THE DECEMBERISTS THE KING IS DEAD

Turning from Brit-folk towards their home-grown heritage, the band convene at Pendarvis Farm to cut warm, direct songs soaked in classic Americana. Peter Buck is among the guests, and the record went to No 1 in the States. MELOY: I was in kind of a dark place during the recording and touring of Hazards Of Love. Near the end the cloud dissipated a bit, and suddenly I wanted to write pretty songs. Short, economical, recognisable, accessible; something that people might want to sing along to. I can clearly remember thinking that. I love those kind of songs, and I knew I had it in me. The King Is Dead came out of that feeling. We recorded it on a farm outside of Portland. The feeling was, let’s make American music! Portland folk-rock! Let’s do it in a barn where everyone is in the room together! And let’s camp

out on the farm and wake up in the morning and go make the record! Of course, it rained steadily through the entire process. There were only a few nights where it was comfortable enough to camp out, so that didn’t really work out. Then we ran out of time. We had to finish it at Tucker’s home studio afterwards. We had this ideal, and then reality caught up with us.

FUNK: We were citing The Rolling Stones in a French château, and Dylan and The Band in Big Pink. We were trying to capture a style of recording we really knew nothing about, without properly immersing ourselves in it. We were keeping studio hours and trying to get live takes, and everyone was getting really frustrated. As carefree as that record sounds, it was actually really difficult to make. It’s Americana folk, but with some ’80s college rock thrown in. On “This Is Why We Fight” the guitar is very Johnny Marr. And “Down By The Water” was such an obvious and loving rip of a very famous REM song [“The

One I Love”], we thought we should just get Peter on there to give his stamp of approval.

MELOY: It was a resetting. REM was the band that, along with The Smiths and Hüsker Dü, knocked my socks off and established my aesthetic when I was 13 years old. The writing was an effort to get back to that. It felt only right to get Peter, who had just moved to town, to play. He was game. It was funny trying to teach him these 12-string guitar arpeggios I had written, which were basically me being Peter Buck. “No, that’s not quite right. Play it more like Peter Buck!” It was a No 1 record and sold almost 100,000 copies in its first week. Mind-blowing for us.

“‘Down By The Water’ was such an obvious and loving rip of a famous REM song, we thought we should get Peter Buck on there” COLIN MELOY