists, weren't they-- not Sinn Fein or IRA?

 

CM: They were Protestants, Orangemen. Initially, their violence was just against Catholics, but eventually I think it became just psychopathic killing.

 

Pitchfork: You've said that "When the War Came" was inspired by Elise Blackwell's book Hunger. Were you thinking about our current global-political situation as well? Is wartime ambiance so pervasive that it automatically filters into all creative endeavors right now?

 

CM: I think it was unconscious. After reading the book and starting to work on the song, it didn't even occur to me that "When the War Came" could mean anything other than what it was, the inner monologue of a botanist at an institute in Leningrad. But then immediately when the record came out and we started doing interviews, people assumed it was some scathing criticism of the Iraq war. And I think that certainly is an interpretation you can take. Living in war, and being a wartime band, which is essentially what we are-- we started right when we were invading Afghanistan-- I don't think there's any way that can't somehow influence the songwriting.

 

Pitchfork: The Crane Wife also features a reappearance of what seems to be one of your favorite themes-- the doomed, star-crossed lovers divided by class and fate, who wind up horribly. What is it you find so resonant about this very Shakespearean concept?

 

CM: I don't know, it's just a universal idea that's lasted over time. It's an archetypal storyline, so it means a lot; it carries a lot of baggage. You can draw a line through it to a hundred other stories. I've always been attracted to that sort of tragedy.

 

Pitchfork: It seems that this is really where your interest lies-- these archetypes that are timeless and cut across cultures, occurring in different formats with the same narrative arc.

 

CM: And hopefully that's what makes it something people can relate to. Because it's programmed into our heads to relate to these stories in certain ways.

 

Pitchfork: You're a fairly recent father. While the question of how it's affected your songwriting is way too complex, how has it affected your relationship with all your children-in-peril songs?

 

CM: It's played it up a little more. Honestly, one thing about hanging out with a baby is that you can remember a little bit better what it was like to be a kid, and all the mystery that came along with it. When I was a kid, I was really fascinated with horror stories and violence, and I think that's just a natural inclination for kids to have. I remember people saying, when Carson [Ellis] was pregnant, "Oh, is he going to start writing a lot of kids' songs now?" Which is the very opposite of what happened; I started writing these really gruesome songs about violence and death. And part of it is [my son] Hank allowing me to get back to that childlike imagination, which has a certain attraction to the gruesome and horrific.

 

Pitchfork: You play a lot of covers, I'm curious about the spirit in which you approach these covers, whether it's more revisionist or more direct. In your cover of Joanna Newsom's "Bridges & Balloons" for instance, you change, perhaps inadvertently, a couple key words that really affect the meaning of the song. When she says "brace and buoy the living room," it sounds as if you're saying "brace and boil," which obviously changes the implications of that line a lot.

 

CM: I just fucked it up. I think I was drunk when I recorded it.

 

Pitchfork: You wrote about the Replacements for the 33 1/3 series, a band that seems about as different from yours as possible. Was Robyn Hitchcock already taken?

 

CM: [Hitchcock's] I Often Dream of Trains was one of the three proposals I submitted. When you're asked to pick your favorite album, it's impossible to nail it down to one. The Replacements have really influenced my approach to music, if not the music itself. Just being in a band with a sense of humor, being able to make fun of yourself a little bit and have fun onstage. I think their courage is the thing that most inspired me.

 

Pitchfork: To close on a frivolous note-- do you think it's silly that your music is so often called "literate" as opposed to the more appropriate "literary," seeming to imply simply that you're able to read?

 

CM: [Laughs] Well, I like that people think we make literate pop, as opposed to illiterate pop. The whole terminology is kind of weird and silly and media-created, but I'm glad that we're described that way.

[Welsh Rich]

Tickets arrived for the Shepherds Bush date last week to...

 

Get in!

[muller]

Tickets arrived for the Shepherds Bush date last week to...

 

Get in!

 

Ordered mine but am gonna pick em up at Box Office as im too much of a cheapskate to pay for postage.

[wheelco]

never listened to the Decemberists

 

now I might!!

 

I have so much music backed up now though that I should be listening to . . .

[Mrs. Peel]

Going to see them tomorrow night....Halloween!!!

[mountain bed]

Prog is a good cure for the ever-dwindling Amerikan attention span.

 

I guess I should give these folks a spin...

[LouieB]

This is the Decemberists month. They also have an article in No Depression.

 

LouieB

[zoom]

Thanks for the articles.

 

Nice to hear some more of what's behind the Crane Wife.

 

I was a minor Decemberists fan before, but I can't get this one out of the player.