The Decemberists are heading to Oakland on July 27th to perform at the beautiful Fox Theater. They are currently out on tour in support of their album, I’ll Be Your Girl. The new album brings to life their music as they explore new approaches of making music, all the while broadening their sonic range. Check out their track, Severed which is off the album,
About the new album,
As busy as they have been, the band felt a need to shake things up. “On the last record,” says Meloy, “there were moments when I thought I was making familiar choices. I tried to be mindful in the songwriting process of challenging myself and being a little more critical. The idea was, how can we make unfamiliar choices, turn off the light a little and grope around in the dark a bit?”
Previous Decemberists’ records like The Hazards of Love or The Crane Wife have been structured around thematic or musical concepts, though Meloy maintains that ultimately, it’s always “our frame of mind that ties them together.” This time, he says, the songs share a mood that’s steeped in our current times and condition—“exuberant nihilism, an apocalyptic dance party was what we envisioned.”
“We were talking about music and our references,” says Meloy. “It kept coming back to Roxy Music and early glam, and we dove in with that in mind. The Decemberists are a record-collectors’ band, we’re all fans and scholars of music, so there a lot of touch points that we all get, but they don’t always come through. So we were trying to embrace that Bryan Ferry aspect, that kind of set the tone.”
The approach the Decemberists pursued on I’ll Be Your Girl also allowed for a new sense of contribution and involvement from the other band members. “Since we were going to mix it up, everybody felt like they had more of a voice,” says Meloy. Highlighting the input of Chris Funk and Jenny Conlee, Meloy mentions “Severed” as a significant team effort. “That was written as a punk song, but wasn’t really working,” he says. “Jenny set this arpeggio throughout it, and it became like an early New Order song. And I had forgotten that when we made the demo, I also started a file to turn it into more of a Depeche Mode song—I actually wanted it to be a synth song all along.”
I’ll Be Your Girl is the sound of a veteran band finding new inspiration, a unit unafraid of challenging itself to re-connect with its creativity. “Making music is an infinite choose-your-own-adventure,” says Meloy (who is also, of course, the author of a series of best-selling children’s books), “and when you go down one path, the other paths get sealed off. So every time we could, we said, ‘If this is what our impulses would tell us to do, let’s try to imagine it in a different way.’”
You don’t want to miss them perform at The Fox on July 27th. Their shows are dyanamic, fully entertaining and are not to be missed. You can head over to http://thefoxoakland.com/events/the-decemberists-3 for show information and tickets.
Make sure to visit their social media sites and stay up to date on their latest news.
Information & Links:
- Website: http://decemberists.com/
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/TheDecemberists
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/TheDecemberists
- Youtube: http://youtube.com/TheDecemberists
- Instagram: http://instagram.com/TheDecemberists
Leave a Reply