The Decemberists: The Illusion of Being Alone
photo: Holly Andres
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To anyone familiar with Portland, Ore., folk-rock icons The Decemberists, it will not come as a surprise that frontman Colin Meloy writes most of his songs in a building constructed in the mid-1800s. Meloy’s adoration for stories, characters and even phrases culled from the ether of history is so ingrained in The Decemberists’ lore that, for many, it might even be difficult to picture the him enjoying the convenient pleasures of modern life.
That read on Meloy isn’t entirely fictional. The writing studio is part of the farm Meloy, his wife and their two sons call home—and they sought out the property for its distinction as the only plot of land in the area that, he says, hadn’t been converted to a McMansion.
“We’re only the fifth family to own it since it was built in 1857,” he says proudly, via Zoom. “It was an Oregon Trail-style home, built by a physician who came out West with his son.”
The structure where Meloy writes his songs was once a barn for repairing agricultural machinery. His artist wife Carson Ellis’ studio used to be a nut drying house. (The property was once filled with orchards of hazelnut-bearing filbert trees.)
But it’s not just the history of Meloy’s tractor-repair studio that coaxes songs out of him. It’s also the privacy. For as much as the singer-songwriter loves performing and telling the stories behind his songs onstage and on his blog, to create them, Meloy needs to be completely alone—and out of shouting distance from his wife, his kids and his band.
“The process of songwriting is a lot of exploration, trying different avenues and pathways, running through things over and over again. And I sing really loudly,” he says with a laugh. “It’s a weird thing, but I can’t work if I know other people can hear me. I must be totally isolated and in my own world to work on songs. So even if my kids barge in here all the time, I still have the illusion that I’m alone.”
It’s when Meloy steps outside his own world that things get complicated—and the reason that The Decemberists’ new, ninth album nearly didn’t happen. But, thankfully, this isn’t the story of a band in turmoil. Indeed, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again’s tale is spelled out in its title. The Decemberists had to lose their way just a bit to find the path back to the sweet spot that had long helped them grow into one of the indie-folk scene’s most beloved bands.
And rest assured, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is certainly The Decemberists at their idiosyncratic best: tragic folk songs about dying brides and burial grounds; sweet, lovelorn acoustic ballads; rousing, satirical anthems; and a 19-minute prog-rock epic about Joan of Arc. And none of that will surprise anyone familiar with The Decemberists’ unique arc.
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Colin Meloy discovered his love for storytelling early.
Born in Helena, Mont., Meloy recalls an assignment in first grade to write an original story. He remembers spending time scrawling “The Blizzard Monster,” about a monster who attacks a family stuck in a blizzard. Both his parents and his teacher seemed to love it, “which made me feel good, even if they were blowing smoke up my ass,” he says.
“And so I became that kid, always writing stories. By second grade, I’d written a play and forced the other kids to be in it.”
Before he hit middle school, he discovered music, and his passion became songwriting. For a brief period of time, he no longer wanted to be a professional author.
“My entire life, I’ve been bouncing between the two,” he says.
In 2000, two years after graduating from the University of Montana with an English degree and relocating to Portland, Ore., Meloy met the musicians who eventually coalesced as The Decemberists, naming the nascent project after an 1825 insurrection in Imperial Russia. (The rebels were defeated and largely exiled to Siberia.) The band’s debut album, Castaways and Cutouts, was released in 2003—an acoustic, lullaby folk collection that kicked off with a song sung from the perspective of the ghost of a baby “born at nine and dead at noon.” The LP was a cult hit and paved the way for the band’s slow, steady climb in both popularity and ambition.
By 2005, The Decemberists’ lasting line up was in place—lead guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk, bassist Nate Query, keyboardist/accordionist Jenny Conlee and drummer Jon Moen. The next year, they signed to Capitol Records and dropped their major label debut, The Crane Wife, which included a multi-section suite interpreting a Japanese folktale and a song about one of World War II’s most brutal battles, the Siege of Leningrad.
Thankfully, Meloy’s lyrical headiness didn’t overtake the band’s music. The Decemberists became stars not because of Meloy’s use of obscure French words or History Channel narratives, but because their music was deliciously fresh— gorgeously melodic, bright, emotional and warm. Each member of The Decemberists adds a layer to the band’s music that feels organic, a puzzle piece clicked into place. At the center of this musical appeal has always been Meloy’s voice—a high-toned, crystal-clear sound that the band’s longtime producer, Tucker Martine, calls “completely singular.”
He adds, “You know it within seconds of hearing it, and you can’t say that about everybody.”
From the beginning, The Decemberists composed their music in a very specific way: Meloy would write his songs in solitude, slowly and carefully crafting grin-worthy lyrical conceits and hum-along melodies. Then he’d bring those songs to his bandmates, who would flesh them out into beautiful full-group masterpieces. Sometimes that meant bare-bones folk with light touches of keys, bass and percussion; other times, as with 2009’s The Hazards of Love, it meant transforming The Decemberists into a plugged-in rock band. Regardless, the method of creation was tried and true.
By the time the band issued The King Is Dead in 2011, they’d long transcended their own indie-folk scene. The album featured The Decemberists’ most straightforward, accessible music and topped the Billboard 200 the week it was released. That same year, Meloy released Wildwood, a 541-page children’s fantasy novel illustrated by his wife, which became a New York Times bestseller. Bouncing between songwriter and author was no longer a childhood hobby; it was a dream realized.
