In the spring of 2010 we were prepping to make our 6th LP, The King is Dead. Of course, making a record is never just the making of the music — we were also clunking heads with our various non-musical creative collaborators, trying to figure out how we wanted to present this work to the world, once it was finished. One only has a vague sense, early on in the process, what kind of shape the creative clay will take so there’s a sort of magical thinking that goes on: what kind of packaging will this music want? What sort of photographs? These are startling questions to ask oneself when, often, the music doesn’t even really exist yet.

One of those collaborators was the very great Autumn De Wilde, a photographer and film-maker. We’d been mixing it up with Autumn since 2006, when she shot us for the release of The Crane Wife. I can’t remember the specific instance when the idea came up — it was definitely Autumn’s hairbrained scheme — but suddenly, while we were prepping to turn a barn in deep SE Portland into a recording studio, Autumn was amassing thousands of Polaroid type 100 peel-apart film cartridges on which to capture the album-making process. It took her a very long time.

Those Polaroids — provided to Autumn by the Impossible Project — ended up being a critical part of The King is Dead’s albums packaging. They were used in the promo video for the album’s first single, “Down by the Water.” They were reprinted in the album jacket and in the hardbound book that accompanied the deluxe set. Many of them were included in that deluxe box set; you might own one of them.

It was a cool thing to do — particularly in 2010, when our lives were suddenly suffused with digital photographs taken on computers that we kept in our pockets. The Polaroids were one-of-a-kind. They could not be reprinted. They could be scanned and shared and made into new photographs, but the original Polaroid was a unique thing.

I was recently digging around in a folder on my laptop when I found a file containing the scans — I spent a little time scrabbling around, taking them in again. I do remember the process being very arduous for Autumn — I don’t think she really grokked just how hard it would be to shoot 2,500 Polaroids. But it was relatively easy for us, the subjects. There are candid shots, there are posed shots. There are shots of use working in the barn-turned-studio on Pendarvis Farm; there are shots of us wandering around the farm’s property. There wasn’t enough time for Autumn to shoot them all while we were recording, so there are shots taken months later in various parts of Portland — at a time when we were likely prepping mixes and readying ourselves for promotion and touring. They are disarming in a way that a set of digital photographs can’t be. They are products of their limitations. Some of them have faded — I own a few where the image has completely vanished, leaving only a glare of pristine white on the emulsion, another layer of temporality added to an already-temporal thing.

Before I go on I should mention that I’ll be appearing alongside former Oregon Poet Laureate Anis Mojgani at The Evergreen in Portland, OR, on Thursday, August 6 — talking picture books with Mac Barnett, the National Ambassador for Young Peoples’ Literature. Tickets are available now via the Literary Arts site. Come on out!

Anyway, here are a few selections. Enjoy!

Oh, there are so many of them. A couple thousand, in fact. These are just a smattering. Maybe I’ll share more later. You might own one of these — please pipe up in the comments if you do! That is your photograph; there is only one, really. Treasure it!

Time was, when you went on tour by yourself without your band or a record to promote, you did what they called a “Tour-Only CD EP.” I’m not sure if that practice is kept up, what with the implosion of the physical CD market and the rise of streaming services, but back in the periwinkle days of 2005, that was the sort of thing one did. I embarked on my first solo tour in that same year, between (I recall) the conclusion of The Decemberists’ touring behind Her Majesty the Decemberists and the recording of what would be Picaresque. What inspired me to heave myself back on the road only having just returned home, I have no idea. Something about the joy of music, I imagine. The mind boggles.

Anyway, here I was about to travel the country playing small-ish venues, road testing new songs, and I had no wares to hock. I must’ve got hit on the head with the side of a board at some point, because in a delirium, I decided to home-record 5 deep-cut Morrissey tunes and one decidedly non-deep-cut Morrissey tune. I had CDs printed up; I brow-beat my then-girlfriend Carson Ellis into making illustrations for a sleeve and I asked the kind folks at Stumptown Printers to make a fetching letterpressed slipcase for each CD.

Thus began not so much a tradition as a precedent that I felt obligated to follow every time I subsequently hit the road solo. Three other such “Cover EPs” were to follow, each of them enshrining my love and admiration for the artists’ work: Shirley Collins’ immaculate curation of old English folk songs, Sam Cooke’s tender soul-songs, and the songcraft of the Davies brothers’ music written for their band The Kinks.

4 CDs; 4 Carson Ellis-illustrated, Stumptown Printer-printed sleeves. Over the course of eight years: four tours between the years of 2005 and 2013. And that’s how they remained. Physical objects. Things you could hold in your hand. Things you could play on a CD player, if you only had one.

Back in 2022, when people were still trying to determine whether or not their hand-crafted facemask made to look like a ham sandwich was capable of fending off a tenacious coronavirus, we took those four CD EPs and made a vinyl double LP of them. We called it Colin Meloy Sings Together. Carson did the illustration. Four EPs, four sides. It had a nice symmetry to it. I’m pretty certain it’s well out-of-print at the moment. We’re very pleased to announce that that collection is now available to stream via your favorite, least-ethically dubious streaming service! I prefer Tidal and Apple Music, myself, because they appear to have a better track record for compensating artists, though Qobuz seems cool too — and there you can actually purchase the songs to have forever. It’s not currently up at Bandcamp, which is a shame, but we’re working on that. Edit! It’s up on Bandcamp now, for those of you who partake.

