It goes without saying that a band’s lead singer embarking
on a solo tour featuring acoustic covers of Morrissey songs could
be labeled self-indulgent. But Colin Meloy doesn’t mind.
“People are going to see me that way,” the lead
singer of The Decemberists said in a recent phone interview.
“Doing a covers record of someone like Morrissey stretches
the boundaries of my humility. I don’t feel like it will be
for everyone, but I’m not one to shy away from experiments in
self-indulgence, which is what my whole career has been
about.”
He has a point. In addition to his solo tour, Meloy has also
written a book called “Let it Be,” which is a
meditation on his own personal affinity for the Replacements’
album of the same name.
And The Decemberists, a Portland-based indie rock group, has
never been known for their mainstream accessibility. Their
narrative-driven lyrics frequently center around characters more at
home in a Charles Dickens novel than a pop song, and their most
recent EP is an 18-minute epic called “The Tain,” based
on “Tain Bo Cuailinge,” the central poem of the Celtic
Ulster cycle.
“I can’t write something that doesn’t strike
me as a little bit off or weird,” Meloy said. “The
songs I shelf are the ones that are too straight.”
And before Meloy introduces the world to his newest batch of
songs (The Decemberists will release their third LP,
“Picaresque,” on March 22), he’s exercising a
more personal form of self-indulgence, as if the band’s form
isn’t enough. Meloy describes “Picaresque” as
“a bit of Oscar Wilde, a kind of Patrick O’Brien, a nod
to general ancient fairy tales.”
Meanwhile, his national solo tour will hit Los Angeles’
Hotel Cafe on Jan. 17-18 and, through Campus Events, UCLA’s
Kerckhoff Grand Salon on Jan. 18 at noon.
At the shows, Meloy will play The Decemberists songs, both old
and new, and Morrissey covers, which will also be available for
sale on a tour-only EP. Meloy thinks releasing the EP in record
stores would be too self-indulgent, even for him.
At least the tour wasn’t his own idea. Originally planned
by Chris Carrabba to be a dual solo acoustic tour, the Dashboard
Confessional star eventually dropped out, but Meloy decided it
would be a good idea anyway.
“It will give me an opportunity to reconnect with
audiences,” Meloy said. “In the last couple of years,
The Decemberists shows have become less and less intimate because
of the size of the venues and the size of the crowds. The songs
themselves are best appreciated if you’re paying attention
and not being jostled around too much.”
With lyrics rich enough to buy out Donald Trump, Meloy’s
songs may be best heard when accompanied only by an acoustic
guitar, as opposed to the complex arrangements that typically comes
with a complete Decemberists production.
“We have a tendency to arrange the hell out of
things,” Meloy said. “The songs themselves really work
on their own, and that’s how they were originally written
anyway.”
In that way, playing smaller venues is a prospect Meloy is happy
to return to. After recently completing his first European tour
with The Decemberists, Meloy may be a little slow to return to the
growing venues The Decemberists now mandate in the United States.
They played in the Troubadour during their last U.S. tour, and will
almost certainly play in an even larger venue when they next
return.
“(The European tour) most resembled our earlier tours,
with the band playing smaller clubs,” Meloy said. “We
didn’t have a sound engineer. We didn’t have a tour
manager. It was just the five of us.”
It’s fitting, then, that Meloy’s solo tour finds him
playing at UCLA, as The Decemberists played on campus in the Coop
in 2003 as part of a national tour that saw their popularity begin
to take off.
“It’s a nice campus. Everyone’s very
nice,” Meloy said of why he’s returning to play at
UCLA. “And I left a microphone there, so I’m going back
to get it.”