IN his studio named The Machine Shop, Colin Meloy engineers his outlandish musical creations.
Like a madcap inventor, The Decemberists singer and songwriter sets about fusing elements of folk, indie rock, prog rock and baroque pop.
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For lyrics, he draws on historical events and fantastical folklore to realise his themes — love, death, hope, despair, fear — and is prone to strange archaic language.
One of his best known songs, The Infanta, is about a Spanish princess. “Here she comes in her palanquin/On the back of an elephant,” it goes.
Just so you know, a palanquin is a boxlike litter once used in eastern Asia to transport a single person.
Not content with a plain old airship, on the rousing Sons And Daughters he sings: “We will arise from the bunkers/By land, by sea, by dirigible.”
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For Decemberists epic The Crane Wife, he revives a sad Japanese folk tale about an injured bird masquerading as a newly-wed woman.
In private, she plucks out her feathers to make wondrous clothes for her greedy husband to sell, then leaves him forever when he discovers her secret.
The vocals are probably the most challenging I’ve ever written.
So it comes as little surprise that Meloy’s latest infatuation is with one of history’s most captivating and complex figures, Joan Of Arc.
She was the poor devout village girl who donned a suit of armour to lead France into battle in the early 1400s and was burned at the stake before she reached the age of 20.
Revered as the Maid Of Orleans — a hero, a martyr, a saint and a feminist icon — her so-called crimes included “dressing like a man”.
In typical Meloy style, he’s gone all in with the 19-minute Joan In The Garden which begins with becalmed acoustic folk but swells into a prog rock monster.
You hear Pink Floyd-like bells, heavenly choirs, scorched earth guitars, muffled voices, what he calls “a psychedelic soundbath” and backing vocals from R.E.M.’s Mike Mills.
The track’s breathless, ultra-fast final section even has a whiff of Black Sabbath in their pomp.
Meloy reports that bassist Nate Query “was watching Iron Maiden videos while trying to figure out how to play that quickly.
“And the vocals are probably the most challenging I’ve ever written,” he adds.
Joan In The Garden takes up the whole of side four of the band’s wild ride of a double album, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.
After a brief sonic detour involving more synthesisers and a more “abrasive” sound on 2018’s I’ll Be Your Girl, this marks a vibrant return to The Decemberists’ core strengths — with bells and whistles attached.
Meloy says the 13 tracks feel like “a summation of everything we’ve done up to this point.
“I had a reckoning with myself about what a Decemberists song is and got rid of some of my hang-ups.”
The frontman is speaking to me via video call from The Machine Shop, also the name of his online journal which features deep dives into his songs and tour diaries.
‘Psychedelic trip’
The studio outbuilding where “they used to repair tractors” is on the farm he shares with illustrator partner Carson Ellis and their two sons, Hank and Milo, not far from Portland on America’s north-western seaboard.
Though Joan In The Garden is the new album’s last song, it seems like a good one for us to talk about first.
Joan, as an icon, an archetype and a myth, has always fascinated me and I guess she naturally found her way into a song.
“It goes back to before the I’ll Be Your Girl sessions in 2017,” says Meloy. “My Joan Of Arc obsession started when I read Lidia Yuknavitch’s bizarre The Book Of Joan.”
Yuknavitch’s novel imagines a post-apocalyptic dystopia and deals with “sex fetishism, skin-grafting and gender identity stuff”. As you do.
“After finishing it, I read a couple more Joan Of Arc books including a straight-laced biography,” he continues.
“Joan, as an icon, an archetype and a myth, has always fascinated me and I guess she naturally found her way into a song.”
Also on Meloy’s mind was a striking visual aid — an 1879 oil painting by Jules Bastien-Lepage which hangs at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art in New York.
It depicts Joan in her parents’ garden where, glimpsed among trees behind her, angels are encouraging her to fight the English.
“That visitation was is beautiful as it is terrifying,” says Meloy.
“Now we know how the human mind works, we might think, ‘Is that mental illness? Is it a psychedelic trip?’.
“There were a lot of strange mushrooms around and they were a foraging society,” he adds.
Another aspect of the Joan Of Arc story is her gender-blurring image which, says Meloy, resonates in today’s world.
“In a lot of paintings, she’s more feminised than she likely would have been,” he reasons. “If she really did cut her hair short, it would have been shaved into a little bowl cut — the men’s haircut of the time.”
Having done extensive research, Meloy elaborates: “There’s a moment during Joan’s trial when they say to her, ‘If you put on this gown and stop dressing like a man, the court is more likely to give you a reprieve’.
Hazards Of Love was our second record for Capitol, right after our major label debut (The Crane Wife) — and we insisted on making this weird, challenging thing.
“For a day, just because she’s terrified of execution, she does this and it wins her sympathy but that night she insists on getting back into men’s clothing.
“It was such a big part of her vision and her identity that she doomed herself.”
Meloy concludes: “For trans people, we now know it feels like a death to be the wrong gender.
“I have to think Joan was experiencing that.”
As for the song all about her, The Decemberists have been playing it as a marathon encore at gigs.
