The Decemberists

The Decemberists, American indie-rock group known for its highly stylized, literate songs. The band’s principal members were lead singer and guitarist Colin Meloy (b. October 5, 1974, Helena, Montana, U.S.), keyboardist and accordionist Jenny Conlee (b. December 12, 1971, Seattle, Washington), guitarist Chris Funk (b. November 28, 1971, Valparaiso, Indiana), drummer John Moen (b. August 23, 1968, Brainerd, Minnesota), and bassist Nate Query (b. September 5, 1973, Bellevue, Washington).

Formed in 2000 in Portland, Oregon, The Decemberists (with drummers Ezra Holbrook to 2002 and Rachel Blumberg from 2002 to 2005) initially hewed to a primarily folk-pop sound built around acoustic guitar melodies. Their first album, however, Castaways and Cutouts (2002), featured the baroque instrumentation and narrative song structures (as well as Meloy’s idiosyncratically nasal voice) that would become the band’s hallmarks.

In 2003 the group released Her Majesty The Decemberists, which built on the first album’s sound to include prominent horn and string sections. Their EP (a format intermediate in length between a single and an album) The Tain (2004) consisted of a single song broken into multiple movements and foreshadowed The Decemberists’ future direction. As the band grew more successful, its live shows developed a distinct theatrical bent, replete with elaborate stage designs and props, and The Decemberists became one of indie rock’s most popular concert draws. Their third full-length record, Picaresque (2005), featured a wide-ranging set of songs that tell the stories of a diverse cast of characters, including a widowed peddler, spies who tragically fall in love, a pair of homeless runaways, and two men trapped inside the belly of a whale. The last of these tracks, “The Mariner’s Revenge Song,” was an eight-minute epic in the style of a sea shanty, which became one of the band’s signature concert numbers, its performance augmented by the presence of a massive papier-mâché whale.

After The Decemberists signed in 2005 with major label Capitol Records, some observers speculated that the band might be required to make artistic compromises for the mainstream label. However, the group’s first album with Capitol, The Crane Wife (2006), assuaged those fears. It featured elegant ballads about a man falling in love with and marrying a wounded crane that temporarily takes the form of a woman, alongside sprawling progressive-rock-infused jams, and was atop many critics’ lists of the year’s best albums.

In 2009 the band’s uninterrupted hour-long rock opera The Hazards of Love debuted at number 14 on the Billboard album charts. The group’s follow-up, The King Is Dead (2011), marked The Decemberists’ return to both an independent label and the rustic folk-influenced sound of their earliest work, and it reached number one on the Billboard charts in the first week after its release.

The band subsequently took a four-year hiatus. During that time Meloy wrote (and his wife, Carson Ellis, illustrated) a trio of children’s books, the Wildwood Chronicles, while the other members toured and recorded as part of the alternative folk band Black Prairie. The Decemberists returned in 2015 with What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, a more conventionally pop-oriented album. Two years later they collaborated with British singer Olivia Chaney to form a folk-rock band, Offa Rex, and recorded The Queen of Hearts. As The Decemberists, they released I’ll Be Your Girl (2018), an eclectic collection ranging from the Russian folk tale “Rusalka, Rusalka/The Wild Rushes” to the arena rock stomp “We All Die Young.”