As he opens The Decemberists’ long-awaited seventh studio album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World, one could be forgiven for thinking songwriter Colin Meloy is directly addressing the band’s many fans across the world.

The track The Singer Addresses His Audience talks about how a band has to evolve, change and adapt and even sell out, despite what its fans might want.

“In my mind that voice in the song is not me, but the lead singer of a boy band who has only ever known celebrity,” says Meloy.

“He is trying to make sense of the relationship between himself and his audience. Although my own experience informs that, it’s an exploration outside myself of that relationship, and what kind of obligations we have as entertainers. To be honest when you look at our records they haven’t altered that much. I don’t think we’ve done anything pretty shocking to a mainstream audience or hardcore fan base – we’re not like Sufjan Stevens who has spent the last few years dabbling in electronica. The song is a little bit of a canard in that maybe I’m just too cowardly to change much!”

That said Meloy’s career as songwriter and frontman of the Portland-based band has been an idiosyncratic one.

His writing eschews the classic pop boy meets girl /falls in or out of love structure, with subject matter ranging from a lack of achievement on the playing field in This Sporting Life, to a murderous sailor’s epic plot to avenge his wronged mother in The Mariner’s Revenge Song. Perhaps the apex of Meloy’s storytelling was in the brilliant 2009 concept album The Hazards Of Love, a sprawling tale of witches, virginal maidens in distress, murderous rakes and avenging ghostly children, all married to beautiful melodies and acoustic instrumentation.

“We were experimenting with storytelling for a while,” admits Meloy. “The Hazards Of Love was seeing that to its very absurd conclusion, blowing it out as much as I could.

“[Follow-up album] The King Is Dead was setting it to rights, trying to work out how to square things again.

“They sit together in my mind as being odd siblings of one another.”

With guest appearances from the likes of REM guitarist Peter Buck, and singer-songwriters Gillian Welch and Laura Veirs, The King Is Dead topped the US Billboard charts in 2011. It was a more traditional country-influenced pastoral rock album, packed with earworm choruses on songs like Rox In The Box, This Is Why We Fight and Down By The Water. The band’s first album in four years comes from the same place, packed with acoustic-flavoured indie-rock masterpieces, including the brilliant Cavalry Captain, lead single Make You Better and tongue-in-cheek love song Philomena, with its repeated refrain: “All I wanted in the world was just to live to see a naked girl”.

“I’m coming to see the record as a portrait of myself and the band over the course of four years,” says Meloy. “There is a progression. The album isn’t sequenced in any progressive way, although it would have been an interesting thing to do, to see the songs that fed in from The King Is Dead era and then how we moved away from it.”

As well as writing material for the album Meloy has enjoyed plenty of other extra-curricular activities in the last four years – from penning the Wildwood Chronicles series of picture books with his wife artist Carson Ellis (who designs all The Decemberists’ album covers), to touring as a solo artist singing the songs of Kinks mainman Ray Davies alongside Decemberists favourites.

“I’m a compulsively creative person,” admits Meloy. “Where other people might be content to just disappear completely and put their work away for a while, I’m always doing something.”

The solo tour found its way into the development of the latest Decemberists record.

“A lot of people were comparing us to Ray Davies – particularly the mini suites and Arthur album,” says Meloy, who recorded a tour-only EP of Kinks classics.

“I knew the hits, but I had never gone as deep as some of his concept records. It was a fun opportunity for me to really go in and rediscover the records and the songwriting. I realised how deceptively intricate they can be.

“I started out playing solo acoustic, and in some ways that’s a more comfortable way for me to do a show. It’s nice to be able to play the songs as they were originally written and try out new songs with different arrangements.”

He admits he is not someone who just sits down and writes lyrics separately, saying that everything tends to come at once.

“The lyrics are often informed by the melody, and the melody is informed by the chord progression – it’s about strumming and singing,” he says. “I’ve never been able to write in a hotel room or at the back of a bus. I need to have a safe comfortable space where I know nobody is listening in. I’m really conscious of not offending anybody.”

Writing the Wildwood Chronicles partially satisfied his need to tell a story with his lyrics.

“Narrative was finding its way less and less into the songs,” he says. “As soon as I finished writing the books I could see the narrative creeping back into songs like Carolina No, Cavalry Captain and Till The Water Is All Long Gone. As the books were satisfying the need for narrative, the songs became more autobiographical. There have been autobiographical songs that pop up on our records, but they tend to be overshadowed by the narrative stuff.”

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