Today, The Decemberists have released a new single, “All I Want Is You.” The track, which appears on their forthcoming new album, is a simple and pleading love song set to finger-picked guitar, muted horns and light vocal harmonies. It’s the most unadorned song on the record, and in many ways the most emotionally potent track in the collection. Listen HERE.
Colin Meloy on “All I Want Is You”
“‘All I Want Is You” is a love song. An unapologetic, wear-it-on-its-sleeve love song. I don’t write a ton of those, at least not in this vein. The song grew out of the finger picking pattern — “Don’t want pretty poses…” — and I just followed that lead. In the end, it just kind of wrote itself. It’s so bare bones, it lived for a long time in my songwriting notebook, kind of in hiding, before I got up the courage to put it out there. It shares a title and hook with many songs that have come before it, but I like to think I’m merely adding my own take to that tradition.”
The Decemberists new album, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, out on June 14th via YABB Records (Thirty Tigers). The band returns with their 9th studio album after a 6 year hiatus, with a remarkable double album produced by lead-singer Colin Meloy and Tucker Martine and featuring guest appearances from The Shins’ James Mercer and REM’s Mike Mills. The album is available for pre-order HERE today.
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again is not only the longest Decemberists album to date (and their first intentional, proper double-LP, split into four thematic sides, no less) but also their most empathetic and accessible, its 13 songs like semaphores of mutual recognition for our fraught times and faint hopes. The existential slog and capitalist vexation of “The Reapers,” the opiated delusion and jumbled jingoism of “America Made Me,” the guileless tenderness and absolute surrender of “All I Want Is You”: As It Ever Was is the redemptive testament of a band finding new communal hymns by revisiting several old modes at once. This, Meloy will tell you proudly, is the best Decemberists album—perhaps even the ultimate realization of 22 years of work. As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again rings with the urgency and ardor of right now, maybe more than ever before.
The band teased the new album first with the release of the single, “Burial Ground.” “The Decemberists are so back,” declared Flood Magazine. “’Burial Ground,’ revives the band’s warm, familiar folk-rock sound,” said Paste Magazine. “Frontman Colin Meloy’s buoyant vocals carry genuine eagerness and charm as he sings of graveyards over twinkling instrumentation. Loose guitar and flourishes of horns embellish the whimsical track, giving off a Beach Boys-style vibrancy.”
They followed up the track earlier this month with a 19-minute prog rock epic titled “Joan In The Garden.”
The Decemberists will head out on an expansive North American tour with both spring and summer legs. The tour kicks off next week, on April 30th in Kingston, NY at the Ulster Performing Arts Center and wraps up in August on the West Coast. Highlights include the Brooklyn Paramount Theater on May 3rd, The Salt Shed in Chicago on May 21st and the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on May 24th. The band will return to their home turf, wrapping the tour in Troutdale, OR on August 3rd at McMenamins Edgefield. All tickets are on sale now with a full list of tour dates below.
For 20 years The Decemberists have been one of the most original, daring, and thrilling American rock bands. Founded in the year 2000 when singer, songwriter, and guitarist Colin Meloy moved from Montana to Portland, Oregon and met bassist Nate Query, keyboardist Jenny Conlee, and guitarist Chris Funk, The Decemberists’ distinctive brand of hyperliterate folk-rock set them apart from the start with the release of their debut EP 5 Songs in 2001. After making their full-length debut with Castaways and Cutouts in 2002, the band signed with Kill Rock Stars for the release of the acclaimed albums Her Majesty the Decemberists (2003) and Picaresque (2005), which was produced by Chris Walla. The 2004 EP The Tain – an 18-minute single-track epic – made the band’s grand creative ambitions clear.
Around this time the band’s permanent line-up fell into place with the arrival of drummer John Moen, and they made the unexpected leap to Capitol Records for their first major label album in 2006. Fans’ concerns of whether the band would alter their trademark sound quickly vanished when they delivered their most ambitious and audacious record to date in The Crane Wife, a song cycle produced by Walla and Tucker Martine (who would become a longtime creative partner) that added elements of ‘70s prog, hard rock and even quasi-disco to their palette. The album was met by wide acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Stereogum, and was named Best New Music by Pitchfork.
Three years later, The Hazards of Love – a full-length concept album based on Meloy’s idea for a stage musical – was a Top 20 hit. In 2011, they topped themselves yet again with their first #1 album, The King Is Dead, which featured the GRAMMY-nominated song “Down By The Water.” After their 2015 album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World, which included the #1 AAA radio hit “Make You Better,” The Decemberists changed up their sound and explored new approaches to making music on their eighth studio album I’ll Be Your Girl (2018) with producer John Congleton. NPR Music wrote “Every band needs to refresh and reconsider its sound sooner or later, no matter how sharp it’s gotten over the course of a long career — even The Decemberists, a band whose records have always come bursting with verve… I’ll Be Your Girl captures a collaborative spirit that keeps the band sounding vibrant and alive.”
The Decemberists have toured the world, performed at countless major festivals, and even founded Travelers’ Rest, a festival of their own curation in Missoula, Montana. The band has appeared on The Simpsons, collaborated with Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, and released their own crowd-funded board game Illimat. Colin Meloy is also the author of The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid and the New York Times bestselling Wildwood Chronicles as well as two picture books, The Golden Thread: A Song for Pete Seeger and Everyone’s Awake. Meloy’s Wildwood Series is currently being made into an animated feature starring Carey Mulligan, Mahershela Ali, Angela Bassett, Jermaine Clement, Tom Waits and more.