I hope you’re all having a lovely summer and that these songs — bangers, all — will be a balm to your soul. Enjoy!

Many of you, upon purchasing the Live Home Library Volume 1 back in the halcyon days of 2020, may have wondered when a second volume in this robust series would be released. You might’ve been surprised to learn that it would be six years later. We, dear reader, are as surprised as you. And yet, here it is: Live Home Library Volume 2.

I do hope that the mere existence of this second volume will set a flag in the ground: we Decemberists do hereby pledge to make these things come out on a more diligent and frequent schedule. I have shouted that to the void; perhaps the void will listen.

In any case, here we are. Or, as the case is, there we were. In Brooklyn, New York, in 2017. Here’s a photo of us, lest you doubt:

Our stage design is still wearing the trappings of our most recent conquest, the touring behind 2015’s What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. We were only starting to play songs that would eventually end up on our 2018 long player I’ll Be Your Girl. Our three nights in Brooklyn capped a two-week run in the spring of 2017. We were already pretty honed from our time touring over the previous couple years; by the time we hit New York we were a well-oiled machine.

And what better place for a well-oiled machine than a former steel plant? Our run of shows would be the venue’s sophomore airing — LCD Soundsystem had opened the place with their own multiple-night-stand only a few days before. There was still drywall in need of mudding in the backstage.

Over the course of those three nights, we played songs from every dusty corner of our catalogue, from the early stuff to the never-been-played-before stuff. One of the nights, we played The Hazards of Love in its entirety. No leaf was left unturned; very few songs showed up concurrently in the three set lists — they were each mostly unique.

We recorded all three of the shows (indeed, we recorded that whole two week run) for posterity; last summer, myself and the band reviewed all of the songs and picked the very best ones. These, we have enshrined on wax for Volume 2 of this archival series; it’ll be available for purchase on September 25th online and at discriminating indie record stores. You can pre-order it now! Here’s the track list:

Side A
1. The Crane Wife 3
2. The Island: Come And See/The Landlord's Daughter/You'll Not Feel The Drowning
3. We Both Go Down Together

Side B
1. Shiny
2. Red Right Ankle
3. Make You Better
4. June Hymn

Side C
1. Down By The Water
2. Lake Song
3. Los Angeles, Im Yours
4. Till The Water's All Long Gone
5. Bandit Queen

Side D
1. The Tain, Pt. I-V
2. O Valencia!

You can listen to that last track, a rather charmingly shambolic O Valencia!, here:

You can also order this fetching t-shirt, celebrating our time in Brooklyn, along with this fetching 2-LP set pressed in “Shiny Clear” vinyl from our webshop (though you can also just order the LP). Indie record shops will have a “Ruby Red Right Ankle” variant for sale as well.

Here are some more shots from those shows (including a photo of the winner’s circle from the instrument duel in The Chimbley Sweep, a performance that was too long and unlistenable to include on this release — you really had to be there):

And there you have it! Hopefully it won’t be too long before we’ll have another one these ready to go — though beating a 6 year gap should be a relatively low bar to cross. I hate to imagine what the world will be like in 2032; will our ears still be tuned to the frequencies of music? Or will our sensibilities be forever augmented by the tastes of robots? One can only hope we survive, ears intact…

Machinists! Sorry for having been absent from these pages the last few weeks. As it happens, I’ve been at my laptop keyboard a lot since the beginning of the year, working on one project or another, and I’ve found that my writing juju has been a little bit exhausted once I’ve needed to turn my attentions to the Machine Shop. But here I am! I’ve traveled from Portland to South Carolina in the space of 48 hours and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Here’s the diary:

Friday, June 5
Portland, OR

Wildly, this is the only performance date I have left this year. After this, there is nothing on the books. A strange territory stretches out before me, but I’ll be the one deciding whether it’s a barren desert or a fruiting orchard. I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t really love touring, so there is part of me that is elated at the prospect of an empty calendar. I have my hands full with a couple writing projects and that’s enough to keep me fed (body and soul). I imagine I’ll get a yearning in a couple months, but for now I’m content.

I meet Troy at the airport. He’ll be my one traveling tech guy on this short hop. He’s been off and on with the Decemberists apparatus since The King Is Dead days and is a beloved member of the family. He also works with Snow Patrol, Brandi Carlile, and The Shins, so it’s sometimes hard to get him on our schedule. But when it works out, we’re all the more thankful for it. He’s a good dude.

Our flight will take us to Charleston, South Carolina, where I’m to perform at the Spoleto Festival. I admit to knowing next to nothing about this festival aside from the fact that they are the sort to ask me (me!) to perform. I’m not sure if that’s a strike against them or not. The band has played in Charleston only once before, so this will only be my second time in the city. I don’t recall much about that first time through, aside from the fact that the show might’ve been a tad undersold. I’m sure it was a great show and the performance was inspired and the audience was rapturous but I am cursed to forever only focus on the empty seats. Ugh, what a sad sack am I.

