Springville Hill

Driving to Decemberists’ frontman Colin Meloy’s house is something of a scenic adventure. First, pass St. Johns Bridge, the most beautiful bridge in Portland, Ore. – a city full of bridges. You climb up a damp, narrow road lined with country-style homes and cars parked precariously near slopes full of rocks, thick vines and old leaning trees. There’s even a big, weather wooden boat next to a driveway, as if it had been ejected – crippled and creaky – from the nearby Willamette River. There is a sign with an old-fashioned painting of Santa Claus propped on top of it. It’s the middle of January and the image of the man in the red suit seems more comical than festive.

I’m listening to the new Decemberists album, The King Is Dead, as I figure out the confusing directions that I printed from Mapquest. I’m playing the record (yet) again with the hope that a few more questions about the songs might magically come to mind. But, then, something else oddly magical happens. I’m driving up Springville Hill when the song, “June Hymn,” comes on. It’s a song about birds, bonnets and ivy – things coming back to life. There’s a shiny acoustic strum and a soft harmonica flutter. Jenny Conlee’s electric piano and accordion are underneath those sounds, warming up the whole thing like a trusty hotplate. Even though it’s a cold morning outside, the sun heats me through the windshield as Meloy sings, “You were waking/And day was breaking/A panoply of song/And summer comes to Springville Hill.”

It almost seems too true to life for Meloy, a songwriter who says, “I’ve never been good at writing about myself.” Whether he’s being modest or not, it’s true that The Decemberists are known more for fantastical tunes about espionage, pirates and ancient folklore. Besides lofty, sometimes difficult, subject matter, the band has also been known to master pure pop melancholy, such as one of my longtime favorites, “The Apology Song” (off of 2003’s self-released 5 Songs EP), which is about a stolen bicycle.

The King Is Dead is a fresh new turn in The Decemberists saga. It’s a stripped down set of songs steeped in an Americana style. There’s still a sweeping, big sky vastness to some of the songs (Meloy is from Montana after all), but the sometimes hushed instrumentation gives this collection an intimate feel that you don’t hear on other Decemberists albums.

Before I visited Meloy at his family’s home, I talked with Conlee, who plays accordion, piano and organ for the band. I asked her what her favorite songs on the new album were. Besides “Rox in the Box” (because “it’s a reggae Celtic song and that’s totally weird” ), she points out “Rise to Me.” “The song is so personal to Colin and it’s rare for him to write in the first person. I really loved listening to him sing that.”

When I ask Meloy about the song, it almost seems too private. “‘Rise to Me’ resonates with people we know because they know the story behind it, which is about our five-year-old son, Hank, who was diagnosed with autism two years ago,” he explains carefully. “If you were to listen to it, it just sounds like a father son chat about being strong in the face of diversity, but it’s more about our family coming to terms and figuring out what that diagnosis means and how we can deal with it and be strong and move forward. It’s about the inevitability of things.”

Still, the 36-year-old Meloy sees the bright side of his son’s condition. “I don’t think of it as a tragedy,” he says. “I think of it as more of a jog in the road. He’s on the very high functioning end of the spectrum. He taught himself how to read when he was two and a half and now reads like an adult. He reads non-fiction, like encyclopedias.”

Portland Mainstays

Portland has a surprisingly diverse and successful music scene for a city its size. Besides The Shins, Modest Mouse, Menomena, The Thermals and Stephen Malkmus, The Decemberists have also been a long-time pillar of the music community here. I saw Meloy play for the first time about ten years ago. He played solo at a small café in front of two-dozen people. Five years later, I saw him and the rest of the band play to several thousand people at Riverfront Park. At times, the band can look huge onstage, with various guest musicians and backup players filling the wings. In reality, the band is officially a five-piece: Meloy and Conlee alongside guitarist Chris Funk, bassist Nate Query and drummer John Moen. The group’s rise in popularity has been gradual and comfortable, especially considering the quick major label transition and local alienation of some of their early Portland peers.

“I remember when I first moved to town and I was playing the Blackbird a couple of times a month and working at a pizza place to make ends meet,” Meloy recalls. "I was meeting bands and hanging out with people in the music community. The Dandy Warhols were kind of like a specter that hung over town and there was also [the band] Everclear and you’d be like, They’re not really Portland bands. "

I ask Meloy if he has a respect for those bands now, especially considering how some younger Portland bands might also see The Decemberists in a skeptical light. “Absolutely,” he quickly says. “I mean, The Dandy Warhols…[lead singer] Courtney [Taylor-Taylor] has obviously said some dumb things, but I’ve gotten to know some of the folks from The Dandy Warhols and they’re incredibly sweet people. I think they are truly an iconic, and important, Portland band. To some degree, I don’t think we’d necessarily be here if it wasn’t for them. They bridged the gap during a low ebb of national attention on Portland from grunge to the early 2000s. They were representing the Portland music scene for a while.”

Conlee had some success in the 1990s and 2000s as well, playing and touring in various bands (including the jamband Calobo which Query was in, too). She also taught piano lessons and worked at the same neighborhood bookstore as Meloy. She remembers how the popularity of The Decemberists became more apparent to her. “When The Crane Wife came out, it was a huge jump and we were playing huge rooms and people were recognizing us. If I mentioned the band name to relatives, they’d be like, ‘Oh, I’ve heard of that.’ That was a big change. We had a tour manager and a person to drive the van and that was funny because I’d been touring for 15 years before that, and what I was used to was loading in myself and doing our own merchandise and stuff.”

