Few bands leave themselves more vulnerable to mockery and outright hatred than The Decemberists. This is a band that named their first EP 5 Songs and then, perversely, went ahead and put six songs on it; a band that has written rambling, showoffily erudite story-songs about 19th-century sailors, Shakespearean plays, rogue Irish paramilitary killers, Tom Courtenay movie characters, Spanish royalty, and Victorian “chimbley sweeps”; a band that has aggressively tasted the patience of listeners by recording numerous epic song suites, including the 18-minute mini-opera “The Tain,” based on a story from Celtic mythology; a band that couldn’t stick to a single normal time signature for more than two minutes if you held a gun to their heads; a band whose unabashed anglophilia can’t help but seem a little affected in a band from Portland, Oregon. Coming in for the brunt of the mockery is their lead singer and songwriter, Colin Meloy, whose voice as been described variously as “strange,” “plaintive,” “quavery,” “irritating,” “thin,” “reedy,” “whiny,” “horrible,” “nasal, needling, nerd-like,” and “sounding like a muted mellophone.” And yet, somehow, against all rational predictions, whether by accident or design, The Decemberists' defiantly uncommercial formula has translated into significant commercial success. Their well-reviewed 2006 album The Crane Wife, their first for a major label, has sold nearly 300,000 copies, their song “The Infanta” was featured prominently, albeit anachronistically, on a recent episode of the TV show Mad Men, and they appeared on a much-hyped 2006 episode of The Colbert Report, when Stephen Colbert challenged them to an on-air guitar “shred-off.” (They lost when an allegedly “injured” Colbert brought in Peter Frampton to act as his pinch-guitarist, but sales of The Crane Wife seem to have enjoyed the fabled “Colbert bump” anyway.) Meloy seems to be one of those rare art-rockers, along with artists like Björk, Radiohead, and Wilco, whose audience gets bigger and bigger the weirder and more self-indulgent and outré his music becomes.
Of course, that theory will be tested with the release of The Decemberists’ latest disc, The Hazards of Love, an hour-long concept album, highly influenced by the British folktale tradition, telling the story of a pregnant woman and her shape-shifting, forest-dwelling lover whose efforts to be together are hampered by a vengeful nature goddess and a child-murdering rapist. The disc is big, melodramatic, and bombastic in the best prog-rock tradition, and while it lacks the pop appeal of The Crane Wife (for my money, their best, most accessible album), you have to admire Meloy’s crazy ambition — not to mention his willingness to carry such a potentially ridiculous-looking project all the way to completion.
I spoke to Meloy last week over the phone from Los Angeles. His voice was perfectly pleasant.
Q: I feel like I should apologize to you — I’ve been listening to The Hazards of Love on a little iPod station with these minuscule speakers, which hardly seems like the appropriate way to experience an album as epic as this one. How should I be listening to it? How big should my speakers actually be?
Colin Meloy: [Laughs.] They should be Kenwoods from 1972, 150 pounds each at the very least. No, seriously though, I’m so not precious about how people should listen to this record. I realize that people have busy lives and we come at music in a different way these days. Unfortunately, it does often involve listening to music thought tiny speakers and poorly compressed digital files, but what can you do, you know? Ideally you’d listen to it in some lossless way on gigantic speakers, but not everybody can afford that kind of luxury.
Q: Well, it’s interesting, because as I was thinking about what questions to ask you about this album, it occurred to me that a lot of them were about that tension between the modern and the historic. But let’s begin with the origins of the album. As I understand it, you were inspired in part by an album from the 1960s called The Hazards of Love by the British folksinger Anne Briggs, and you wanted to write a song with that title.
CM: That’s right.
Q: So how did that impulse develop into this massive concept album you wound up with? Do you like that phrase, “concept album,” by the way, or do you prefer something else?
