Pioneering bookworms of lit-rock (aka grad-core, intelli-folk, et. al), The Decemberists, are giving Mother Nature a run for her money. With a new album (the band’s best yet), a cult following, the coolest spectacles since Elton John and an intuitive grasp of 16th-century Irish poetry, The Decemberists are quickly becoming the coolest month.
Just prior to the band’s sold-out March 28 performance at Lo-Fi Caf -The Decemberists packed the venue so tight the fire marshal couldn’t have fit through the doorway to shut it down if he had wanted to-I sat down with blustery singer/songwriter Colin Meloy and a handful of other assorted Decemberists, road managers and wayward sorts at an undisclosed sushi restaurant for a five-course meal of redemption, salvation, universality, street urchins and shrimp tempura .
Unconventional Appetizers
(Meloy and I enter nameless sushi restaurant and are seated. We dislike our table, and switch seats. Sitting down, we realize we dislike our second table even more, and switch again.)
A&E: This place is funny-it’s like pre-school sushi. I wish they had pictures for us to circle in crayon.
Colin Meloy: Oh, right. What paper are you from again?
A&E: The Daily Utah Chronicle. It’s a college paper…actually, I don’t think I’m going to order anything. I forgot my wallet.
CM: Really? I can spot you.
A&E: That’s cool, I’ll eat later.
(Enter the rest of The Decemberists, road manager and crew members, who sit at an adjacent table.)
CM: Are you guys just going to sit over there and make fun of us or do you want to talk as a whole band?
A&E: We can join them, if you want.
(Meloy and I switch tables yet again to join the band)
CM: Our waitress is going to love us.
(Waitress arrives, irritated. “You’re here now? You want separate checks?”)
CM: No, together is fine.
A&E: Now we’re one big happy family and a reporter…Let’s get started. Decemberists’ songs are unconventional in that they are populated largely by anti-heroes-runaway prostitutes, vengeful sailors. These characters all live tragic-but-beautiful lives-why is that? Do you think there is a greater degree of humanity in suffering?
CM: I think that the idea of them being anti-heroes and suffering through their own tragedies is just more interesting. I think inevitably pathos is more interesting than anything else…People can relate to suffering.
A&E: So you believe in the universality of human emotions?
CM: Of course. People really relate to things like love-that’s why pop songs are typically first-person meditations on romance. But equally interesting, and equally universal, is tragedy.
A&E: Another theme you play with is salvation. Many of your characters, to use your words, have wretched existences, and yet they still find salvation in love, in companionship…Can a life get so wretched that it can’t be redeemed? You don’t seem to create many characters that don’t have [that] potential.
CM: I think all the characters do, and I think that’s what makes them appealing as someone you can relate to. All the characters, hopefully, have faults as much as they have [redeeming] qualities.
A&E: “We are kings amongst runaways…”
CM: Yeah, even though you may not agree with some of…their approaches to life, they are still characters you can find sympathetic.
(Waitress returns to take The Decemberists’ orders. Mass chaos ensues-including, but not limited to, a heated discussion as to why shrimp tempura has to come with vegetable tempura:
“Wait, why do you have to get shrimp tempura with your vegetable tempura?”
“They throw it in, I guess…for $1.50.”
“Oh…But what if someone wanted more vegetables?”
“What if somebody was vegetarian?”
A&E: What if someone was allergic to shrimp?
“I mean, does [our waitress] want to play the show for us, too? I’m kidding…”)
Universal Second Helpings
A&E: Something interesting about The Decemberists’ is how you reconcile listeners’ ability to personally relate to your music-your characters are placed in these classical [contexts] and they live these lives that don’t really exist in modern times…yet the emotions transcend. How?
CM: What a particular character is going through is a universal thing, regardless of its historical setting. It should be something that anyone can relate to. There should be a window there because they are archetypes. They are all drawn largely from actual things that have sort of been passed down through history in books, poems, songs and movies and they have this snowballing effect of collecting every aspect as it’s gone along until its this thing that is other than the thing it started out being. It’s something that exists in a public domain-something like a Chimbley Sweep really belongs to the collective imagination.
A&E: Is that where the appeal for creating these post-classical environments for your characters comes from? Why is there a resistance to creating modern characters in modern settings?
CM: Well, there isn’t. There are a lot of characters set in modern times, I just think that people tend to latch onto the older [ones]. But on each of the records, there are songs set in contemporary times. I think it’s almost sort of an optical illusion because people pay so much attention to the [archetypal characters], so they tend to pop out. But we’re not necessarily married to any historical time or genre.
A Cautionary Side Salad
A&E: Where is the line between universality and subjectivity for you?
CM: I tend to think that first-person meditations tend on the side of subjectivity, or can get a little lost-their universality can get a little lost-in all the inward-looking. And so by placing [my songs] outside of myself, I think they have a greater potential for impact.
A&E: Does that give you more creative freedom in terms of exploring your characters, when you can feel like you control them? Coming from a literary background, is that more compelling?
