The Decemberists

Colin Meloy discusses the perils of narrative songwriting, the political implications of making a war-themed album, and how fatherhood has affected his music

By Ann Friedman
Published: October 18th, 2006 | 3:34pm

The story goes that a poor Japanese man heals an injured crane he finds one day after a storm. Shortly thereafter, a woman appears on his doorstep, and they fall in love and marry. His wife offers to support them by weaving beautiful silk fabric to sell at the market, but only if the man promises never to watch her work. They make enough money to live comfortably, yet the husband greedily pushes his wife to weave more and more, oblivious to the fact that her health is deteriorating.

Ultimately, the man gives into temptation and peeks behind the curtain in her weaving room. There he sees a crane sitting at the loom, plucking feathers from her body and weaving them into silk. The crane sees him, flies away, and never returns.

Something about this simple tale resonated with the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy, who first read the story at a Portland bookstore several years ago and knew immediately that he wanted to write a song about it. Meloy eventually spun the folktale into several songs that mark the beginning and end of the Decemberists’ fourth full-length album, The Crane Wife.

With several tracks that soar past the 10-minute mark, The Crane Wife isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a major-label debut (the band recently defected from longtime label Kill Rock Stars to join Capitol Records). The album has the familiar cast of characters and lit-major lyrics, but the sound — equal parts Steely Dan, Yes and Portland indie — marks a departure from the band’s previous efforts with its unapologetically gloomy tone.

I called Meloy at his home in Portland, two days before he was set to embark on a national tour.

So let’s talk about the title tracks. What about the story stuck with you?
It was a really simple story, so pretty and sad. The narrative arc was so non-linear. It felt really ancient. It felt like the sort of story that had been passed down for many generations in an oral tradition, like a true folk tale. It struck me as a story it would be fun to write a song about.

Was the album’s prog-rocky sound chosen to complement that story?
I think that the scope of the story required a certain scope of musicality. A lot of prog stuff pulls from classical music and has a certain gravitas and exoticness about it. That makes it the perfect tone for grandiose music.

The record is certainly full of grandiose tracks, a few of them topping 10 minutes, which can be challenging for listeners. Did you ever consider splitting longer songs like "The Island" into separate tracks?
The pieces don’t really work on their own. They were written with the idea of being part of a longer song.

The last track on our first album, “California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade,” was like that. I wrote the first part and it felt so complete, but I knew it wouldn’t stand a chance on its own. It felt like the beginning of a longer song. That’s the first time that intuition has popped up for me that a song doesn’t fit on its own, but becomes more interesting and comes into its own with different parts.

Moving to a major label has had to mean some changes for you.
This is the same record we would have made on Kill Rock Stars. I also feel that, while the ideas would have been there, we attacked it in a way we wouldn’t have on Kill Rock Stars. We needed to come across as being really confident and sure of ourselves on this record, and say that we’re still staunchly the same band, we’re still doing everything on the same terms.

The terms may be the same, but certain tracks like “The Perfect Crime” don’t sound like anything you’ve done before.
It’s a departure, but it didn’t feel strange when I was writing it. It felt really normal, just happened to be a little more rhythmic. When we finished recording it, it felt like it stood out. We’re still trying to figure out what is “Decemberisty” and what isn’t. Though you don’t want to be doing something that’s too “Decemberisty”…

The "Landlord’s Daughter" part of “The Island” really stood out to me, largely because of the raw rape imagery. When you’re going through the creative process, do you think about the fact that this is really touchy subject matter? Do you think about how this will come across to female listeners?
Yes! Absolutely. These are touchy subjects. That’s an issue we deal with as a band, internally, all the time. It’s something I consider very strongly as a songwriter. There’s a lot of touchy subjects we deal with — not only rape and violence, but racism, anti-Semitism. I know it’s so loaded, being a male and singing about these things. I don’t do it aloofly, but there’s a reason why I’m pushed to write about these sorts of things. The tone of these songs is supposed to be really dark.

