John Lucas

I went waaaay back into the archives to dust off this interview with Colin Meloy, which was first published exactly 21 years ago today. I’ve been doing this for a long time.

Decemberists ponder a big-league leap

This article was originally published by the Georgia Straight.

When the Decemberists’ sophomore long-player, Her Majesty, was released in 2003, it came on the heels of the quirky Portland folk-rock group’s buzz-making debut, Castaways and Cutouts, which had been issued just a few months earlier by the respected Kill Rock Stars label. Both were fine efforts, but it was Her Majesty that catapulted the Decemberists beyond cult status and into the ranks of indie royalty. The disc’s artfully arranged Dickensian tales of soldiers, pirates, and orphaned chimney sweeps garnered critical praise and earned the band a loyal following. With an equally strong new album, Picaresque, slated for release on Tuesday (March 22), the group might well grow too big for its current label, but singer-guitarist Colin Meloy is wary of making a jump into the corporate end of the music world.

“We’ve been talking to a few major labels, but I don’t know if that’s going to be entirely our cup of tea,” he reveals, reached by cellphone in his car, which he’s piloting back into Portland after a few days on the coast. “We’re not quite sure what we want to do. This is our last record for Kill Rock Stars, so I think we are going to be moving on. We’re going to talk to majors, but we’re also going to talk to a lot of indies as well, just because I don’t know if our music is meant for a major-label environment. I don’t know if we can be that big crossover indie-rock sensation that everyone’s been hoping for right now.”

Leave that for Conor Oberst, as Picaresque makes few concessions to the mainstream. The record isn’t without its potential singles, mind you; “The Sporting Life” is a deceptively jaunty-sounding number about humiliation on the soccer pitch, and “The Engine Driver” is a gently rolling lament whose tuneful melancholy brings to mind Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman”. The Decemberists would have less luck hitting commercial radio with “16 Military Wives”, however. Boasting a chorus that demands to be shouted and closing with a blast of rousing brass, the track is a sharply worded summation of Meloy’s disgust at the red-white-and-blue spectacle that is U.S. life during wartime: “Because America can and America can’t say no/And America does if America says it’s so.”

Record execs might also balk at the likes of “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”, an eight-minutes-plus epic of deceit and vengeance complete with sea-chantey accordion and death-in-the-belly-of-a-whale rumbling. Decemberists fans, on the other hand, are already aware of Meloy’s Gilbert-and-Sullivan tendencies, which on Picaresque extend to album photos that feature the quintet’s costumed personnel in stagey tableaux illustrating the lyrics of the more dramatic songs.

Those who have caught Decemberists shows on past tours will have observed that, somewhat disappointingly, the band’s members tend to favour a jeans-and-T-shirts look. For fans thinking of heading to the Richard’s on Richards gig on Saturday (March 19), Meloy promises something a little different. “We are kind of upping the theatricality for this tour, and we’re using some of the backdrops from the photo shoots for the stage, and we’re also having uniforms that are vaguely communist/military,” he says. “But that’s about as far as I would want to take it. I’ve always felt it’s really important, as far as the live show is concerned, to not distract too much from the songs themselves. When it comes down to it, we’re just a rock band, you know? And people should come to our shows expecting to see a good rock show, that there’s not going to be too many props or acting on stage. I feel like there’s enough theatricality in the songs that you don’t really need to punch it up that much.”