Last Monday July 29, my friend Mike and I went to see The Decemberists at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre in Vancouver — second time seeing them live, with the first time being in 2017. They are my favorite modern band of storytellers around today and fill my own creative work with wheelbarrows of inspiration.
When they first came upon the scene from Portland Oregon in the early 2000s, my younger brother introduced me to them — I was intrigued right away, and over time and album after album, my fondness for them grew…and grew…and grew until the ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around.
The tapestries of their songs are woven with tales of ghosts, drownings, ancient myths, dark and violent Victorian melodramas and folk tales. The images brought to light by their melodies, lyrics and full instrumentations are like classic Pacific Northwest forests, swamps and mysterious secrets, all done with alternating movements from loud to quiet, and everything in between. The Decemberists provide a fantastically creative departure from standard popular musical fare, blending different styles & sounds into a new form of storytelling, all at once beautiful and tragic.
Colin Meloy, lead singer & songwriter for the band, is also author of the Wildwood Chronicles, a trilogy of middle-grade fantasy novels currently being made into a stop-motion animation feature by Laika, the studio behind Coraline. He’s also written other novels called The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid and The Stars Did Wander Darkling — all illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis, herself a maker of amazing picture books like Du Iz Tak? Colin and Carson are my top favorite team of creative people making things today and I love everything they do.
If you’re not familiar with The Decemberists, I’ve put together some playlists from the set lists of both times I saw them in concert thus far. It’s a good sampling of their repertoire for the un-initiated — but I encourage you to dive deeper into their full records and I hope they become a new favorite for you.
(If you love dark folk and fairy tales, you need to listen to their rock opera The Hazards of Love all the way through. It’s like Romeo and Juliet with shape-shifting forest creatures.)
Their show at the Orpheum Theatre in 2017 was in the wake of their collaborative album with folk singer Olivia Chaney as Offa Rex, and she opened for them and joined them for a mid-show set.
Their show at the Queen E this year was a smooth and steady progression of some quiet acoustic tunes with soft gazebo lighting, followed by a meandering of mid-tempo tunes and raucous rocking out. Their light show was amazing and added to the transcendence of it all. I'm pretty sure I went into a trance and had an out-of-body experience during the "Joan Space” noise/drone movement for their encore of the 20-minute epic Joan in the Garden.
If you’ve listened and enjoyed these, post a comment and let me know! I’m always glad to add another fan to the Church of Decemberism.