The Decemberists have announced their new album, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, out 14th June via YABB Records (Thirty Tigers). The band returns with their ninth 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. To mark the occasion, The Decemberists have released a new song, a 19-minute prog-rock epic titled ‘Joan In The Garden’ – listen below:
Colin Meloy on “Joan In The Garden”: “Joan in the Garden” has been kicking around as an idea since the ‘I’ll Be Your Girl’ sessions. I got into a Joan of Arc kick after reading Lydia Yuknavitch’s beautifully batshit novel ‘The Book of Joan.’ I wanted to make my own version of Joan — but the song that came was as much about the creative process as it was about the actual woman, about angelic visitation and creative visitation and the hallucinogenic quality of both.”
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) 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‘.
Last month, the band teased the new album with the release of the single ‘Burial Ground‘. The Decemberists will head out on an expansive North American tour with both spring and summer legs. The tour kicks off on April 30th in Kingston, NY at the Ulster Performing Arts Center and wraps up in August on the West Coast. The band will also be appearing at All Points East in London on 25th August.
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. 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.
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’.
As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again artwork and tracklist:
1. Burial Ground
2. Oh No!
3. The Reapers
4. Long White Veil
5. William Fitzwilliam
6. Don’t Go to the Woods
7. The Black Maria
8. All I Want Is You
9. Born to the Morning
10. America Made Me
11. Tell Me What’s on Your Mind
12. Never Satisfied
13. Joan In The Garden