CM: Well, I fluctuate between “folk opera” and “fake musical.” But the germ of the idea was really a confluence of a few things. It was sort of the apotheosis of my fascination with the British folk revival of the 1960s. I’d managed to get my hands on the 45 of Anne Briggs’ debut album The Hazards of Love, for an ungodly sum of money on eBay. I played it once and then put it on my shelf and sat there looking at it and letting my mind wander. And at the same time, I’d been approached by a director and producer from New York about doing a stage musical. So these ideas swirling around in my head all kind of came together: I wrote a song called “The Hazards of Love,” but it seemed that after those five minutes were over, there was still more story to tell.
Q: Is it based on an actual folk legend, or did you make it all up yourself?
CM: Well, I’m not sure how clear all this is on the album — maybe it’s not clear at all. The idea was to take common, archetypal folk song events and characters and place them together on some kind of stage, assuming that their trundled narrative, the aura orbiting about them, would connect once they were all placed in line into some sort of story, with as little of my own invention needed as possible.
Q: I hope this question doesn’t sound as stupid as I think it might, but what does this story mean to you? Not that I want you to explain every last image, but is there some message that you hope listeners will take away from it, some lesson about love or the cruelty of the world?
CM: Sure. Hopefully people come away from it learning something about love, or understanding something deeper about love. The thing is, a lot of those common elements I was talking about were drawn from artists I was listening to from the British folk revival of the ’60s and ’70s. And by and large, if you listen to them a lot, you’ll discover they have a penchant for arranging songs that deal with romantic love but which also have a very dark and violent streak to them. I think that’s partly because they’re from a younger generation, and when they come to these folk songs, that’s a way in to them, to say, “Wow, these songs are really dark and scary! But they’re also pretty sweet and sentimental.” That’s what drew me to them as well. So my album is about love, but it’s about the hazards, the danger of love as well — and especially the danger of love in a time that’s not our own time, when the balance of power between the sexes was a bit uneven.
Q: There’s something about setting a song in a long-ago historical period that gives you access to grander emotions.CM: Definitely. I think you can get away with a little bit more galloping sentimentality — in fact, I think people kind of expect it. But also, one of the things I find so appealing about this kind of song is that they deal with archetypes. We need those archetypes in our stories — just as you can’t have an action movie without a car chase, you can’t have a romantic folk song without a tragic drowning, you know?
Q: Did you have a hard time deciding whether to give the album a happy ending?
CM: Yeah, I think I did! I maybe had an inkling initially that there would be a marriage instead of a double drowning. But I ended up going with the latter. It just seemed to make more sense. [Laughs.]
Q: What is it about the British folk tradition that seems to appeal to you more powerfully than the American folk tradition? Is it the storytelling aspect? My impression is that British folk is less about the singer and more about the story, whereas post-Woody Guthrie American folk puts more focus on the personality of the singer.
CM: I think the British folk revival and the American folk revival kind of started out the same, taking these old songs and playing them for people in the present. But when American singers like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Phil Ochs took off, there were different things happening — there was civil strife that inspired them to write original, more topical material. Meanwhile, the British folk revival was just getting farther and farther back towards the source, to the point where it was kind of anathema to do new original material. Mike and Lal Waterson did a brilliant album in 1972 called Bright Phoebus that was just shunned by the British folk revival community because it was entirely new material, and I don’t think that would have been the case in America. On the other hand, people in England really discovered the width and breadth of traditional folk songs in a way that America didn’t.
Q: What are the challenges of writing an album-length musical story as opposed to a collection of self-contained songs? Were you at all worried about whether these songs would stand on their own?
CM: No, that wasn’t too much of an issue. I kind of had to throw that idea out the window, along with the idea of writing choruses and so on. Which was kind of freeing, in a way, being able to mess around with songs that were essentially bridges between two other songs, and things like that. Whether I sacrificed some “real” songs as a result... well, you can’t sit around and think about things like that because you’ll just go crazy.
Q: People always marvel at the complexity of your songs, all the esoteric vocabulary and the unusual time signatures, and so on. But I wonder if there’s an extent to which these kinds of songs are easy for you to write — this is just the way your mind works.
