Mushroom Music Publishing

Life as a musician means continual evolution. Over the course of a career, any band worth paying attention to will pursue a sound, a direction, until it triggers a different idea and they’re chasing some other distant dream. With their sixth album, The King is Dead, The Decemberists illustrate the power that comes from this kind of creative call-and-response.

Like any band with a clear, identifiable concept-- in this case, a penchant for verbose, high-concept screeds-- the Decemberists are beloved and chastised for all the same reasons: The quirks that make them such a target for snickering, disaffected aesthetes (namely, stuffing their songs with arcane historical allusions and library language) are also what make them a boon for drama kids in three-button vests.

The inventive songwriting is the binding force, emphasizing character but remaining ever in thrall to stories, savoring the way they always play out to the same conclusions. Their songs cuts characters loose in their own tales. They still do what they're fated to do-- the thieves thieve and run amok, the lovers love and die tragically, the soldiers soldier on and pine for peaceful homes-- but they seem to do it more out of free will than authorial design.

To Colin Meloy, in some ways The King is Dead represents his own musical journey coming full circle. “Over the last eleven years or so, since I moved to Portland, I feel like I've been mining mostly English traditions for influence”, he says. “I guess I've kind of come back to a lot of the more American music that got me going in the first place – R.E.M. and Camper Van Beethoven and all these bands that borrowed from more American traditions like Neil Young and the Byrds.”

“Sometimes I kind of miss the epic-ness of the other albums,” he continues, “but it’s nice to get all of the information across in three minutes. It’s like going from reading a novel to reading a bunch of short stories.”