Tom Lynch

There is a quiet literature in the words of Colin Meloy.

He's created a ball of shapeable wax, with a Portuguese princess, suicidal lovers, a disenfranchised athlete and vintage prostitutes united in experience. His Decemberists have triumphed before--two full lengths, "Her Majesty the Decemberists" and "Castaways and Cutouts," plus one E.P.--but here the Portland, Oregon band has created something else, a still picture in time, a window into a band that's in its prime. "Picaresque"(Kill Rock Stars) is Meloy and company's greatest achievement, and it all starts with a tribal, thundering floor tom beat.

"We just wanted to start off with a bang," Meloy says, and cites the opening of the band's previous record, "Her Majesty," a blood-curdling, cringe-inducing horror scream. "Just start big. Set the bar at the beginning, and everything that follows will be in relation to that. If we get it all out in the beginning, you know what you're in store for."

The entire record elicits a theatrical atmosphere--helped by the staged-and-in-costume booklet artwork, featuring each member of the band in different attire for each song--but even Meloy's storytelling seems as if it's all snatched from the stage, with believable characters thrown in unbelievable situations. "Yeah, for sure," he says. "I think that the whole attitude towards production and recording--it's all really theatrical. We have the theatrical aspects of the band in mind, and the songs' production in mind, which are thematically over-the-top. The photo shoot correlates as an homage to community theater, which was something that was important to me as a kid."

The band recorded the record in an old church, a setting that lent itself heavily to the process of creating the cohesiveness. "The feeling of community," he says, "it's an amazing feeling. While we were recording, people were coming in and hanging out, really relaxed." Meloy enjoyed the atmosphere created by the location, matched by the album's engineer, Death Cab For Cutie guitarist Chris Walla. "It was great. We just basically turned this church into a studio for three weeks. We were successful in removing any feeling of a studio. When someone was recording, everybody had to be completely quiet, to monitor everything through headphones. Everybody had to be focused. There was a lot of downtime, so we would sit around and chat. It had an open feeling--and when you were recording you didn't feel that on the spot."

"Picaresque" fills itself with The Decemberists' classic indie-pop and Meloy's recognizable--and individual, for those who still think he reflects Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum--voice, along with scattered horns, strings and accordion. And Meloy's tales cut deep. "There were all written over a year and half," he says. "I think my entire body of work as a songwriter is trying to create believable people populating songs that are dynamically interesting, whether they are personal tragedies or personal victories, and how they affect them. Each narrator deals with those things in a different way."

Meloy's been called the professor of the indie world before--the man who brings brains to the operation, a literary scholar and history geyser. "I kind of shrug it off I guess," he says. "It kind of breaks my heart a little that that has to be said. You just can't allow the same rules in pop songwriting as in any other writing. People find it so extraordinary that I use vocabulary, but nobody would say anything if I was a poet." A history buff, at least? "To the degree that any kid is," he says, "but I'm not, not any more than anyone else. [For the] characters in songs you only need a passing knowledge. These are archetypes handed down through generations of storytelling from folk songs and stuff. They're immediately recognizable, sort of universal. I like history. I studied history. I read nonfiction, but I'm not a history buff, nor do I research any of the songs. They're just archetypes." He jokes, "They're just characters that I know aren't completely accurate or very real."

One could only assume a skilled songwriter would weave in autobiography through such songs, if only to hide it from his audience. "There is," he says, "in some songs more than others. `Of Angles and Angels' (the record's gorgeous, bittersweet closer, with Meloy's voice paired simply with a lightly strummed acoustic guitar) is one of the straight-up, non-fantastical songs I've written. There's a certain aspect of character in `The Engine Driver' (see chorus: `And if you don't love me let me go') that is me. It pops in and out. For the most part I think of myself as a fiction writer, but there will always be some part of autobiography."

Any chance for a total Pete Townshend-like rock opera? "I'm moving towards that, we'll see," he says. "It's too early to tell."

The Decemberists play Metro on April 7.

(2005-04-05)

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