Colin Meloy was a creative-writing major with an alt-country hobby when he scrapped his extant artistic ambitions to form The Decemberists, a whimsical folk-pop outfit deeply indebted to the hummable melodies and gently twisted storytelling of Robyn Hitchcock and Belle And Sebastian. The band's 2002 debut, Castaways And Cutouts, impressed enough of the right people to get a 2003 reissue on the respected indie label Kill Rock Stars, which also put out the follow-up Her Majesty The Decemberists the same year. Even rock fans inclined to like Meloy's brand of bright, imaginative music have been amazed by The Decemberists' rapid progression from likeable imitators to true originals. The band's most recent two releases—last year's EP The Tain and the stunning new album Picaresque—have found Meloy discovering the contemporary relevance in ancient epic poems and campfire tales, while losing none of the catchiness that first endeared The Decemberists to scenesters. Meloy spoke with The Onion A.V. Club about his steady improvement and how long he thinks the run can last.
The Onion: On Castaways And Cutouts, The Decemberists already sounded fully realized. Was that because you'd been playing with other bands for a while?
Colin Meloy: I think that had a lot to do with it. I felt like I'd already explored a lot of directions and trimmed off the excess a little bit, and honed in on what sort of music I was most interested in making. In that sense, it was sort of easy to hit the ground running. But there was still some unknown there, given that we started as an acoustic guitar, upright bass, accordion, and drums combo. [Laughs.]
O: How did you come up with the concept for The Decemberists, given that you'd been writing and performing alt-country?
CM: Well there's an element of country I'll always love—largely its ties to traditional American, British, and Irish folk music. But I wanted to remove myself from that thing the late-'90s alt-country scene seemed to run into the ground: this kind of sentimental nostalgia for things rural. Having grown up in a rural community, it smacked of being a little hollow. And I just thought there were more interesting, vital things being done in pop music. Morrissey and Robyn Hitchcock having been my idols growing up, I wanted to try to create something that emulated what they were doing, but also infuse it with the storytelling nature of folk music.
O: Do you still do other kinds of writing, like short stories or poems?
CM: I haven't really had time. I did a book about The Replacements' Let It Be last year for the 33 1/3 series, but that was such a huge challenge, I don't know that I'll do it again any time soon. I still do little projects here and there when I can. Carson Ellis, my girlfriend and the illustrator who does our album covers and T-shirts and stuff, she and I have been collaborating on a ghost story that I wrote a while back, and we also have a kids' book on the back burner.
O: Back when you wrote a lot of short fiction, was it much like the songs you're writing now?
CM: When I was a kid it was, but once I got funneled into the creative-writing program, they try to get the fantastic stuff out of you. At least at University Of Montana. It's a school that really champions that western style of writing: really stoic non-fiction. So it was kind of beat out of me a little bit. I guess I felt obligated, like, "I'm mature, I'm a college student, I shouldn't be writing about weird, exotic things. I should be trying to get into the human spirit." But once I got out of school, I was so disillusioned that The Decemberists' songs were kind of a reaction against that.