“It’s demanding but it feels important to put it in the set,” says Meloy.
“I’m sure some people are a little chagrinned but, we like to do things on our own terms — we make strange decisions!
“After the sound-bath (an ambient section before the hectic finale), I was expecting to see half the room gone but people stick around.”
Meloy is reminded of another uncompromising Decemberists project — the macabre fantasy rock opera The Hazards Of Love, released as their fifth album in 2009.
“In retrospect, I’m not sure what led to that,” he says with a wry smile.
“But I do have a weird, anti- authoritarian bent.
“I’m like, ‘You expect me to do this? F*** that!’.
“Hazards Of Love was our second record for Capitol, right after our major label debut (The Crane Wife) — and we insisted on making this weird, challenging thing.
“The single (The Rake’s Song) was about a guy gleefully retelling how he murdered all his children.
“The label must have been thinking, ‘What the hell’s your deal?’.”
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is the band’s first for their own YABB Records and it finds Meloy continuing to challenge his listeners.
It begins with Burial Ground, a jaunty singalong about, er, death with backing harmonies from his friend and fellow Portland musician, James Mercer of The Shins.
A playful tune with a darker lyric is, he tells me, “our stock in trade”.
‘Life expectancy’
“I guess it comes from my own fascination with death,” he confesses.
“Maybe my way of soothing my soul over mortality is writing songs that gleefully talk about it.
“Obviously, we all have moments to be morose but why in songwriting?
“The music I grew up with was always poking at death.”
Meloy has long been a student of British traditional folk music, all those murder ballads and stories of doomed lovers.
He says: “Those songs come from a time when life expectancy wasn’t much past 40 and children were dying all the time.
“If you think about a ten-year-old in the 18th century, they probably saw more death than most of us do in adulthood today.”
One of Meloy’s new songs, the folky, country-tinged William Fitzwilliam, visits Tudor England and is named after one of Henry VIII’s loyal enforcers.
It namechecks notable families of the day — the Howards, the Seymours, the Poles and the Boleyns — but is also about a much-missed American songwriter.
At a certain point, we thought ‘Wow, this is too legit’. But we messed with it enough to bring it back to our own territory.
Meloy explains: “When the pandemic came, I was reading The Mirror And The Light, the third book in the Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall) trilogy and was really wrapped up in the world of Thomas Cromwell.
“Right around that time, I also heard of John Prine’s death (from Covid) and was listening to a lot of his music.
“So William Fitzwilliam is my early lockdown fever dream, a weird meet-up between John Prine and Hilary Mantel.”
Then there’s the horn-fuelled Latin vibe of Oh No!, given a handsome lilt by members of Pink Martini, a Portland-based collective who describe themselves as a “mini-orchestra”.
Meloy says: “We decided to lean in on the Latin percussion thing and the guys from Pink Martini really nailed it
“At a certain point, we thought ‘Wow, this is too legit’. But we messed with it enough to bring it back to our own territory.”
Long White Veil, about the ghost of a lost love, comes with another slice of Meloy’s gallows humour.
“I married her, I carried her/On the very same day I buried her,” he sings rather too joyfully.
The title is a nod to country favourite Long Black Veil, covered by Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, Nick Cave and many more.
“I wanted this apparition to be in a veil so why not reference Long Black Veil and embrace it?” says Meloy.
He’s got form for this type of thing, once writing a song called Red Right Ankle, a shout-out to Cave’s Red Right Hand, “though they had nothing to do with each other”.
Meloy likes adding new layers to songwriting history’s rich tapestry.
“I’ve never shied away from building on everything that came before,” he says.
“I love hearing music that’s in debt to something else.
“The Jesus And Mary Chain blatantly tried to make a Velvet Underground record.
“And I’ve always felt a certain amount of licence to play in that world without trying to hide it.”
If many of his songs dwell in the past, America Made Me, which Meloy began more than 20 years ago, finds him kicking and screaming into the present day.
“All my life, I’ve been grappling with what it means to be an American male,” he says.
‘My guiding lights’
“It’s a label I haven’t worn easily, that feeling of not belonging.”
“I am particularly uncomfortable with my Americanness when I see our convicted felon former President (Trump) is polling neck and neck with this perfectly adequate, mainstream centre-left President (Biden).
“It’s just baffling to me.”
I don’t need to be surrounded by madcap geniuses, Though I guess that description could be made of me!
I suggest to Meloy that at least there are plenty of good things going on in his personal life.
“Oh absolutely,” he agrees.
“I’m profoundly lucky to live where I do.
“I have my family and my bandmates.”
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In October, Meloy will be the last of The Decemberists to reach 50.
“When the band came together, we were all in our late twenties or early thirties so we were elderly by pop standards.
“That has helped our staying power.”
Meloy calls his colleagues Chris Funk, Jenny Conlee, Nate Query and John Moen “capable adults and my guiding lights”.
“I don’t need to be surrounded by madcap geniuses,” he decides, before adding after a pause, “Though I guess that description could be made of me!
“There’s only room for one of those in a band.”
THE DECEMBERISTS
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again
★★★★☆
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