On my flight to Atlanta, I’m seated next to a man who appears to have a serious fixation on claiming the armrest between us. He’s in the middle seat; I’m on the aisle. At one point, just as we take off, he cedes territory and I put my elbow on the armrest. He abruptly puts it up, saying, “I guess we’ll go without this.” I ask him why. He says because I was pushing into him. I was not pushing into him. This, sadly, is how our 4+ hour flight to Atlanta begins. I’m stuck sitting next to a petty manchild.

On arrival, Troy and I are greeted by Frank from the festival. He takes us in a white van to our hotel. I help myself to a Guinness from the minibar and settle in to watch the rest of the movie I’d started on the plane: The English Patient. Why am I watching this movie? Strangely, I’d been trying to recall the plot of it, only a few days prior to leaving, and there it was on offer in my seatback entertainment system. Kismet!

Saturday, June 6
Charleston, SC

I am determined to lay low for as long as possible, to luxuriate in my hotel room like a goddamn starlet, before I dare venture into the light of day. I read my book, which is Little Big Man by Thomas Berger. It is, shall we say, of its time. I’ve been on a bit of a Western novel kick lately after reading Butcher’s Crossing (by John Williams) and True Grit (by Charles Portis). Both of these books are absolutely ace — True Grit in particular. Portis’s novel might be one of my new favorite books of all time — I’d never read it before — and one that I can envision returning to over and over. There are only a few books that rise to that level for me, that demand a yearly or bi-yearly re-read, and those are as follows: Dubliners by Joyce, The Buried Giant by Ishiguro, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and now True Grit by Charles Portis. I’m not sure what the through-line here is, but those are my guys.

By lunchtime, however, I feel like I should at least see what Charleston has on offer. I wander the maze of streets in the afternoon swelter, falling in with the Charleston tourist traffic. There seems to be a kind of uniform among the young people of Charleston. Lots of white shorts and oxford-blue button-ups. I feel like I’m at a fraternity/sorority mixer that’s spilled out into the city streets. I find an obliging restaurant, belly up to the bar, and positively house a half-dozen oysters and a chicken sandwich. Then it’s back to the hotel to luxuriate just a little more.

At 6, I make my way to the venue, which is an outdoor stage set up on one end of what looks like an oak-shaded college quad. I meet the genial front of house engineer; I do a short soundcheck. Then I’m led to the greenroom, which is some kind of dormitory lounge. I pass the time till Troy calls me to the stage.

The heat of the afternoon has worn off but here, at 9 pm, it is still warm enough for short sleeves. The stage is wide and there’s only me to occupy it. I look out into the half-darkness; they’ve strung lights through the boughs of the oak trees and I feel as if I’m at some Charlestonian’s wedding (which would explain the gaggles of tipsy twenty-somethings, swaying through the streets today — perhaps the bachelorette party has finished and the ceremony has begun). From my vantage point, it feels like a goodly crowd — or at least an improvement over our last Charleston showing — so my ego is assuaged. I open with “My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist,” which is my only song that mentions South Carolina. I thought to put it farther along in the set, but I feel as if I need to get in everyone’s good graces immediately. The rest of the seventy-five-minute set goes smoothly: my voice feels in fine fettle and the crowd seems sweet and attentive. I play “Everyday Is Like Sunday” in A, which I’d never done before — I always play it in C — because my C harmonica had a touch of the grippe and was misbehaving when I played it at soundcheck. It’s an easier lift at a step-and-a-half lower, which is maybe something I should start embracing. Those E and F notes that I blithely wrote into my songs when I was 30 take a little more effort to hit at 51.

Here’s the final setlist, for those keeping score:

MY MOTHER WAS
ENGINE DRIVER
WBGDT
ARCHITECT
ELI
JANUARY
EVERYDAY IS LIKE SUNDAY (A HARP)
APOLOGY
SEVERED
RRA
BURIAL
ROX
VALENCIA
JUNE (A HARP)
STAGE

Looking at this now, I’m realizing that I skipped “Engine Driver” and I have no idea how or why. These things happen. It does explain why I was about five minutes short as I got closer to the end of the set. I slipped “1952 Vincent Black Lightning,” the Richard Thompson tune, in there to make up for it. I also played “Sons and Daughters” as an encore and, spontaneously, tried to get the crowd to do the in-the-round parts with me. That worked about as well as you’d expect, considering it took some doing to even get the parts down in the recording. No harm in trying.

I skipped offstage, my labors through, and was walked back to the greenroom by Troy. There, we busily stuffed our knapsacks with the several bushels of granola bars the venue had provided. We then hopped in our transport back to the hotel. Safely cocooned in my hotel bed duvet, I abandoned myself to sleep, a thousand gimlet-stained cotton camisoles whirling in my mind. Adieu, Charleston, adieu!

