DAVID GREENE, HOST:
I'm David Greene with a tale of a quirky band that rose to the top of the charts and then sort of disappeared, like the sailors in one of their famous songs.
COLIN MELOY: We need you, at a certain point of this song, to all collectively scream like you're being swallowed by a whale.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE MARINER'S REVENGE SONG")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) We are two mariners, our ship's sole survivors, in this belly of a whale.
GREENE: It's The Decemberists. They're known for being jaunty, mischievous, sometimes dark. We spoke with their lead singer and songwriter Colin Meloy.
I heard an interview where you said when you start played, you tried to be provocative, to scuttle your own ship, as you put it. What does that mean?
MELOY: (Laughter) I don't know, but that's funny. OK, I'm going to try to unpack that. I guess...
GREENE: (Laughter) OK.
MELOY: I would've meant, you know, I feel like the early days of The Decemberists, or my first days of when I had moved to Portland after college, there were so few people paying attention, playing little happy hours in basement bars on summer days.
GREENE: No one wants to be in a basement bar on a summer day (laughter). I guess that's the best answer...
MELOY: No (laughter) and I would be playing to nobody.
GREENE: (Laughter).
MELOY: Literally, sometimes the bartender would be, you know, at the bar and then he would leave to go get something and then I would be still playing, and it's kind of like I didn't really care what people thought 'cause nobody was thinking about it.
GREENE: (Laughter).
MELOY: There was no audience to not care about. And so I think it led me to a lot of experimentation. And then I think once there was an audience, maybe there was something about missing that, not ever taking yourself so seriously. It seemed to me a really important part about good music.
GREENE: And that's really the journey The Decemberists have been on. They became so popular their last album debuted at number one on the Billboard charts. After that unexpected success, the band took a four-year hiatus. Now they're back with a new album, and The Decemberists' feel is still there.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PHILOMENA")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) Oh, Philomena, are you in a tawdry gown? Lean to your window, let's slip a ribbon down. A cure to your boredom if only you'd let me go down, down, down.
GREENE: OK, so what's this song about?
MELOY: Well, that song is clearly about kind of juvenile sexual fumblings.
GREENE: (Laughter).
MELOY: I think the chord progression and the melody came first and it was so sweet and so treacly that it needed some kind of caustic - something to rub against it. And so I thought it being - making a really dirty song out of it was just the way to go.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "PHILOMENA")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) All I ever wanted in the world was just to live to see a naked girl, but I found I quickly bored. I wanted more, oh, so much more.
GREENE: But listen to this whole album and you do get the sense that Colin Meloy is changing a little. And it's almost like he wants to warn his fans. He has a song called "The Singer Addresses His Audience."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SINGER ADDRESSES HIS AUDIENCE")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) We know, we know, we belong to you. We know you built your life around us, and would we change? We had to change some.
GREENE: What are you telling your fans here? How have you changed?
MELOY: Well, you know, I think that that song is as much a kind of message to listeners of the record as it is just an exploration of the relationship between the singer or the entertainer and an audience. There's this funny back-and-forth, you know, of expectations of one to the other. You know, to me, almost the I in that song, I don't think of it as being me. When I'd written it, I'd imagined it as, like, a lead singer of a boy band, you know, who's maybe getting on a little bit. So maybe he's like 25 or 26, but all he's ever known is celebrity.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SINGER ADDRESSES HIS AUDIENCE")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) We're aware that you cut your hair in the style that our drummer wore in the video.
MELOY: I'm just kind of trying to come to terms with what is it to change or not change, and who are you making art for? Are you making it for yourself or for your audience?
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THE SINGER ADDRESSES HIS AUDIENCE")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) We did it all for you.
GREENE: In the four years leading to this new album, Meloy, who's now 40, took time for himself and his family. He worked on children's novels with his wife, who's an illustrator. The couple had a second son. All of this put the music in perspective.
MELOY: The music suddenly became something that it had been, you know, prior to The Decemberists, where it was something that I had done in between my shifts at the restaurant that I worked at. And in some respects, it was nice to get back to that. There was no deadline. There were no record label people calling me and wondering when the record was going to happen, and it was very refreshing.
GREENE: He was writing songs when he felt like it - exploring relationships, fatherhood, one song is about the tragic school shooting at Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 young children. His son, Hank, was in first grade at the time.
MELOY: And I remember picking him up at school and just seeing how everybody was just so in shock, and you can only help but imagine where you would be if you weren't in that position and knowing that there were people out there, you know, suffering. Finally, something in me kind of burst and I needed to do something, you know, even if it was something as incidental, you know, as writing a song, just getting something out.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "12-17-12")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) What a gift, what a gift you've been givin' me. Here with my heart so whole while others may be grieving, to think of their grieving.
GREENE: Here with my heart so whole while others may be grieving.
MELOY: Yes. I think it's just trying to make sense of the riches that you might have and sometimes that you might kind of take for granted while you know that others might be so devastated.
GREENE: There's another lyric in the song and it's the name of the album actually - "What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World." And, wow, I just hear that and I think about some of the events that we've been covering around the world in the last few weeks and months.
MELOY: Yeah. It is just trying to figure out how do these two things go together? It's absurd. You know, how can things be so beautiful and yet so horrible at the same time? And the song and the record, to a certain extent, is me trying to make sense of that.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "12-17-12")
THE DECEMBERISTS: (Singing) What a terrible world, what a beautiful world, what a world do we make here?
GREENE: Colin Meloy, thanks so much for spending some time with us. We really appreciate it.
MELOY: Yeah, I got really heavy really quickly. I'm sorry.
GREENE: No apologies. I really enjoyed the conversation with you. That was singer Colin Meloy from The Decemberists.