CM: I feel like everyone has complete control over whatever songs they’re writing. I guess it’s just more interesting for me to write about [classic archetypal] characters-it’s more challenging. There’s something about the accepted forms of pop songwriting that doesn’t quite do it for me…There’s nothing really that strange about [Decemberists’ brand of songwriting]. If you listen to old British and Irish folk music, there are all sorts of songs about, you know, weeping urchins and dead babies…
A&E: That lack of convention definitely creates more intriguing heroes and heroines.
CM: In Irish and British and American folk music, those stories are intended to sort of scare people, or move people. They were the films of the working class. That form gets a little lost in contemporary pop songwriting, so it’s just an attempt to kind of toy with those mediums.
A&E: Do you see yourselves as champions of these lost forms?
CM: I don’t know if we’re champions because there are plenty of other people doing it. We’re just one of many. I think of Joanna Newsom, Jolie Holland…
A&E: Julie Doiron…
CM: Oh yeah, she’s fantastic.
A Rock-steady Main Course
A&E: If unconventionality is appealing to [The Decemberists], what happens when creating these classical characters becomes conventional for you? Would you be willing to move on and try something completely new?
CM: I always feel like I’m doing something new, exploring something new. I’ve never really known what was going to come next. It’s not that calculated.
A&E: Is there a resistance to any kind of form?
CM: Whatever makes sense for us [is what we go with]. Something like [2004’s EP] The Tain made sense for us. Doing a reggae record would not make sense for us.
(Sarcastic jabs of disagreement emanate from the Decemberists sitting around the table. “A rock-steady album might make sense…”)
CM: Rock-steady? You think a rock-steady album would make sense? I mean, I like rock-steady. I’d like to start another rock-steady band…
(“I do play melodica, you know. That’s right in there.”)
CM: I don’t think that…um…yeah. It’s a question of working within what makes sense for us and what we’ve done so far.
A&E: So, if somehow it seemed to make sense, could we look forward to a rock-steady Decemberists’ album?
(“What is rock-steady, anyway?”)
CM: Rock-steady is like early reggae.
No, no, I don’t know that we would do that. We do what we do and we’ve found something that we do relatively well…It’s all about setting boundaries for yourself and then exploring and discovering things within those structures.
A&E: Well, your music is very adventurous…
(Laughing)
CM: There are limits.
Just
Broadway Desserts
A&E: In terms of the atmosphere of your latest album, Picaresque (recorded in an abandoned Baptist church), do you see the process of making a record as something like staging a production?
CM: You really have to do it in pieces-there is nothing theatrical about it. Well, there is to a certain degree, but it’s such a…
(The waitress returns unexpectedly, interrupting, “Who ordered the miso?”)
CM: You’re taking everything apart bit-by-bit. That being said, when we did “The Mariner’s Revenge,” (a seven-minute lumbering epic of Melville-esque proportions) we did do it around a single mic.
A&E: It definitely has that [booming atmospheric] quality to it.
CM: We tried to put as much theatricality as we could into that song, but when you really get into it, recording a record like Picaresque, you do need to take it bit-by-bit because you just can’t possibly do it all at once.
A&E: How do the unseen aspects of making a record-recording in an abandoned church as opposed to a studio, for example-affect the overall dynamic of an album? How do you think it affects the listener’s experience? Would Picaresque have been a much different record were it recorded in a booth?
CM: Yeah, it would have been. I think that one of the reasons for recording in a church was, after having played around on the last few records retooling and setting up microphones in better ways and doing stuff live, we discovered that the sound some songs could have was this sort of original Broadway-cast recording [thing]-you know, like where they basically set up a mic in the middle of the stage and just said, ‘Go for it.’
So, we wanted to try to make the whole record have at least a little bit of that in every song. And I’d always loved records that have been done in sort of cavernous places-that drum sound, that vocal sound you can get has always really appealed to me.
A&E: When I think of original Broadway-cast recordings, [I think of] a sort of kinetic energy that you might not be able to feign were you trying to recreate or represent a live experience. Were you concerned with pinning down the [singular] originality of a recording?
CM: As much as we could, considering that we were recording up to 16 tracks for any particular song. With “The Mariner’s Revenge,” I think we really captured what that song is-I mean, there is really no arrangement. We’re just kind of [going] with that stuff.
(The waitress returns with what looks like much less food than was ordered. The Decemberists eye the platter skeptically.)
CM: Is that all our stuff there? I know I got two hamachi nigiri…is that salmon?
(“I got salmon!”)
CM: There’s one hamachi. Maybe I got an eel avocado roll…
A&E: I think I see avocado in one of those…
(“No, that looks like spicy tuna. Did you get a hand roll?”)
CM: No, I thought I didn’t. But I’ll eat it anyway. Can I get some ginger and wasabi? I’ll just grab it…Can I have a little soy sauce too?
(“Can I have one of your tempuras?”
“Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”)
A&E: You know, I’ve never done an interview over sushi before. This is a new experience.
CM: Really? I thought they were all over sushi.
A&E: You’d be surprised.