It’s two minutes and twenty five seconds, sixteen years in the making. The first trailer for the Wildwood movie from Laika has alighted, like a maquette eagle, on the branches of the interweb. Please viddy it here:

It’s a surreal thing to see your own story turned into a three-dimensional thing (literally: Laika is a stop-motion animation studio; almost everything you see in that trailer is handmade by someone, or a team of someones — all those trees and coats and ferns and cannons). It’s been so long in the making, I’ve almost become inured to the novelty of the whole thing. I’ve seen a cut of the whole movie and it’s a wild, beautiful, ambitious ride. Like the book, it’s also a real love letter to Portland; you really get that vibe from the trailer.

I’m so thrilled for everyone to see the whole film, but please enjoy this little tidbit while you wait. It’s out October 23rd in theaters.

“Rusalka Rusalka / The Wild Rushes” arrived in July of 2017. It would’ve certainly been one of the last songs written for the I’ll Be Your Girl sessions, which began in September of that year. I can tell from listening to this demo that I was inclined to just get the song down in a recording — there is little added accompaniment, it’s just guitar, bass, and a single vocal on the second half of the song, with drums added at the top. We were in the midst of our (brief) Offa Rex tour and I think English folk song was on the brain. The Wild Rushes was certainly a product of all that steeping in Martin Carthy and June Tabor and Steeleye Span we were doing during the making of our one LP, Queen of Hearts. To my ear, it stands out among the tracks that made it on to I’ll Be Your Girl — I can hear that it was written at a different time than the others. There’s less angularity to it, less seething anxiety and resentment. It remains my favorite song from those sessions. You’ll hear in the demo that the little instrumental coda from the finished track is missing; that was an in-studio invention. I recall knowing that something had to go there, but felt confident that we’d come up with a good solution once we were all stewing in the studio.

Here, for the ears of you paid subbies (merci), is that demo:

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For whatever reason, I recently got to thinking about witchy songs, witchy music. I’m not sure what to owe this to — it might’ve been that I recently went through a bit of a Kate Bush swoon, as I am occasionally wont to do. I was thinking about her song “The Sensual World,” her inspired adaptation of Molly Bloom’s mind-wanderings in the last pages of Joyce’s Ulysses, and how she had to rewrite it because the Joyce estate didn’t want her using text word-for-word from the book. I always knew that the song was mapped on to that last bit of Ulysses, I think that was general knowledge when the record came out, and it was definitely identifiable as coming from Molly’s perspective — and yet Kate manages to skate around the text and create something altogether new. She re-recorded the song in 2011 using the original lyrics, the ones the Joyce estate shot down, and I do think it’s a better version — at least lyrically. Here’s the 1989 version:

And here’s the one from 2011:

Of course, Kate Bush, in my opinion, is in the pantheon of rock music’s ur-witches. I recall when Taylor Swift’s record Folklore came out, everyone was calling it “witchy.” I remember being excited to check it out — to hear how this pop goddess would join the coven. I remember being disappointed. This isn’t witchy music! Witchy music is scary, disjointed, moody, ensorcelling. I felt none of those things listening to Taylor Swift, even at her most witchy

So here I’ve decided to plant my flag, to make a not-so-definitive mixtape of properly witchy music. I’m sure some will take issue; I’m sure there are omissions — to which (witch) I say: Make your own witchy mixtape!

You’ll notice that most of these songs are from women singers and songwriters. This seems appropriate — I’m no witch myself, but I believe that witchy songs, by their definition, should be speaking from the feminine divine. It doesn’t mean that it’s exclusively the domain of women, however, so I’ve included a few men in the mix who, to my mind, are women in their own right.

I’m only playing one other show this year, a solo show in Charleston, SC for the Spoleto Festival. Click on the image for tickets!

This brought tears to my eyes this morning:

“We will always choose Earth,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, said once the crew members regained communications. “We will always choose each other.”

It’s from this short NYT article (gifted in case you don’t have a subscription). The Artemis capsule lost contact with Earth when it circled around the far side of the moon. This was their message when communications returned. It’s a stunning contrast to the sentiment being shared by our president, who is vowing to “wipe out a civilization” by 8 pm tonight, selling it as if it were some must-watch reality TV segment. I’m enraged and disgusted by our careless, thoughtless, criminal president; I am inspired and made hopeful by the Artemis crew.

We should be listening to the advice of these brave astronauts, who are being given a once-in-a-generation perspective on the wholeness of our Earth and our humanity; we should not be listening to an addled narcissist with all the imagination and perspective of a rock. Let’s hear that again, from Ms Koch:

“We will always choose Earth,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, said once the crew members regained communications. “We will always choose each other.”

Let’s choose Earth. Let’s choose each other.

Fuck yeah.

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This was written by my great grandmother, Carrie Meloy, as put down in calligraphy by my grandmother Harriett, her daughter-in-law. It’s from her journals. Carrie was living on a ranch near Townsend, MT when she wrote it. I imagine winter on a ranch in central Montana in the 40s could be dreary stuff. When she says it “makes living a little bit harder,” I can only imagine what kind of hardships those might be. How would they compare to our February hardships in 2026? I doubt they had indoor plumbing, there on the ranch, and I bet it was very cold. I bet they had to go break up ice from the water in the water troughs and fetch wood for a woodstove in freezing temperatures. But even in the midst of what was likely very tough living, she managed to find beauty in the world. She saw reasons for persevering in the way the creek ran.

