Colin Meloy Transcript March 1, 2005. Portland, OR. by Sean Nelson Ten minute introductory back and forth about life, music, bad interviews, mutual friends, la la la… SN: Picaresque is a triumph, and it seems like a consummation of everything The Decemberists have been working towards up to now, a real flag on the moon kind of record. I’m curious about the period that led up to you forming the band. What was your musical life like before Castaways and Cutouts? CM: Well, I was in a band called Tarkio, from Missoula, MT, while I was in college, as a way, you know, just something outside of writing essays. It had a kind of alternative country fell at first, which was sort of of the fashion at the time. I still, to a certain degree—that scene has bummed me out for about six of seven years now… Anyway, we kind of moved out of that and started becoming more of an introspective, pop-ish kind of band, kind of like what the Decemberists ended up being. And I graduated from school in ’98, and stuck around Missoula for a year, thinking that we could sort of make it as a rock band based out of Missoula, Montana— SN: Like so many before you… CM: Exactly. Like so many before. Well, the Fireballs of Freedom… But then everybody wanted to stay in Missoula, and I kind of wanted to move on. We had made 8-track demos, and we actually recorded a full-length record at John & Stu’s Place [landmark ‘90s Seattle studio, now the Hall of Justice] with Kevin Suggs engineering. And then we did a home-recorded EP, kind of a final EP, and shortly after that I moved to Portland. I was going to try to get the rest of the band to come, but as it turned out, everyone was kind of rooted in Missoula, and I was just like ‘Fuck it; I gotta get out.’ I wanted to have a triumphant first show at [defunct Portland music industry conference] NXNW in the fall of 1999. As triumphant as one could be at NXNW, anyway… SN: I’m interested in the evolution of your songwriting style. That kind of signature, fabulistic Decemberists song seems to have reached fruition on the new record, and was obviously successful on Her Majesty, but on Castaways, you can hear that it’s kind of inchoate. CM: I think that all started in Missoula, that last year with Tarkio. We were playing in bars, we had a pretty decent following, you know, 200-250 people at a show… But I was getting more and more burned out on playing party music—and we weren’t even really a party band, but because we had some songs that sounded kind of like the Eagles, people were really into it. You know, there’s this attraction to playing rock music for people because they enjoy the rock music, but I was also getting away from that and writing really dour—we would play entire sets of really dour songs, and we were steadily losing our fan base. It all sort of started with “My Mother Was A Chinese Trapeze Artist,” which was a song I wrote in 1999 after a trip down the Smith River with my sister, my dad, and my uncle, in which my dad and my uncle fought the whole way and my uncle sort of barbed my dad by using my sister and me as ammo, saying, like, ‘why aren’t they taking over your law firm?’ and things like that. This weird brotherly stuff. And at the same time, I was trying to get my dad to help me pay for my student loans, which were out of control. Then my dad had heat stroke—it was this super, super intense, three-day river trip where we were all just stuck together and it was all just like one constant fight, and everybody was angry at each other for all different reasons. I think I came off that trip with this loathing for my family, and I wrote the song about basically completely re-creating the family in this really fantastical setting, using myself as this sort of sad anti-hero. And it was the sort of thing that—I completely wrote it for myself. I thought it was too bizarre to ever appeal to anyone. I think I sang it to my girlfriend, and that was it. We did eventually record it as Tarkio, as sort of the last thing we did, then I moved to Portland, and you know, had these connections here, supposedly—people I’d met, none of whom were returning phone calls, and I kind of had to start from absolute square one, doing open mic nights and things like that. I eventually got some shows. I did an open mic at the Laurelthirst and they gave me a Monday night, the 27th of December or something like that. And the six-to-eight months that followed were pretty much just like that. SN: Sounds lonely. CM: Super lonely. But it really gave me an opportunity to mess around with stuff. Being able to have a sense of humor about the fact that I was playing these shows to no one allowed me to kind of poke fun at myself. And my way of poking fun at myself was to try and write more and more ridiculous songs, just to sort of jab the audience. So that’s when I started writing these ghost story songs and things like that. But I loved doing it so much, because when you don’t have that thrill of having a roomful of people jumping up and down and listening to your songs—when you have five people