CM: It’s certainly was an easier record to make than if I were to sit down and just write a bunch of pop songs.
Q: Well, I was curious about that. If someone forced you to write a bunch of songs for a more conventional band like, say, Maroon 5, would you be able to do it?
CM: I think I would do a terrible, terrible job and would be racking my brain the whole time. Now, there was certainly some labour involved with The Hazards of Love, but there were a lot of times where the songs and melodies were coming to me pretty thick and fast. Once you feel comfortable working in a certain mode, it does come fairly naturally.
Q: Would you have been capable of making this album 10 years ago when The Decemberists were just starting out?
CM: No. Ten years ago, I was still figuring out how to write, you know? What was interesting to me as a songwriter? I was still kind of struggling to develop a voice. In some ways, I needed to get a lot of songs under my belt before attacking something like this. I don’t know this project would even have been interesting to me 10 years ago; I would have balked at it and said, “I just want to write pop songs.” You know?
Q: What do you take the most pleasure in — coming up with a neat lyrical turn of phrase, or creating a melody that has just the right emotional quality to it or builds to a nice crescendo?CM: I always find that melodies are the easiest and the funnest things to write. I feel like you use such a different part of your brain for that — you’re just listening for musicality, for tone, and it’s something that can’t be workshopped or learned. You just have to recognize, “Oh — that interval sounds good.” But when it comes down to filling in and writing the words, it becomes more of an academic exercise. That said, there’s some happenstance there as well — often I don’t realize I’ve written a good turn of phrase until I’ve come back to it later. I do like language with some musicality or cadence to it. It’s not like I’m out to impress people by using certain words, but I do take pleasure in peppering my songs with words that you don’t hear in everyday speech. I would hate to hamper myself by not using those words.
Q: So much of your music is sung in the voice of invented characters. Would someone listening to your records learn much about Colin Meloy?
CM: No, other than my weird penchants and fascinations. But none of it is very autobiographical, if at all.
Q: Do you ever have moments of self-doubt as an artist? Especially with a project like The Hazards of Love, it seems like there’s an increased likelihood of, well, falling on your face in public. Or are you able to soldier through those moments and think, “No, I know how this is all going to sound when I’m done, and it’s going to be great”?
CM: There are definitely moments of self-doubt involved in any project. But I guess you just have to trust your first instinct. And taking risks is essential if you’re going to create something real. With this project, there were plenty of moments where I was thinking, “What are we doing?” You know, “It’s our second record for a major label. Why are we on a major label? Do we want to make something more difficult for our audience?” But the pushback to that, I think, is our belief that it’s not difficult music — that it’s actually really inviting music, and accessible in its own right. I did know this record was going to be polarizing. Some people are not going to like it, and I totally understand that. The vast percentage of records coming out are “normal,” with normal songs on them. In some ways, making this record was an exercise in free will — “You’re going to give us complete creative control. Okay... we’ll do this.” That kind of thinking can give birth to a lot of great ideas, but also a lot of terrible ideas. But hopefully even the terrible ideas are interesting ones.
Q: I was listening to music critic Jim DeRogatis review your album on his radio show this week, and he argued that your true influence was not the British folk revival, but Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick.
CM: You know, I own Thick as a Brick, but I can’t say I know it that well. At the risk of sounding like a total impostor, I didn’t grow up listening to Jethro Tull; I grew up listening to The Smiths and The Replacements and Hüsker Dü — the bands that were kind of working in reaction to everything Jethro Tull had built up. But I do have a newfound love for that kind of music, if only for its ambition, which I still find interesting and exciting.
Q: There’s a lot of dark characters who populate your songs, and The Rake in The Hazards of Love is just the latest example. Do you have faith in humanity?
CM: I do have faith in the world and in human beings as being, in their essence, very kind and loving. But I do find people who are violent, who have dark histories and dark fascinations, to be endlessly interesting. So I’ll probably continue writing about them.
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