A Mission of Minimalism

It seems odd that such a talented pop band and gifted songwriter would challenge themselves, and possibly alienate fans and critics, with two successive albums of high-minded song cycles and big productions (2006’s The Crane Wife and 2009’s Hazards of Love ), not to mention an EP based on an Irish folk tale (2004’s The Tain ). Meloy sees things differently and understands now that it has brought him to a new approach for The King Is Dead.

“Once you’ve had a few records out and you’ve gotten some attention, the temptation to do something more audacious is pretty great,” he says. "We’ve given in to that temptation for a couple of records and, now, it’s like, ‘OK, we’ve done that to the nth degree. It might be more fun or interesting to scale back now.’ I really enjoyed writing some of the longer, more epic stuff because it was challenging to me and I was deliberately messing with my own writing style and approach.
“Especially Hazards of Love, which I wrote in a style I’m totally not comfortable with where I sketched out the story and then I had to fill in the blanks. I even made myself write it in order, so the last chord of one song would inform or be the first chord of the next song. It was sort of a puzzle for myself. You could think of it as an obsessive compulsive thing, but also maybe I was getting bored of the normal structure.”

When asked if any concept catalyzed The King Is Dead, Meloy says that if there was any, that “it was economy – [producer] Tucker [Martine] and I talked about how it would just be ten songs – under 45 minutes. After the Crane Wife tours, I was really exhausted with the promoting and trying to meet everyone’s expectations of being on a major label. It was like the scales falling from my eyes a little bit and I had to look at what I was giving up versus what I was achieving.”

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Conlee concurs about the new album. “It’s nice to have these little chunks to work with instead of huge 60-minute pieces,” she says. “It’s less pressure, but mainly it’s less work. At least we thought it would be a lot easier, but because the songs were so spare and exposed we kept being perfectionists. We definitely recorded these songs many more times than the last record, looking for that magic take. But because they’re so bare, if there was any little mistake, we’d stop and redo it. We were a lot more nitpicky on this one. It wasn’t hard to play, just hard to get the right performances.”

The King Is Dead, which the band recorded at Pendarvis Farm just outside of Portland, features contributions by guest musicians like Americana songstress Gillian Welch, R.E.M. multi-instrumentalist Peter Buck and violinist Annalisa Tornfelt (formerly of Bearfoot). Buck’s distinctively chiming guitar can be heard on two of the songs ( “Calamity Song” and the first single, “Down by the Water” ), while his mandolin opens the song “Don’t Carry It All,” a mid-tempo stomp propelled by Meloy’s rousing harmonica work.

“People say, be careful when you meet your idols, but so far none of them have disappointed,” Meloy says when asked about the experience of working with Buck and Welch.
“He’s a really fast learner,” says Conlee of Buck. “Colin would show him some parts and he’d watch one time through, and on the second take, he got it.”

Wildwood

Besides making music, Meloy also immerse himself in books. (His sister, Maile Meloy, is a bestselling fiction writer.) His wife Carson Ellis is an illustrator whose dazzling artwork accompanies several children’s books and Decemberists albums. Last year, Meloy and Ellis scored a three-book deal with HarperCollins for a series called Wildwood. The books, aimed at young readers, take place in a fantastical version of the 5,100-acre Forest Park, which is a stone’s throw from Meloy’s home. The story involves a young girl whose baby brother is kidnapped by crows. The first book is due out in September. You won’t be finding it on any Decemberists merch table though. “I want to keep those two things as separate as possible,” Meloy says adamantly.

This actually won’t be Meloy’s first published book. In 2004, he wrote about growing up in Montana and his love for The Replacements in Let It Be, published as part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series on famous albums.

The Art of Avoiding Boredom

Unfortunately, there are drawbacks to people seeing you as a literary musician. Sometimes your subject matter might go over the heads of your listeners or your lyrics might be too cryptically poetic for them to fully grasp. Of course, this didn’t stop Michael Stipe or Bob Dylan, but some music fans will get bored when music gets too cerebral. While most of my friends are Decemberists fans, a few have said that they find them “boring” in this way. I ask Meloy if he’s afraid of being boring.

“I hope we’re not ever boring, but I’m sure we’re totally boring to some people, but also inaccessibly weird to others,” the singer suggests. “I know people say you shouldn’t read your press, but you do things to get a reaction and it’s helpful to see what the reactions are. But I do have thicker skin now. I’ve read many pans of the band as well as personal takedowns of me – from people who don’t even know me.”

The King Is Dead is an intimate and appealing, constantly catchy batch of songs that illustrates Meloy’s love of classic country-rock melodies. They’re the kind of songs that you imagine playing on a Mississippi jukebox (especially the fiddle-powered “All Arise!” ). To me, it’s a refreshing new style for The Decemberists repertoire. But watch out – strange and lofty ideas are still percolating in Meloy’s head.

“I was messing around with the idea of writing a musical based on Butte [Montana] miners in the early 20th century, but as I was piecing the story together, the producers I was suggesting it to were nonplussed,” Meloy says. “They were like, How are you going to make a musical out of this? It seems a little dry. It could still happen though.”