The Decemberists' Shiny, Happy Protest Album
“Everything is awful” goes one of the many cheery sounding, morosely themed choruses from The Decemberists’ eighth album, I’ll Be Your Girl. Seventeen years into the Portland rock eccentrics’ career, Colin Meloy is writing more plainspoken lyrics than ever while his band accesses the joy of ’80s synthpop. Meloy’s signature nasal keen and fascination with folktales remains, but there’s a new helping of easily accessible sentiment—and Donald Trump–related angst.
In February, I spoke with Meloy about the album, which is out March 16 and is streaming at NPR now. This conversation has been edited.
Spencer Kornhaber: The moment on this album that made me laugh out loud was during “We All Die Young,” when you have this really happy children’s choir sing the song’s title. That’s a pretty demented thing to do, is it not?
Colin Meloy: Yeah, it is. It was surreal teaching them the line, but you got to give kids credit. They were really into the idea of shouting that phrase. We actually have a history of getting kids to sing questionable things. On Hazards of Love we cast three kids singing about what their father had done to them to kill them. In the spectrum of Decemberists’ use of children in song, it’s actually pretty PG.