I, myself, am a little freaked out about the world right now and I’m trying my best to channel some of that February optimism. February 1942 was about as grim as it got in the world, Montana winters aside, though I don’t know how much of that news was filtering down to the Meloys on Greyson Creek. I’m sure they knew the broad strokes and it was probably pretty frightening. They were certainly not being assaulted day in and day out by endlessly unspooling news feeds and AI generated video slop made by an authoritarian, war-mongering president. But it may well have looked like the world was ending anyway.

“Or says it in fact to those who will listen…”

As always, I find solace and perseverance in books and music, in puttering around the kitchen and the farm. I was playing guitar yesterday when my fingers stumbled on to the riff from The Wedding Present’s “Octopussy.” If you don’t know the song, you owe it to yourself to listen:

Of course, having plucked out the riff, I had to have a go at playing the whole song myself. I had no idea, till recently, that the last line of the chorus was “You’ve become my family.” I always thought it was something like “funland” or “fumbling.” Like most of the lyrics on this very great record, they are buried in a slag-pile of lacerating guitars and thunderous drums. You never knew what David Gedge was singing about, but you knew it was something important. So when I looked up the lyrics and tried to sing, my Oregon-by-way-of-Montana accent just could not draw the same power from that word “family.” Sounded weird. Gedge is a Yorkshireman, I believe; The Wedding Present came together in Leeds. So when he sings “family,” it sounds like “fum-leh.”

Lande Hekt, who is from Exeter, England, does an admirable cover of the song. I wonder if she, too, couldn’t quite get her head around pronouncing that word as intended. I feel like she splits the diff in her version:

I hadn’t come back to that record, Seamonsters, for a while and it was lovely to return to it. I think I might’ve been seventeen when I first heard it. Someone gave me the cassette. I wore the thing out, I seem to remember. The sonic landscape it makes is so individual. I think, at seventeen, I was only starting to become aware of Steve Albini’s production, but seeing his name on the j-card (that’s what they are called!) answered a lot of questions. Here was a through line between a couple other beloved records of mine: The Pixies’ Surfer Rosa, The Breeders’ Pod, and now this. But the drums, oh, the drums on Seamonsters were the thing I died for.

From what I’ve come to understand, drum production has as much to do with the player as the particular recording environment in which they were captured. I think they managed to get both things just right on this one. The drums sound cavernous, recorded in the concrete box that was Albini’s Pachyderm, and played by someone who sounds like they are bringing their sticks down from the very heavens at every snare strike. Even on a record that is absolutely saturated with overdriven guitar, they are the loudest thing in the mix — and it works so well.

I’ve also been listening to a Mark Kozelek live record from 2004. It’s not released; as far as I can tell, it’s only available as a YouTube playlist. I don’t know much about its story — it’s from a show at Great American Music Hall in SF; I learned about it from Eliza McLamb’s substack post:

words from eliza

Piece of shit

I’m walking through the snow in feels-like-zero degrees, wondering what’s so compelling about the male genius who also knows he’s a piece of shit who also knows he’s a genius…

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7 months ago · 403 likes · 34 comments · eliza mclamb

Kind of a bummer that a post called “piece of shit” should lead the reader to beautiful, incandescent music. Mark Kozelek, the singer/songwriter behind Red House Painters and Sun Kil Moon, is, by many accounts, a problematic person. Or, as McLamb has it, a piece of shit. But he does make gorgeous music. We’ve all had to figure out where we fall on the divide of separating the art from the artist — Morrissey, Evan Dando, Kozelek, the list goes on. Is there something defiant in appreciating an artist’s art despite their behavior? I don’t know. I have no answers. But I have been listening to this on repeat since I read Eliza’s piece and I don’t care who knows!

(Speaking of out-of-print, unstreamable music, here is very great 90s shoegaze titans Th’ Faith Healers’ debut record which, for reasons I cannot fathom, is unavailable elsewhere:)

Be like Greyson Creek! Do not give up or stop!

Till next time,

Colin

While I’m all sequestered in my space, working on various things, I thought I’d take a moment to hit up the community here and see if you had any questions you were dying to ask. AMA!

Hello my cherished Machinists,

When I put up the post about the Days of Elaine demo last week, I added some bits of news below the fold, as it were — beyond the paywall. Figured I’d bring them together in a tidy news update for the rest of you!

First off: happy pub day to my brilliant wife, Carson Ellis and to Mac Barnett, my brilliant non-wife. Mac has written a really spiffy new version of the classic fairy tale Rumpelstiltksin and Carson has provided the illustrations. It’s real good and it’s on bookshop bookshelves everywhere today!

In related news, I’ll be at the Hillsboro Barnes & Noble this Friday, February 6th at 6:30 pm, talking to Sara Pennypacker about her rippin’ new middle grade novel, The Lion’s Run. That book, too, is out in fine bookstores (all bookstores are fine, by my estimation) everywhere today. It happens that Mac and Carson are doing an event at Literary Arts in Portland the same time as I’ll be at B&N talking to Sara, which is a bit of a bummer but what are you going to do? Come on out! And if you can’t come to see me, go see Mac and Carson!