sitting at the bar who aren’t even listening, you glean what you can from the songwriting process as far as what joy it gives you. The creative process is sort of all you have at that point. And In a way, my attempts to entertain myself and to sort of get onstage and basically advertise that I was going to do whatever the fuck I wanted to do, and if that involved playing a song in three parts, or playing a song about a legionnaire, you know, then that was what I was going to do. But then I discovered that people liked the songs, but I think also, they liked having that thrown in their face a little bit, liked to be jabbed a bit. And at the time, also, I was doing these insipid songwriters in the round with these singer-songwriters in town. As far as I knew at the time, that was all the Portland music scene had going for it. Those were the only people I had met playing out. And they were all these, like, Sarah McLachlan types… who did no end of good by me, like they gave me shows and sort of took me in at a time when I was really struggling, but the music was just—I just couldn’t handle it. So a lot of the songs came as a reaction to that, like sitting on-stage with three other songwriters, and listening to stories you’ve heard before, and this sort of canned laughter from all the people there, and they play their really heartfelt, poetic song, and you’re supposed to be all ‘oh, that was really great. Now here’s a song I wrote about this, this, and this,’ and that was a major part of me wanting to play songs like ‘My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist’ and have everybody not know what to do. SN: Such a bummer to go from having no community to being invited to a community you really want no part of. How did you meet the people you wound up playing with? CM: There was no single moment. It all just sort of trickled together. We met Nate, and he was perfect because he played stand-up bass, which I really wanted, and then met Jenny through him, and Chris was actually a guest player until after Castaways and Cutouts. So it was just the four of us; I was just playing acoustic guitar, Nate only played upright, and Jenny only played accordion, so we were this really weird folk band. I guess we are still. SN: Going back briefly to the “My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist” story… Was your idea at that point that you were going to be a fiction writer who also wrote songs, or vice versa. It seems like that experience, as terrible as it was, is exactly the kind of thing you’d see in a short story written by a college writer—the family, the river, the alienation; it’s all right there. But you mined it in a kind of abstract way, to make a really fabulistic, non-reality based song. Still a fiction, but not Fiction. Was that a turning point not just in your songwriting style, but in your identity as a writer as well? CM: I think that’s what I was being taught—that was how I was supposed to see it. I was getting my degree in English with an emphasis on Creative Writing, and taking all these workshops from the faculty at the University of Montana, and that MFA program is pretty renowned, but they teach you a kind of dogmatic approach to writing that’s really terse, non-fictionlike, you know, the Western style of writing: creative non-fiction. And that’s where everybody really shines, like Kitteredge, and Kevin Canty, and people like that… So that’s what I was being taught in writing classes, and that’s how I should have regurgitated that whole experience on that river trip, but I think I was so disillusioned with that whole approach that it was a reaction against that as well. I think it has a lot to do with the songwriting style that I followed after that. SN: Now that you’ve made three full-lengths and a couple of EPs and gotten acclaim as a writer and a band, do you feel emboldened to pursue that style more and more? There’s an obvious evolution of that fabulistic style (as I seem to keep calling it) from Castaways and Cutouts to Picaresque, and it’s obviously a big part of what people latch onto about the band—though it’s also obviously not all you do. Is it challenging to know when you might cross the line into being too bold or ridiculous? CM: Oh, totally. It’s a constant struggle of trying to gauge what works and what doesn’t. That’s the tough part. When I was playing to five people at the Laurelthirst, it didn’t matter if I made that decision. I could seriously get on stage and sing about whatever I wanted to and it didn’t make any difference. But certainly now, I have a lot more to think about. And part of me has wanted to get away from that. Even though the albums do have a lot of songs that are really not that fantastical, more straight pop stuff, which has always been something I’ve been fascinated with: writing that perfect pop song. This is gonna go off on a tangent here, but we were driving out east, listening to the radio, and ‘The One I Love’ by R.E.M. came on, and we were like, ‘Is this their one hit? Well, no. They have others—‘Stand,’ ‘Shiny Happy People’ and stuff—but this is the one they will always be remembered for, and why is that?’ And if you think about it, that song is two chords mainly— SN: And the chorus is the word “Fire.” CM: And then the verse is just one verse, repeated. And it’s beautiful. So beautiful. And it takes you to a place that no other R.E.M. single does. The economy of that song—that’s what masterful songwriting is. SN: I totally agree. Even if that song is kind of a goof on some level, it really transcends the cliché that it enacts. CM: Yeah, it’s like this heartfelt dedication, ‘this one goes out to the one I love,” but it’s E-minor! There’s an underlying sadness there, something really tragic about it. That’s another really masterful thing about it: the way the words and the melody work with the chord progression, how they play off each other. All that to say that kind of economy is really important to me. There’s something that’s very satisfying, even though it’s kind of a tangent on my quest to write the perfect pop song—which I don’t know if I will ever do—to do those sorts of things [fantastical Decemberists songs]. SN: Those are the ones that really stick out, though. For example, they’re the ones that sort of sound like the cover art looks, for example. That relationship is really strong, which helps forge the band’s identity. Then, you look a little closer and see that there’s a breadth of styles on the records. I get the connection between the “regular” songs and the fabulistic ones, but I could also see where you might be concerned that the showier numbers might overwhelm— CM: Which they do, and I know that people are going to pay more attention to the song about the chimbley sweep than about something else. It’s a lightning rod sort of song. But that’s fine, you know. In a way, playing those songs off the more serious, earnest, heartfelt pop numbers—my attempts at doing the perfect pop song—really kind of balance the band, and kind of keeps the humor there. You know, we don’t necessarily take ourselves that seriously. SN: Not to belabor it too much, but in terms of perfect pop, which is something I’ve thought about a lot in my life, I mean, the song “Infanta”—there’s really no flies on it. It’s not like it has any extraneous parts. The bridge might be a little long-ish, but the construction is very economical. And it’s super catchy and super exciting to listen to. That’s pop. The same is true of “16 Military Wives”—but that one’s not really written in the adventure language, though it kind of feels like it is. Speaking of which, do you feel that the vernacular of the showier songs tends to bleed into the more straightforward ones? CM: I think it will always be there, even in the straightest songs. Like ‘The Engine Driver’—it’s still very much a character narrating very much outside my personal experience. The only thing that I’ve done recently that’s like a first-person ‘meditation’ is ‘Everything I Try To Do, Nothing Seems To Turn Out Right,’ which just doesn’t fit, because it’s this over the top, self-deprecating, ironic, woe-is-me kind of song, and it came out as a B-side. It didn’t even make it on the record. But for the most part, even in the intimate stuff, I feel like I have to cast myself in different characters and parts. SN: Everyone I know knows that “Red Right Ankle” is the star of the last record, and the new one has “Of Angels and Angles,” which has a similarly quiet, beautiful feel. It’s the contrast with the big songs that makes them so effective… I have to ask about language. I know you get a lot of press, both positive and negative, for using fancy words. In most cases, the attention focuses on the premise that using words with more than two syllables is somehow a revolutionary act in pop songwriting. But I’ve been through all the lyric booklets, and there is quite a lot of language that I think of as specialized—I mean, I have a friend who once kind of shot me down by saying “I suppose most people think of any knowledge they don’t possess is specialized…” But, there are a lot of “palanquins” and “tamaracks” and stuff like that, stuff that I had to look up. Does the language of your adventurous songs reflect your taste in reading? CM: That’s a really funny thing that people ask me that makes me think—not that they don’t understand, but… I mean, people say ‘You must do a lot of research to do these things.’ I mean, all the characters in all these songs, the really fabulist ones, the Chimbley Sweep, the Legionnaire, the Infanta and things like that—there’s no research involved. In fact, there’s a considerable lack of research involved. You only need a passing knowledge of history. They’re just folktale archetypes that everybody knows. When you say ‘legionnaire,’ everybody has a picture of a legionnaire in their head. ‘The Infanta,’ granted, maybe not everybody knows what an Infanta is, but it really doesn’t take that much to know. And from the definition alone, it immediately evokes something in your head. You don’t need to have researched it. SN: And the song, especially that song, kind of does the job of giving you a musical prompt to imagine the meaning of a given word—whether or not it’s accurate. But even though there are a lot of words in the songs that a typical listener might have to look up in a dictionary, the primary impulse in your use of those words, as you’ve pointed out in many interviews, is to satisfy a rhythmic imperative or to set up an elaborate rhyme, rather than, say, to demonstrate knowledge. In a weird way, that kind of close attention to syllables and scansion and consonance and all that stuff reminds me of hiphop more than rock’n’roll—though there’s obviously not a big thematic link… CM: I wonder if, like, your average street mix-tape rapper knows what alliteration is, or knows what consonance is. But the really good ones absolutely adhere to it. That is their ammunition, which is really amazing if you come to it from an academic background at all—that basically a literary trope is used by street rappers just naturally and you don’t need to put a name on it. But it just comes from a basic understanding of… Just having rhythm. None of those words are intended to be intellectual or exclusive, like if you don’t know this word then… I don’t even like to talk about it. It’s unfortunate that those sorts of words in a poem, nobody would say, ‘Oh, that’s interesting how Jeffery Hill uses this word…’ It’s just accepted that it’s part of the medium. SN: Right, using language that’s actually available to everyone. But in songwriting, if you use more than two or three syllables, or use a word someone imaginary 12-year-old listener might not know already, there’s an orthodoxy that says you’ve violated some kind of deep rock law. It’s funny how the one school of thought that says rock music shouldn’t be smart is so clearly contradicted by the vast sea of listeners who actually prefer smart music a lot of the time. But there’s that other school, within the smart audience, that really resents people who get a reputation for being smarty pants writers. Given your growing reputation as an “intellectual” songwriter, is that backlash something you’ve encountered or that you worry about? CM: Well, yeah, but my hope is that we kind of disarm people who call us ‘intellectual’ or ‘hoitsy-toitsy’ or ‘collegiate’ or whatever, are so silly, because, while the language is there, I also totally poke fun at it. And we go back to Morrissey with that: that ability to toy with his own image, and all those sort of high minded ideas in his songs are always balanced with a really low sense of humor, like really low. Like a hair’s breadth away from toilet humor. SN: The puns in his song and album titles alone. CM: Right, like Your Arsenal. That’s toilet humor. And that’s what’s so brilliant about him. And so people who call him intellectual, or elite, or exclusive, or miserable, don’t get it. They don’t get the fact that Your Arsenal is referring to your ass. It’s so beautiful. And there’s probably a good chunk of people who own that record and don’t even recognize that. Probably most of them. So, yeah. But I think that’s a common trend, anti-intellectualism. You see that in our administration; people just don’t like the idea of a President who’s smarter than them. SN: I think the problem is when people perceive intelligence as the source of arrogance. People are so sensitive to other people’s superiority, but how can they not see that Bush is obviously the most arrogant American citizen. Did they not see the debates? Bush was far more of a snob—he looked like he was affronted that he even had to be there. Kerry seemed like he was proud of his education— CM: And why shouldn’t he be? Do we really need to think of our president as cut of our own cloth? Don’t you want him to be as educated as he possibly can, as well mannered as he possibly can? All these things that obviously the core voting population finds kind of appalling? But they really just don’t want him to act like he’s smarter than them, by using words, you know. So Kerry, it’s interesting, if you look at the beginning of the campaign and then how he was tailoring his word choices by the end, just dumbing it down. SN: Having the bias against words that are, let’s say, large… the same bias that exists in the relationship between people and the government also exists, super-acutely between rock fans, or at least critics, and musicians. And even if the critics have dusty degrees, there’s still this idea that rock is supposed to be from the gut and pure and authentic—which it definitely can be, but the idea that it can’t use other tools is ridiculous. CM: And it’s really heartbreaking, because those words, regardless of what they mean, or whether or not what they’re referring to is outmoded—they’re so beautiful. There are so many beautiful and underused words. I mean, seriously, open up a dictionary to any page, and you’ll discover just a gorgeous word that you may never have an opportunity to use. And it breaks my heart, just saying them. And that’s the great thing about playing in