Colin Meloy Reveals Details of New Decemberists Album

Most of The King Is Dead—the Decemberists album that's due out Jan. 18—was made over the course of six weeks at Pendarvis Farm, an 80-acre site east of Portland, Ore. that also hosts the annual music festival Pickathon, at which the Decemberists' bluegrass side project Black Prairie played this summer. The Portland-based quintet and co-producer Tucker Martine didn't quite anticipate how wet the sessions were going to be, though. "The idea was to camp out a little bit more, which the weather has not necessarily permitted," singer/guitarist Colin Meloy observes. "A lot of rain on the roof will probably make it into the recording."

Indeed, this is the most pastoral, rustic record they've ever made, despite its flashes of the band's trademark rococo wordplay ("Calamity Song" features the phrase "queen of supply-side bonhomie bone-drab"). Meloy notes that his songs were inspired in part by the sound of early R.E.M. The track "Down by the Water," in particular, "started out as more of a paean to R.E.M. than I think any of us really wanted it to be." The band tinkered with it to make it sound a bit less like Reckoning — and then R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck joined them to play on it. "It was really cool," Meloy says. "Even playing those simple parts, he's a master."

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Song Stories

“Is It True”

Brenda Lee | 1964

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."

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