More bookish news! Laika’s adaptation of my book Wildwood has a theatrical release day: October 23rd 2026. That’s this October, guys. This is a movie that is fifteen years in the making. It’s going to be gorgeous. Mark your calendars:

Music? What even is music anymore?

I’ll be playing a handful of shows in the next six months. These are solo shows — just me and a few guitars, singing songs from all over the weird, wild spectrum of my songwritin’ catalogue.

I’m playing two shows in the midwest on March 27th and 28th — one in St. Paul, MN and one in Chicago. Tickets are available via decemberists.com!

I’ll also be playing in Charleston, South Carolina as part of the Spoleto Festival on June 6th. Tickets are available via the festival site. Apparently, I’m playing at the Cistern, which I am going to assume is not an in-use water containment structure.

More to come soon!

In the winter of 2008, I was laboring over the nub of an idea that would eventually blossom into The Hazards of Love. The motifs that would make up the songs on that album were only starting to find their way into my daily songwriting; I was still writing songs that did not involve shape changing men, angry forest queens, and infanticidal rakes. Before long, however, my focus changed and the stuff that would make of Hazards was all I could think about. So what to do with those other songs?

Rather than letting them languish in my journal, I decided it might be a nice project to bang them out in a week-long recording session. We could then release them as individual singles 7” singles. Our UK record label at the time, Rough Trade, was keen on the idea; Capitol, our stateside label, not so much. I believe the market for 7” vinyl was still robust in the UK — we compromised with Capitol and they agreed to release the singles as 12 inches in the US. I have no idea what the print run was on these things; this was certainly not a money making scheme. It felt like a fun and novel way to present these songs, which all felt so unmoored from each other, in a separate but cohesive way.

“Days of Elaine” was one of those songs. I’d begun the song almost ten years before while still living in Missoula, MT. I suppose if things had worked out differently, it would’ve ended up being a latter-day Tarkio song — though it never seemed to fit that mode, either. It always felt like a song that didn’t have a home, even though I would regularly pull it out and play it to myself, still trying to puzzle out the structure, still trying to fix a verse here and there. In 2008, I felt like I’d finally unlocked it. I recorded it at home by myself — an acoustic guitar, an electric guitar, bass, and a shaker. It would do. This is the demo I made:

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DOWN BY THE WATER1

See this ancient riverbed?
See where all my folly’s led
Down by the water and down by the old main drag2

I was just some tow-head teen
Feeling ‘round for fingers to get inbetween3
Down by the water and down by the old main drag

The season rubs me wrong4
The summer swells anon5
So knock me down and tear me up
But I would bear it all broken just to fill my cup
Down by the water and down by the old main drag6

Sweet descend this rabble ‘round
The pretty little patter of a seaport town7
Down by the water and down by the old main drag

All dolled up in gabardine
The lash-flashing Leda of Pier 198
Queen of the water and queen of the old main drag

Chorus

Inst. Break9

Chorus10

10

We recorded this in a barn on a farm in Happy Valley, Oregon in the late spring of 2010. We really struggled with it. For whatever reason, I can’t imagine that struggle now. I hear it now or I play it live and it feels kind of effortless. A folk-rock song by the numbers. But we did really tear our hair out over it. Early versions sounded too rock n roll, I seem to remember. It was missing a kind of tenderness, a vulnerability. Usually, we all know the fate of a song once we’ve played it a few times. We played this one in rehearsals leading up to recording and were still uncertain about it. Down by the Water was one of the few instances in my career where a song was saved by small, iterative changes done while it was being recorded. A different drum beat here, a different guitar feel there. It would’ve surprised us, no doubt, if you’d told us while we were working on the song that it would eventually be the lead single of the record and be nominated for two Grammy awards. Good job, little song!

Greetings, Machinists.

Here we are, again at the cusp of another new year. 2025, come and gone. Fare thee well, good riddance.

But it wasn’t all drear and darkness, was it? There were light moments along the way, little lanterns set out along the path. These are the things that guided me this year.

Morality Play by Barry Unsworth

I’m currently dabbling with a writing project that is medieval-adjacent, so I figured I’d start absorbing some writing about the period. This was one of them. I picked up the audiobook on libro.fm, as I am wont to do, before discovering that I already had it on my bookshelf! I think someone may have gifted it to me at some point; I’d shelved it and promptly forgot about it. If this is you, I’m sorry. But you have excellent taste. Morality Play is a real banger. It’s about a 14th century escapee monk who falls in with a troupe of players. It’s a period piece, imagining the moment when art ceased to be simply something done in praise of God and became something else: a way of truth-telling and revelation. It’s also a page-turning true crime novel. It does both these things so well, it’s almost dismaying. Unsworth was a master.

One Battle After Another

I saw this movie as the filmmaker must’ve intended: in a small theater with a bunch of friends. The storytelling is first rate — it’s almost baffling how well the director Paul Thomas Anderson rolls out this tale with all its tortuous turns and funny, strange characters. At a moment when one feels as if the whole world is somehow giving into the gravity of hate and cynicism, this movie manages to be both defiant and joyful.