this band: that I can say ‘pantaloons,’ you know, through the P.A., broadcast to 600 people on any given night, and I can relish it while performing these songs. It’s part of the recitation. The delivery is as much a part of it as the songs themselves, that I can just trip over those words it’s so beautiful and fun and really satisfying to me. SN: It also seems like the area where you’re best able to enact the component of absurdism of a lot of these songs, and of the band as a whole. Speaking of which… The two influences that obviously turn up in all your interviews are Morrissey and Robyn Hitchcock, and I can hear both of them in your songs—particularly Morrissey’s melodies, and Hitchcock’s lyrical otherworldliness. But are there any bands that provide a model for the kind of grand, adventurous style—not necessarily the sound or aesthetic, but the gesture of The Decemberists? CM: I guess, I hate to say it, and it really bums me out, but the media has really destroyed my love for Neutral Milk Hotel [by comparing Meloy to Jeff Mangum], to the point where it’s hard for me to even talk about them. I should be able to just shrug it off, and I do, but it’s basically made it so I really can’t talk about Neutral Milk Hotel, when in fact I really love that record [In The Aeroplane, Over the Sea], and I certainly think it’s had an influence on what we do, and I think of them as a band that at their high point really played around with these grand, gestural things. And I think I’ve drawn from that for sure, but I think it’s the timbre of my voice that has really nailed us to the Neutral Milk Hotel cross. Other people… Oh, the Fiery Furnaces, Blueberry Boat. When I first heard that, it was so exciting. It came out in the fall when we had just finished the record and I was like ‘Fuck! We should’ve done that.’ You know how it works: a record is always the sum of the songs you’ve written over the last year and a half or so, unless you’re really prolific. So it’s never really where you’re at. I think recording The Tain really opened us up. It was pushing things even farther than in the days when I was playing these songs at the Laurelthirst. We knew not many people would hear it, because it was on this really small label, it was an EP, so we just said, ‘let’s do it.’ So, that’s where my head has been a lot more. A lot of the songs on Picaresque were written prior to The Tain, which was written over a weekend. And so, when I heard Blueberry Boat, I kind of felt like I had chickened out a little bit… But I do think it’s an important record, and I love it. It’s as close as we’ve gotten to the thing, you know? I don’t know if we can get closer. SN: I know you made a video and are doing a lot of touring. Is Kill Rock Stars giving Picaresque the full promotional treatment? CM: We have the dubious honor of having spent the most money of any Kill Rock Stars band on a record by, like, ten-fold. SN: More even than the Sue P. Fox spoken word record? CM: Totally. More, even, that Hella. I mean it’s not a big stretch, but it’s still kind of dubious… But yeah, Slim is really committed to the record, and it’s going to get the release it deserves, relative to Kill Rock Stars’ resources. But yeah, I think we’re gonna just go for it with this one, and we’ll see. SN: How big are the shows you’re doing on this tour? Are you playing The Showbox in every town? CM: Pretty much. It’s mostly 1000-to-1400, 1500-people. We’re starting to do theaters more and more, which is great. SN: Do you have a sense of how big the band might get, or how big it could get without you feeling uncomfortable? CM: I have no idea. No idea. So far it’s been a breeze. I haven’t felt any pressure whatsoever. I haven’t felt like anybody’s breathing down my neck to do one thing or another. I don’t feel like anybody’s criticizing the choices we’ve made, musically or otherwise. There’s no pressure for us to dress better or anything like that. Which is the way it should be, naturally. I mean, we’ve had to make some compromises and things here and there, but for the most part, we’ve had a really easy go. SN: I’m a pretty devoted fan of your band and I remain really stunned at the fact that you appeal to so many people so strongly. It’s so strange to think of you guys in the indie rock fabric, alongside the Death Cab for Cuties, Modest Mouses, and Bright Eyeses. Frankly, I think it’s a great thing, but you’ve gotta admit, it’s fucking weird. CM: It’s totally weird. They’re playing ‘16 Military Wives’ on [Portland commercial radio station] KNRK, right up next to the Green Day single and stuff like that. I never thought we’d appeal to that crowd, but apparently, to a certain level, we do. I think we have doggedly insisted on being true to what we want to do, even if it makes us look like complete fools, which it has at times. But I think people recognize that, and I think generally people recognize that in themselves. I think that’s why we get people who really attach themselves to the band, is that they see a band that’s really willing to put themselves