Come and See
Colin Meloy wants you to put the dictionary down and get busy sweeping his chimney.
By Pepper Martin
25.October.2006

Editor's Note: Though our editorial focus is typically local, we were offered this unsolicited Colin Meloy interview from a fellow freelance writer. Since Meloy's Decemberists perform at Dallas' Gypsy Tea Room tonight (Wednesday) and the band's new record, The Crane Wife, is damn fantastic, we decided to run it. It's a treat of a disc, ranging from IRS-era-REM pop like "O Valencia" to epic, never-for-radio 10+ minute sojourns like "The Island," and we look forward to seeing the new, amped up--but hardly compromised--Decemberists vision on stage tonight.


Autumn De Wilde

Let's get this off to a good start...what interview question do you hate the most?

Colin Meloy: When I tell you, are you going to make me answer it? (No.) My least favorite interview question is where the band name comes from. That one is too common. (Ed's note: Don't interviewers ever check Wikipedia?)

You once said that your ultimate supergroup would consist of Bob Mould and Grant Hart. Isn't that an odd choice, considering your music is nothing like Hüsker Dü?

CM: I think Bob Mould got pigeonholed as a punk rocker too often. I think, at his core, Mould was a really great songwriter. I think of Hüsker Dü as being a psychedelic pop band, and a record like Zen Arcade, although it has its elements of hardcore, is really a psychedelic pop record. I never got a chance to see them.

Early on, you said that you wrote songs to alienate as many people as possible. Is that still the case?

CM: That was my initial experimentation phase when I was playing for nobody. It was just a way of getting people to pay attention by riling them up. To me, what seemed like an experiment, like playing a song about a legionnaire and getting at least a smattering of applause...that was progress.

On The Crane Wife, the band seems to explore a lot of new territory.

CM: Definitely. And not only did that have something to do with us wanting to dip our toes into different pools but really allowing the rest of the band's influences to come into play. A lot of the prog elements come from Chris Funk and Jenny Conlee--especially Jenny, who's a massive, massive fan of Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

You once said that modern singer-songwriters were creatively corrupt. Couldn’t you say the same thing about pop music in general?

CM: Yes and no. I guess what I am saying about singer-songwriters is just that mode of ’90s writing--using tired metaphors and imagery to basically bemoan your broken heart--felt so entirely derivative. I don’t think of that as pop music. When I think of pop music, I think about XTC, the La’s and REM. True popular music like Christina Aguilera, that stuff serves a purpose and that’s to entertain teenagers and more power to them.

Many reviews of the new CD say that it is less immediately catchy that previous efforts. Is that an intentional response to moving from an indie label to a major?

CM: I’ve heard varying reports. Some people say that it’s more accessible. I think it is less accessible, although I don’t think that was intentional. I mean, the practical thing to do would be to make a very accessible record, to use the advantages of having a major label at your disposal. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do.

The title track of the new effort is based on a Japanese folk tale, and you use a lot of foreign imagery. How about some good old American stuff, like homosexual Eskimos or Hawaiian prostitutes?

Well, there is a song about the Civil War (“Yankee Bayonet”), but things American feel to me kind of humdrum. What I like to write about are really exotic things, and those happen to be things outside of my realm of experience.

One of the best descriptions I have heard for your music came from a British paper. They described your as “British chamber pop and playful indie folk." Is it a blessing or a curse to play music that doesn’t easily fit within a genre?

CM: I’ve spent our entire career, I think, trying to explain to people what we do. And obviously, the easiest thing people can pigeonhole us with is indie rock, even though that’s such a wide blanket term, which probably doesn’t even cover us anymore. I just think of us as kind of folk music, folk rock in the traditional sense. In my songwriting, I take a lot of tips from old folk songs and that whole process of storytelling, rather than just kind of transient images in some sort of monologue.

One critic wrote that you make music for PBS contributors, NPR devotees and readers of the New Yorker. Is that fair criticism--overly literate and therefore somehow intellectually elitist?

CM: I don’t intend for the music to be elitist. I think there is a lot of low humor in it, masturbation jokes and things like that. I do take issue with the elitist tag and I think it’s unfortunate. I think that we live in such a barren environment when it comes to people valuing intellectualism; it’s remarkable that we are able to make the music that we do.

You know that there are people grabbing dictionaries to look up some of the words you use in songs.

CM: I don’t intend to send people to dictionaries. I always assume that you can pick up the meaning of a word by the context. I use those words because principally they are really beautiful words that should be used in poetry. If those same words were used in poetry, they wouldn’t seem remarkable at all, but in the context of a pop song, it suddenly becomes remarkable.

Do you see it as a failure that some people don’t understand the playful side of the band?

CM: I don’t think people pay much attention to it. There is a lot of low, sex humor involved, really, almost junior high level, sexual allusions. I mean, there is the chimney sweep and the widow and she wants him to come and sweep her chimney. Like, how much more pre-adolescent can you get than that?  



The Decemberists perform at the Gypsy Tea Room (ballroom side) on Wednesday, October 25, with Lavender Diamond . Front Gate Tickets still has some tickets left, or you can risk getting them at the door to save the service charge.