But The Decemberists were reaching a tipping point. The constant touring was increasingly at odds with the band members’ ability to start families and balance side projects. And musically, the ensemble sensed that people knew what to expect. With their 2018 album, I’ll Be Your Girl, everything was about to change.
The Decemberists had already recorded four albums with Martine over a decade-long span; they decided to break that streak and hire another beloved producer John Congleton, with the stated goal of making something different.
“There was a desire to step away from what we’d done. We were looking to upend our work flow. And I was writing more experimental songs, going against our own grain,” Meloy says. “In retrospect, it may have been a bit overthought. I’m glad we shook it up, but we threw out too many good ideas because they felt too ordinary, too much like us.”
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When the first single from I’ll Be Your Girl debuted with pulsing synthesizers and pummeling bass, many longtime listeners did a double take. It was a musical switch up that ended up leading to a much bigger shift. Once the band finished touring behind I’ll Be Your Girl, Meloy decidedly took a step back, truly unsure if he wanted to continue life as a bandleader. And that was the last the world heard of The Decemberists for nearly six years—a natural pause from touring bled into the pandemic, and the pandemic bled into Meloy fully embracing his burgeoning career as a children’s author. Conlee released her own music, took on a full schedule of piano students and “played my weird gigs with my accordion quartet,” she says. Query began facilitating a music program for incarcerated people, and Funk dug into his production work, hunkering down at both Portland’s Halfling Studios and Iceland’s new Floki Studios. Without shows or a new album, The Decemberists simply got on with it; life kept moving.
“We’ve been playing for so long that I always thought that the band would continue on until the end of our lives,” Conlee says. “But the last break stretched on for so long that I started thinking in a different way; that this was my new life.”
Meloy, meanwhile, “still had all these hang ups. I was haunted by the I’ll Be Your Girl sessions, this feeling we had to break things to make them better.” But as he began writing songs for an animated film adaptation of his Wildwood book and a musical theater production, he felt a moment of clarity: He could always use his other projects to experiment, but The Decemberists’ sound needed to remain unmistakable.
And so, in February 2023, Meloy regrouped with bandmates at Martine’s studio—without the producer himself. Meloy had a handful of tunes, as well as lots of stray verses, melodies and song scraps that he’d yet to play for anyone. Even though they’d never finished songs as a group before, this time the bandleader thought that, maybe, the five members could assemble them together.
But he thought wrong.
“I felt too vulnerable playing these unfinished songs. It was too revealing. It goes back to me not wanting people to hear my process. It was a leftover push from our 2018 sessions, experimenting with how we work. But it was too forced,” he says. “I realized, if the goal is to create better music, and we’re just messing with the process for the sake of change, then it’s not serving us. We risked sucking the soul out of the songs.”
Plus, he says, without anyone in the producer’s chair, “everyone was elevated to the level of producer. Everything became committee-driven, and nothing interesting was coming through.”
By the end of the week, the sessions were scrapped and The Decemberists went back into hibernation.
Martine remembers clearly when he got the call from Meloy, who he hadn’t worked with since 2015.
“It was sweet,” Martine says from his home in Portland. “We went to lunch, and he asked me, ‘Will you come back?’ I said, ‘Of course.’ In my mind, I never left. I was just cheering the band on from the sidelines.”
Meloy and Martine worked together over the next six months, slowly but surely sewing Meloy’s scattered song parts into finished pieces. That fall, the songwriter-producer duo called the rest of The Decemberists back into the studio. The unease of their first attempt quickly fluttered out the window.
“It felt so good to be back at it with the old gang,” Martine says. “We didn’t need to feel each other out too much. We quickly fell back into the excitement of the creative flow.”
The band worked what they call “Crane Wife hours,” meaning the set 10 a.m.-6 p.m. sessions they’d adopted while recording The Crane Wife, when band members needed to head home to see spouses and kids. The band leaned into what they knew they do best—serving the song. And they put their faith in Martine to steer those songs to the finish line.
“He is the objective sixth member of the band,” Meloy says of Martine. “He’s a creative partner who you trust and who lives outside of the band. He can shine a light on what the song needs. He knows what he likes, we trust his tastes and he’s not afraid to express himself.”
They recorded five days a week for about six weeks, and then As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again was complete—no mess, no fuss. The completed album is The Decemberists’ longest to date, including the 19-minute, multi-part epic “Joan in the Garden,” which culminates with a headbang-worthy guitar riff and the closest Meloy gets to shouting.
The album’s title comes from the finale of “Joan,” but it’s a fitting description of the band’s sound in 2024 as well.
“There’s so much traditional Decemberists here,” Conlee says. “Some songs sound like Castaways and Cutouts, our very first album. Some totally acoustic stuff sounds like The King Is Dead. There’s some proggy, Hazards of Love nods, some super poppy songs, some story songs, some love songs. There’s songs set in England, songs set in Montana. It’s such a wide variety, but it all sounds like us. It definitely feels like a culmination of everything we’ve been.”
On “Long White Veil,” Meloy sings, “I married her, I carried her/ On the very same day I buried her.” It’s another Decemberists song of death visiting far too soon.
“This woman dying on her wedding day? It seemed nice and dramatic and Decemberist-y to me,” Meloy says, before adding one final laugh. “One thing I’ve learned in the last six years is not to be afraid of Decemberist-y things. I have to make sure I’m telling stories that feel true to me. I can only write what I write. The heart loves what it loves. And I’ve learned I just have to embrace that.”