out there, and this is who they are, and this is what they do, and I think that’s really appealing to people. I mean, we couldn’t compromise. We have enough recorded evidence of us, you know, singing about the things that we do, and the photos alone… in a way, that’s going back to the thing about trying to disarm critics. You can’t make fun of us. We make fun of ourselves on a daily basis. And I think people recognize that sense of fun. I mean the whole photo shoot thing was an exercise mainly to try to remove some of the absurdity of what a rock band photo is, which is so sad. Why does being cool have to be such a part of playing music? I mean, I think that we’re cool people, but I don’t particularly want to display that, or try to show how cool I am in a photograph. I see these photographs of these bands, and they’re so art damaged and so miserable looking. It’s so silly. I remember seeing a Xiu Xiu photograph, and this is when the band had first started, and one of them was lying on the ground with fake blood pouring out of him, and the other one checking his pulse and looking off, and there was a gun, and someone else was running away. And I was just like wow, that is a fucking awesome band photograph. It’s just so accepted what a band photograph should look like. Why do we really need to have band photograph. And at first, everyone was really receptive to our photos, dealing with weeklies and webzines. But I swear to god, once you start hitting major magazines, they have a really hard time. We had to really convince people to run our photographs. You know, they want to run a photo, but they’re like, ‘can we get something that’s a little more straight? This isn’t really the magazine’s style,’ and it’s like, that’s why we’re doing it. What we’re trying to do is make it so Spin Magazine has to run a photograph of Chris Funk in a gigantic beard. And Jenny and Nate as ghosts. And the people who do run them have a good sense of humor and are able to make fun of themselves. By making fun of us. SN: In terms of the band’s identity, it seems like Portland is a big part of what makes The Decemberists what they are. I kind of see you guys as part of the lineage of bands that reflect the character of Portland, like Hazel in the early ‘90s and Quasi after them. I think The Decemberists are part of that strain. CM: That’s cool. I’m still getting—I mean the fact that we are a Portland band is just starting to register. We’re only just starting to be embraced by the city. SN: Was making it out of town a big part of that? CM: Totally. Portland is a notoriously hard place, even for touring bands. I’ve always had a strong allegiance to Portland and will always trumpet anywhere we go, but it was definitely an uphill battle here. I think we share a lot of the experiences a lot of bands have had. There’s such a glut of rock bands in this town, which is great, but it makes for kind of a spoiled populace. But we were playing big clubs in San Francisco and L.A. and New York and Chicago before we even had a toehold in Portland and I don’t know what that is about the town. It’s just the way it is. They have high standards here. SN: But even beyond playing here, I mean, making the album in a church, and not just any church, but that church, seems very Portland to me. It’s a small thing, but, I remember you had all the song titles in a hat, and you would pull them out randomly to work on them. But it wasn’t a hat, it was a bike helmet. That seems very Portland. CM: I think there’s something there. The fact that Portland, for us, has always been kind of a difficult mistress. That’s totally a misogynist way of putting it, but it’s like someone you’re really trying to—for me, Portland was the thing that I most wanted to be embraced by. And playing to big crowds in New York was secondary. Like the fact that we’re probably going to sell out the Crystal Ballroom means more than selling out Irving Plaza [NY], or the Henry Fonda Theater [LA] 10 times over. It’s finally getting recognition from the city that we love. And I don’t think it’s a bummer—like, ‘oh, fucking Portland, nobody comes out, this is bullshit…’—I just think it’s always been a challenge. Because there’s always been a community there, but really being able to reach out beyond the indie rock community to the general populace, you know, the bike riding, nature shopping— SN: Hippie divided by punk. CM: Exactly. To be a part of the town’s fabric has been really important to me. I think that’s really an amazing thing. And going to the church, there’s something intrinsic to the city that lends itself to that kind of approach. The fact that you can do that, relatively easily, that the place exists. And even though David Morrison, who owns the church, had no idea what we were going to be doing, you know, he thought we were just going to be bringing a few microphones and some instruments and that’s it—he had no idea the level of production that was going to be involved… it’s really just what Portland’s about, you know? It’s a really innocent city.