Pitchfork

Earlier this week, we told you that the new Decemberists album, their Capitol Records debut, now has a title (The Crane Wife) and a release date (October 3). Overwhelmed with excitement, we called up Colin Meloy so that he could fill us in with more details about the record.

The title track, a three-part epic that "makes up the heart of the record" was inspired by a Chinese folktale Meloy discovered while working in a bookstore. "The folktale is about a peasant in, I assume, feudal Japan (I don't know when the folktale actually originated)," Meloy said. "He's walking in the woods one day and he finds a crane that is wounded, injured with an arrow in its wing. And he kindly removes the arrow and revives the crane; the crane flies off. A couple days later this woman appears at his door, and they fall in love and get married. But they're really poor, so she suggests that in order for them to make money she should weave cloth for them to sell at the market. She goes off into this room and closes the door and makes him swear never to peek in, and if he does then some terrible thing will happen. So each day she goes in and makes this beautiful cloth, and he sells it for a lot of money, but he never quite knows what's going on inside the room. Until one day his curiosity gets the better of him; he peeks in and sees that she is a crane in fact, and has been picking out her feathers and putting them into the cloth, and she's bleeding. So she sees that he's seen her; she turns back into a crane and flies away, and that's the end.

"I always thought that it would be a good idea for a song cycle, or at least a challenging one, and it proved to be that, I think. I first started thinking about that idea two or three years ago, and immediately started working on some stuff with it, but it never really came together. I was having a hard time piecing it together, until after the last record I really set my mind to it. 'The Crane Wife' isn't going to be the only multi-part song cycle on the album, though. There's also 'The Island', which is "in the 12-minute range" and "not so cohesive, story-wise," according to Meloy. "But it will nicely offset the linear narrative of "The Crane Wife". It's kind of a piece showcasing the rest of the band as well, which is exciting. We're starting to delve more into British folk, especially from the 60s and 70s. Like Shirley Collins and Ann Briggs and Fairport Convention and things like that. And it's really sort of come to a head in preparing for this record. So there's a lot of exploration about where British folk met prog in the early 70s, late 60s. So ["The Island"] is definitely heavily influenced by that era."

If all this talk of epic multi-part song cycles sounds suspiciously familiar, bringing to mind the band's 2004 eighteen-minute, five-part The Tain EP, well, there's a reason for that. "Half of [2005's] Picaresque, maybe even more than half, had already been written by the time The Tain came about," Meloy said, "So I almost feel like this record has more to do with The Tain than Picaresque was. Because most of the material had already been written. That often happens, you kind of skip generations. The influence of a certain record is always coming from two years prior."

The band has been holed up in Kung Fu Bakery studios in Portland, Oregon since mid-April, with Tucker Martine and Death Cab for Cutie's Chris Walla behind the controls; they hope to be finished by the end of June.

They're currently choosing between 22 new songs for the album. Those include "Yankee Bayonet", a "Civil War-era ghost love story" ("My particular fascinations, I guess you can't really get away from them-- wars and soldiers and ghosts, things like that") featuring an as-yet-undetermined female vocalist duetting with Meloy, as well as "The Perfect Crime Number Two". "The Perfect Crime Number One", which "was recorded live a couple days ago after an absinthe binge," probably won't make the cut.

"It's hard to totally say what the record is going to be like," Meloy said, "since we're still in the beginning stages of it, and especially since there's so many songs that need to be trimmed down into a record, it's hard to say what the shape of the record will be. But for the most part, it feels like it's going to be kind of strange. And there will be a few of the three- or four-minute pop numbers that will have the Decemberisty tint to them. But for the most part it feels like-- it's kind of cliché, but-- exploring new territory, which is exciting."

Vocalist/violinist Petra Haden, who has been touring with the band, has not joined the Decemberists in the studio. "Petra Haden is not involved, for a number of reasons," Meloy explained. "One being that she was just kind of taken on to be an extra musician for the Picaresque tour, and now we're done with that and working on new material. We still will absorb musicians on the road, but we wanted to wait and see what the material ended up like before we made any decisions."

The major label experience has been going smoothly so far. Meloy said, "We've had the Capitol Records A&R people come in, which is kind of terrifying because as long as I've been a fan of music, and been aware of the differences between independent labels and major labels, that infamous initial listening by the A&R people in which they frown and shake their heads and say they need to hear more singles, that was kind of terrifying to me.

"So they came in, and we had strategically put together the two obvious singles that were both short and kind of poppy and fit in with the Decemberists idiom and played them for them. And they liked them. And they asked what else we were doing, and then we started playing the long proggy song cycles, and that's when they got really excited. So it was kind of a positive bit of reinforcement, that they actually support the fact that we're moving in a relatively strange direction."

Meloy said that the band hopes to convey that strangeness with suitable stage presentation on the tour in support in the album, which will begin this fall. "It's going to be playing bigger places, and there's always bigger ticket prices at those places, so we really want to make an extra effort to make it a good show. The best that we could do is to offer a better show I guess. So there will be some funny stuff I'm sure, to be determined."

The Decemberists plan to lay low for most of the rest of the summer, with only three shows scheduled. And they are:

06-16 Telluride, CO - Telluride Bluegrass Festival
08-23 Seattle, WA - Woodland Park Zoo
08-26 Salem, OR - NRK Festival

As for Henry "Hank" Meloy, Colin's son with girlfriend Carson Ellis (aka the woman behind the Decemberists' awesome illustrations), Meloy reported that "He's doing really great, actually! Fantastic. Sleeping all the way through the night, which is awesome." Yes, indeed.