When you’re writing in the voice of a character, it doesn’t seem genuine to rope yourself off. A lot of old folk songs actually did deal with rape. There’s a child ballad that has a rape scene in it. Maybe it wasn’t thought about as rape then, but obviously unconsented sex. In some sense, not only am I trying to adopt an appropriately dark tone, but also staying true to the genre.

But people are listening today, seeing you onstage singing the lyrics. Not just reading a tattered book of folk tales. That has to add weight to the subject matter.
A woman came to one of our shows in New York, and we played “A Cautionary Song.” She started yelling at us from the crowd, “You don’t know what it’s like, you’ve never experienced it.” Obviously, it’s a really touchy subject.

Do you worry your listeners have a hard time separating you from your characters?
Yeah , because pop music is typically a first-person monologue. It’s perfectly acceptable to write about these things in short stories or novels. It’s different in pop music because it’s seen as a confessional on the part of the songwriter.

So you have to trust your listeners to understand your narrative style.
Right. I mean, I’m not a misogynist. I’m not a rapist. I’m not an anti-Semite. People should be able to see there’s a sense of irony there. While you need to relate to some aspect of the song, you either love the character or you loathe the character. It should spark some sort of negative or positive response in drawing you into the story. If they need to see me playing the role of the character to do that, that’s fine.

Some of these songs, like “Yankee Bayonet,” have an obvious historical reference point. Regardless, the violence and war themes make it feel really politically relevant today. And not just lyrically, in tone, too. Was that intentional?
“When the War Came” is about World War II. It’s about a botanical institute in Leningrad during the siege. I didn’t even have in my head I was making a statement about any contemporary events, but it’s probably an unconscious look at contemporary events. There’s no way around that. We’re in a war time right now. Naturally, any sort of military reference does that sort of resonance.

Have you ever thought about setting a song like “When the War Came” in, say, Fallujah rather than Leningrad? Retaining your narrative writing style, but making the setting a little more modern?
I’m trying to leave my options open. I don’t think I should try to focus on doing one voice, one tone for the whole thing. I’m not writing these songs to fit into people’s cubbyholes. It’s important to me as a songwriter to continually challenge myself. That requires new things.

The album is so dark and gloomy. Not exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s just had his first child.
The songs were written in January and the first part of February. My son was born at the end of February. I was discovering that a lot of the songs I was writing at the time — even though the expectation is that when a songwriter is having a child, they end up writing kids’ songs — I found myself pushing in the completely opposite direction. There’s a darkness to pregnancy, to a certain degree, and it’s really messy and kind of unpleasant. [My girlfriend] Carson’s body was kind of fighting against this alien thing, this thing in her belly that wasn’t part of her body. Her body was trying to support that growing life, but there’s another side of her body that’s trying to get rid of it. That process really struck me, and really influenced the songwriting.

Kids in general are attracted to darker things. Our imaginations as a kid are built on mystery and the things that scare us. I think that having a baby and being a father and seeing this young brain growing has made me think a lot about my childhood and the sort of things that I was fascinated with. That plays in to the darker tone of the songwriting as well.

I can imagine you’d tell fabulous bedtime stories.
The first lullaby I ever sang to him was “The Old Main Drag,” the Pogues song about prostitution. Both of us [me and Carson] have real fixations on dark subject matter. But he might rebel against it and be a Republican or something.

Though that might be entirely appropriate.
Yeah. (Laughs)

Is having your son at home going to make it harder to go out on tour in a few days?
I knew it was going to happen all along, even before we’d gotten pregnant. It was something we’d talked about and something we were prepared to deal with. Carson and (my son) Hank will come out to some of the shows. I’ll be gone two or three weeks, that’ll be the most that I’ll be separated. It’s not like being on the road for six months.

photo by Autumn de Wilde

Ann Friedman is the managing editor at AlterNet and an editor of Feministing.com.