Olga, the Sourdough Starter

Like so many others, I homebrewed a sourdough starter on my kitchen counter during the pandemic, ca 2020. We named it Olga; it seemed to be a fitting name for something like a sourdough starter — it felt ancient and strange. I baked a lot of bread then, I made a lot of pizza dough. I made pancakes and waffles and bagels. Then the vaccine arrived and the world seemed to open up. Going to a bakery no longer felt like a voyage beyond the gates of one’s fortified island. Olga went into the fridge to hibernate. There she remained for several years until, earlier this year, I revived her. I’ve since been making a ton of bread. I fail a lot — probably more than any decent home baker should, but I find that I’m never overly disheartened. There are so many things to tweak and to try — even with the most basic recipe, I find one can never really get bored.

Labour and Wait

I played a show in London in April; I was there, ostensibly, on vacation with my kid and my mom. One of the days we were there, I went adventuring through Marylebone, a part of the city I hadn’t really explored before. At the advice of my friend Autumn, I went to this store. It’s just the sort of place I tend to love — small, cozy, and well-curated. It was both a clothing store and a gardening store, as far as I could tell. The gardening implements seemed all to be the sort of stuff you wouldn’t necessarily find at a Home Depot, all handmade and esoteric, and the clothing was properly first rate. They have a chore coat there that is properly the finest example of its type — it’s a collab between the store and French chore coat-maker Le Mont St Michel. I tried to match the blue of the coat when I had a suit made for me later in the fall; we got close, but failed to quite nail it.

Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson really had a year, didn’t he? Or at least the latter part of the year. For a hot second there he seemed to be everywhere — due, I suppose, to the release of the movie adaptation of his 2011 novella Train Dreams. Train Dreams happens to be one of my favorite pieces of writing of all time, so I was both excited and a bit leery when I heard there was to be a movie made of it. As I feared, the movie was a piece of garbage. Was my reaction to this movie, which seems to have been otherwise beloved by the movie-going/streaming public, a product of my regard for the source material? Probably. Maybe I would’ve liked the movie if I hadn’t read the book, but, God, what kind of life would that be? I reread the book after I’d seen the movie to reaffirm my love for it and to somehow dispel the movie from my mind; turns out, according to my reading journal, I’d also re-read it in February. So this was the year I read Train Dreams twice and Jesus’ Son once. I’m also reading Ted Geltner’s biography of Johnson. Maybe, just maybe, by the time I’ve done all that I will have exorcised that sanitized, sentimental, ersatz-Malick junk from my head once and for all.

Ghost of Yotei

I go back and forth on open-world video games. Sometimes, they feel too vast and open. A whole lot of nothing. I like a game that is more like a puzzle and less like a vast, digital landscape that one wanders through, waiting for the next cut scene. Occasionally, though, I can come under the spell of such a game — and I am certainly under the spell of Ghost of Yotei. For this sort of narrative-driven game to work for me, I have to feel really immersed in the world, to be connected with the characters. I’m having a terrific time embodying this vengeance-seeking ronin, Atsu, as she goes about her adventures. The voice acting really is top notch — particularly from the actor playing the lead. The designers don’t shy away from wearing their influences on their sleeves: this thing is a love letter to Kurosawa, to westerns, and to old samurai manga like Lone Wolf and Cub. Dig it!

Music?

I’m looking back at my listening history, and I’m a bit dismayed by how little new music I listened to this year. Nothing I could say, I don’t think, that was definitively my favorite of the year. I listened to a lot of non-vocal classical music because I was writing a lot this year and I cannot write to anything with words in it. On that front, I really loved this collection of John Field’s Complete Nocturnes performed by Alice Sara Ott. I also listened to this new collection of Satie compositions. I dabbled in new music, for sure: I like the new Horsegirl record and there are bits of that new Rosalía record that are really extraordinary — the song Berghain in particular. But otherwise, my head was really elsewhere in 2025. Where was it? Will I find it again? It’s there, somewhere, climbing back over the wooden palisades and returning home…

How about you? What’d you get up to this year? What guided you along the path? Sound off in the comments, folks! And thank you all for being subscribers to The Machine Shop!

Hello my very good Paid Machinists: as per usual (and I think going forward) I’m publishing the recording of this last LIVE FROM THE FARM for paid subscribers exclusively (with a wee preview for you freebies). For the most part, I think the kinks were worked out and this is a *much* better solution for doing live shows here on the Machine Shop.

Let me k…

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Happy Atmospheric River Week for those who celebrate. Here I am, green capped and sweatered, showing you how to play my song “Severed” in its various states of being + talking about its evolution. And thanks for being a paid subscriber, you! And if you’re not, consider becoming one!

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Hey all — I’m thrilled to announce a couple solo shows coming up this March in Minneapolis and Chicago. I haven’t played solo in either of these charming midwestern cities since 2013, as the internet tells me. We were all so much younger then! Come and see what kind of patina has rimed me and my songs.

