Quirky songs serve up history

By John Chandler

The Portland Tribune, Nov 7, 2003, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Once upon a time, there was a whimsical fellow named Colin Meloy. He grew up in Missoula, Mont., but in 1999 his dreams, ambition and formidable imagination led him to Portland, where he shucked off his old country-rock band and began to write strange and wonderful songs.

Meloy, 29, is the singer, songwriter and storyteller for the Decemberists, a group that stubbornly flies in the face of pop convention, giving shape to songs about shanghaied sailors, fallen women, soldiers on the front lines and other vivid historical characters hatched from Meloy’s fevered brow.

“It’s all based on my whims and fascinations,” Meloy says. “I go through phases of finding singular historical time periods and literary conventions Ñ like nautical themes. Then I started getting into World War I. Also Spanish, gypsy motifs.

“They just pop up and suggest themselves. I get a little obsessed for like two or three months, and out of that obsession comes a slew of songs.”

It wasn’t always so. When Meloy arrived in Portland five years ago, he was the leader of a band called Tarkio. While the band’s songs showed promise, they were far more conventional than his current output.

“It was almost like I hit rock bottom and started clawing my way back up,” he says. “When I first moved to Portland, it was a little ugly. My connections in the Portland music scene, what few I had, weren’t returning my calls.

“I was playing open mikes and things like that. I’d be like at the Laurelthirst on Monday night, Dec. 27, or something. There was nobody listening. I was playing some of the stuff from Tarkio, which was more traditional alt-country, though we were moving in sort of a more dour, melancholy and less positive direction. But I found it’s really no fun to play that stuff when no one’s listening.”

Convinced that no one was paying attention, Meloy began to tap his passion for books, obscure films and history for subject matter. Taking a page from fanciful fringe artists such as Robyn Hitchcock, Belle and Sebastian and the Smiths, Meloy began to have fun with his new, more dramatic material.

“I started writing songs that I could play to myself,” he says. “Or to the bartender, or to the two people at the bar who were actually listening. I just started coming out with these really bizarre narratives and things that were as entertaining to write as they were to perform.

“I honestly thought that I was pushing myself farther into absurdism, and that I would get fewer and fewer audience members. But it seems to have had the opposite effect, which is a happy accident.”

Meloy formed the Decemberists last year, and the band has released two full-length albums. The latest is “Her Majesty the Decemberists,” for Olympia’s Kill Rock Stars label. Like its predecessor, “Castaways and Cutouts,” it is rife with songs from different historical periods, often written in the mannered fashion of their times, usually with cunning and complicated wordplay.

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