“Picaresque was an effort to make a very characteristic record,” Meloy admits. Its full-length predecessor, 2003’s Her Majesty, The Decemberists, had won favorable reviews and sold well. As far as the band’s label, Kill Rock Stars, was concerned, they now ranked right up there with its top act, Sleater-Kinney. “They were like, ‘Do whatever you want to do,'” Meloy marvels. “Finally we had a blank check, and we were finally going to make the record that we had been wanting to, but, because of money and time limitations, we weren’t able to on the first two records.”
The recording budget was $6,000, but it felt like a jackpot. “We were able to go whole hog, and rent a church and set up a studio in it,” Meloy continues. With more time for pre-production and recording than ever before, the band and co-producer Chris Walla were free to bring in guest stars (including Petra Haden and members of Harvey Danger and Long Winters), fine-tune brass arrangements, “and really nail all the things that we wanted to on the last few records.”
“As a consequence, what came out the other side is a perfect summation of what we were trying to do, of what was the Decemberists,” Meloy concludes. “And after getting away from it a little bit, it felt like, ‘OK, we’ve done that. Now we can try something else.”
Something else, in this case, encompassed a number of significant changes in the making of The Crane Wife: different approaches to songwriting; working with a new producer; graduating to a major label; and whipping up arrangements on-the-spot, rather than over months of touring.
None of which was too daunting to drummer John Moen, who had never gone into the studio with the group before. “I just wanted to record with this band,” he says of his role replacing Her Majesty and Picaresque drummer Rachel Blumberg. An alumnus of pioneering Portland indie band the Dharma Bums in the late 1980s and more recently with Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, Moen had only played live with the Decemberists.
“I was so excited about having some creative input, even just a little, and not just being obsessed with learning somebody else’s part that was a natural for them but unnatural to me,” he says. “I still can’t figure out some of the new songs, but at least it was me who made those parts up.”
Before Moen could settle into the drum stool in the studio, Meloy had to write the material. Whereas in the past, he had a backlog of songs to draw from, going into The Crane Wife, he had only three ditties — “O Valencia!”, “Shankhill Butchers” and “Summersong” — all composed in the summer of 2005, while he and his wife (and Decemberists illustrator) Carson Ellis vacationed in Ireland.
The band finished up a European tour in December 2005 and took the holidays off. Then Meloy set to the task at hand, writing in regular shifts, five days a week. Time was of the essence. “We were having a baby in February,” he explains, “so I knew that January was really my time to do work.”
The crunch actually held an appeal to him. “I was excited to try writing all the songs right before we went into the studio, because I’d never done that before,” he says. “And it seemed interesting to have a group of songs that were birthed one after the other, so there was automatically this cohesiveness, this connection between all of them.”
As the pages flew off the calendar, however, this scenario seemed less appealing. “Once you get down to it, it’s really terrifying to be busting though songs and not knowing if they’re any good. Because with songs that have been around forever, the ones that don’t work out, the bad eggs, just naturally get ditched. This time, we didn’t have an opportunity for that.”
The other members bided their time. “Every week, my dad would ask, ‘How is the record coming?’,” remembers Conlee. “Obviously, because of the Capitol thing, my family was suddenly taking this very seriously.” She would assure them that, yes, work was progressing steadily. “But there were moments where I had to admit to myself, ‘I really don’t know how Colin is doing…I hope he’s doing OK.'”
Sometimes, he wasn’t. “It was hard,” he says. “I actually had to stop at one point, because I was starting to lose my mind from working all day, making demos, and then dealing with the baby at night and not sleeping at all. It was really scary.”
The shortage of completed new songs became the basis of a running gag, although Meloy admits he might be the only one who found it humorous. “It would be so funny to me, setting aside time for recording, when there were no songs. I’d say, ‘Oh yeah, and I can’t wait to attack…'” Silence.
“And then we can start working on the drum sounds for…” More silence.
“It was a little bit like Mad Libs,” chuckles Moen.
Exploring new directions for the Decemberists meant starting with a blank slate, so Meloy’s shortage of source material was almost an asset. “In writing the album, I was trying to take as little of a deliberate approach as possible,” he says. “There was a feel of rolling the dice, letting things fall where they may — of not wanting to be confined by expectations, or what fit in with what was the Decemberists. See what happens, and then just record it, and see what comes out the other end.”
Thus there are compositions such as “The Crane Wife 3” (one in a trio of songs on the album inspired by the Japanese folk tale of the same name), among the simplest originals in the band’s canon to date. “It probably took me all of five minutes to write it, and I wrote it on a bouzouki,” Meloy reveals.
On the other hand, the album’s ten selections also encompass some of the most ambitious tracks ever recorded by a band not known for sticking to conventions. “The Island” is a thirteen-minute murder ballad, split into three sections: “Come And See”, “The Landlord’s Daughter” and “You’ll Not Feel The Drowning”. At least in this case, the group did have a blueprint: Their 2004 EP The Tain was a five-part, eighteen-minute song based on an 8th-century Irish poem. “The fact that The Tain sat comfortably in our oeuvre, and made sense, opened up a lot of possibilities for work in the future,” Meloy points out.