There’s a limited ticket pre-sale happening tomorrow, Wednesday, November 19th at 8 am pacific. General onsale will happen on Friday at 10 am local time. Get onboard here:

TICKETS

And so the Decemberists’ West Coast Symphony Tour of 2025 draws to a close. We finished up this short run with two nights at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, which is so often shortened simply to “The Schnitz” that I, onstage, forgot the actual name of the venue and had to be corrected by Jenny. We are all, of course, indebted to Arlene Schnitz and the whole Schnitz family — which has endowed the Portland theater/art/ballet/music scene since, like, forever.

I’m not sure what to add to my recap of the San Francisco symphony show from last month — these things go down a bit like clockwork so there isn’t a ton of variation in the day to day activity. The setlists were practically identical (apologies to those of you who came to multiple shows on that front — I hope you discovered new and exciting nuance in each song) and the run of show didn’t depart much from the SF formula. That’s how it is with these shows; when you’ve got 60+ people in your band, there’s little room for spontaneity.

I do feel like I learned one valuable lesson: how to rehearse an orchestra through a list of songs without singing. In San Francisco, I found it difficult, during rehearsal, to go through the songs without singing them. The band — myself included — cue off of my vocal a lot more than I tend to think. And thinking I needed the practice myself, I sang through the whole 150 minute rehearsal the day before the show — and I felt it. My voice was a bit worked the next day. In Seattle, we didn’t have the luxury of a two day setup — we were rehearsing the day of the show. But every time I tried to play the songs without singing them, someone would get lost — either myself or a bandmate — and then everything would fall apart. So I kept singing through the rehearsal and after the performance that night, my voice was hashed. So in Portland we managed to work out a system: I would cue occasionally, but John and Jenny would sing through the rehearsal in a close enough facsimile to the actual arrangement that we could get through the songs without totally imploding. It worked! We rehearsed the orchestra and I saved my voice. Is this interesting to you? I cannot know.

Performing onstage, in the moment, is a funny game that you play with yourself. You must both be absolutely engaged with what you are doing but not so engaged that you trip yourself up. Performing, I sometimes sail through arrangements that would otherwise escape me just because I was blithely thinking of something else: the tone of my guitar, my monitor mix, the health of my voice etc. Yet let your mind drift too far away and you’re lost. There’s a kind of Jedi sensibility that one must have to keep all of the bits and pieces of a song, of a concert, in place — to be totally present and mindful and yet blithely above it all. That’s the spot you want to be in. I thought that by rehearsing songs with the orchestra without singing, I would somehow disrupt these patterns I had built in my mind, these channels in my brain that I had neatly carved over the years. Turns out, it actually might be a good exercise to play songs without all those road markers. Keeps you nimble.

So that’s my big takeaway. Thanks, everyone, for coming to these shows. You were a lovely audience. Any time I felt oppressed by the same-ness of the setlist and the arrangements, I need only look out at you, gentle audience, and see your shining faces. I could see it was working.

Reminder! I have some solo shows coming in Los Angeles next month, playing three nights at The Hollywood Forever Cemetery at Masonic Lodge: December 17, 19 and 20. Come on out!

TICKETS HERE

The Decemberists’ 5th LP, The Hazards of Love, started out as an experiment: what kind of story could be made by cobbling together a bunch of archetypes from British and Irish folk songs into one, long multi-part song? And would it be possible to make it all in the key of D? It started out valiantly enough; I made it about four songs in before that majestic key had been rung of all its possibilities. By the time I hit the spot where “Annan Water” belonged, I’d long ago abandoned any hope of keeping to that concept.

One thing I did stick to, conceptually, is writing the whole record pretty much in sequence. “Hazards of Love 1” was truly the first in that series to arrive. In some ways, it was similar to how I’ve approached novel-writing. You start at the beginning and you end at the ending. After you’ve done that, you’re free to hop about the whole of thing, prodding and fixing things as you go. So this song, “Annan Water” was written at the same time that the entire latter half of the record was written: in a little bedroom in a rented farmhouse in the south of France.

This demo recording, too, comes to us from that same little stone-walled room. I had a little midi keyboard with me; that’s doing the vibraphone solo you hear in the interlude. It remained largely unchanged from the demo to the finished LP recording, as it turns out, except for the chorus. In the demo (as you’ll hear), it keeps to the strumming pattern of the rest of the song. By the time I was rehearsing it with the band, I think I’d decided it needed a bigger change — that’s how we arrived at the idea that choruses should be an organ-only affair. But you hear it here as it was initially written.

Of course, this song — and the story it tells — owes a huge debt to the old folk song of the same name that I learned from a Nic Jones recording:

There’s a lot of that kind of thing going on in old folk songs — lovesick dudes and ladies bargaining with bodies of water to let them cross safely, this abundance of bridges being a more modern phenomena. More often than not, the river doesn’t go along with it. Such is the case with our poor William in Hazards: he manages to cross one way, but, as it goes with Willy in another classic Jones arrangement, “Clyde Water,” doesn’t fare so well on the return journey. Alas. Anyway, here’s the demo. Enjoy!

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