THE DECEMBERISTS THE HAZARDS OF LOVE

In thrall to Anne Briggs and the British folk revival, Meloy conceives a complex hour-long “folk-opera”, a dark, arboreal love story with several guest roles. FUNK: The big touring ship came crashing down at the end of The Crane Wife Tour. There was weird internal self-pressure, everyone was burned out. After some grounded Portland time, Colin showed us these songs. He said it would be a longer piece, like Black Sabbath riffs framed in folk music. It was exactly what we needed at the time, and probably my favourite Decemberists record.

MELOY: I have a streak of selfsabotage. This album was me kicking against this new feeling of thinking about record sales and chart positions, but that wasn’t the only reason. It was an idea I liked, stitching together common archetypes and folk tropes into a full-length story. I was taking bigger risks in my writing. It works in places and doesn’t in others, but that’s OK.

The recording process was really fun. Some songs were broken down into 10-, 15-second segments that we’d stitch together after the fact. I really love the record, but maybe a saner band would have made a different album at that point, because we were just introducing ourselves to a new audience. On tour, we decided we’d perform it all the way through. I remember playing to 50,000 people at Lollapalooza and doing all of Hazards Of Love. It was a bit of a “fuck you” – to myself, probably. I wonder what might have happened differently had we not done that…