Why Topping The Billboard 200 Chart Wasn't "A Sudden Seismic Shift"

When Portland avant-folk ensemble The Decemberists were working on their 2015 seventh album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World they weren't just contending with returning from a three-year hiatus, they were also facing the enviable challenge of backing up a #1 album. Incredibly for a band renowned for their "songs about press gangs and infanticide" (to paraphrase The Simpsons) their 2011 album The King Is Dead debuted atop the Billboard 200 chart, although frontman/songwriter Colin Meloy seems relatively unperturbed by the achievement. 

"I think it would have been a different story if we were in our early 20s and that was our first or second record," he smiles. "It was our sixth album and each record had been a gradual growth over the one before — in that we had kept seeing our audiences increase — so when that came it was really cool and exciting and surprising but it wasn't this sudden seismic shift in our lives, it just felt like the next step up. And I think we released the record at the right time and for whatever reason it struck some sort of nerve, it found its audience, and I think it's cool that that happened."

Two of What A Terrible World's tracks — The Singer Addresses His Audience and Anti-Summersong — address that same band/audience construct.

"That's what you get for playing sad folk songs about murdered children. We can't all be in Passion Pit is the lesson I learned from that."

"Those were the songs that were written right after we'd come off the road from The King Is Dead and were heading into this break, and I always end up being kind of a grump after being on the road for too long," Meloy explains. "But also having achieved this pinnacle, or height of success, at that time and then stepping away gave me some time to reflect and look at my life as a musician — and what that means to be a musician — and there's a lot of conflicting thoughts in there."

Now The Decemberists are returning to Australia for Bluesfest, a far more appropriate setting than their previous stint on the 2010 Big Day Out.

"That was a bit rough," Meloy laughs. "Our sideshows on that tour were fantastic — I remember them very fondly — but those festival sets are like a wash in my mind of these brief and strained encounters with a relatively small group of people. We were following Passion Pit, which was so weird! Auckland was our first show in New Zealand and Australia and it's this big festival and we arrive ready to go and we get to the side of stage and Passion Pit is playing and there's this sea of people and everyone's going crazy with girls on people's shoulders whipping their shirts off and we're, like, 'Holy shit, This is going to be so incredible, this crowd is wild!'

"Then when we got on stage it was the biggest sad tramp trombone moment: three-quarters of the crowd had split and it was a typical Decemberists show with people standing there, nobody was on anybody's shoulders. That's what you get for playing sad folk songs about murdered children. We can't all be in Passion Pit is the lesson I learned from that."