The Decemberists: "Everything actually is awful, and it's not that funny"

The Decemberists have been ploughing their furrow of verbose prog-folk for over 15 years now, but this year’s ‘I’ll Be Your Girl’ saw them change things up, with a new producer, a truckload of synths and a highly refined songwriting approach. From the fizzing anger of ‘Severed’ to the macabre humour of ‘We All Die Young’, the five-piece stay on form even as they step away from the largesse of some of their early work. With the band currently on their first UK tour in over three years, frontman Colin Meloy chats with Dork about getting out of old habits, branching out into literature and what’s next for The Decemberists.

You've been out touring ‘I’ll Be Your Girl’ most of this year, how is it being back out on the road? It's been great; we've just finished North America, which is kind of the meat of the touring. It was nice to be playing new songs.

It's the first tour since America went completely bonkers, has ‘Everything Is Awful’ been going down well with audiences? I'm pretty bummed out about it, to be honest. I don't want to disparage the song from the record, but my relationship to the songs inevitably change every time. Something about going around even in an ironic way and proclaiming ‘everything is awful’ does an injustice to the fact that everything actually is awful, and it's not that funny. So we've actually stopped playing that song. I feel like the joke ran thin after a few months and everything remains awful. I guess it's just changed my opinion; I don't feel like joking about it anymore.

Your last few albums have dealt a lot more with personal topics than the fictional narratives from your earlier records? I just hit a stride where I was feeling more comfortable writing about myself, and it felt more novel writing about myself. Whereas I feel like at the beginning of The Decemberists it felt novel to not include myself or to include myself only as an observer almost. There are certainly autobiographical songs in those early records; they don't get as much attention maybe because of the narrative stuff.