Demonstration Tapes: Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)
From a garret in Provence
The summer of 2008 was a wild time for me. In that summer, I got married, I moved house, and I was writing songs for what would be The Decemberists’ second record for a major label. I was grappling with the success of the band — 2006 and 2007 saw us performing to a level of visibility and scrutiny that I’d never really imagined — and was trying to find my way forward as a songwriter, as a husband, and a new dad. In an effort to get away from it all, I decamped with my new family to the south of France for a three week vacation. We rented a farmhouse in a small town in Provence, one that we’d randomly discovered on the internet years before, when these sorts of vacations seemed only aspirational, something outside of our grasps. And here we were. It was all a bit surreal.
I had packed a Pelican case of recording gear: an A/D box, a Neumann U87, and a small midi keyboard. I had hopes that this Provençal idyll would help inspire the latter half of a concept record I was building about two star-crossed folksong sweethearts and the world that was conspiring against them. I set up in an attic bedroom of the house and started recording.
A bunch of the songs from Hazards of Love existed prior to our time in France, but I still needed to finish them and demo them. I needed to figure out how they all fit together, since this was intended to be an album best suited to listening all in one shot. A lot of my time, I remember, was spent doing that — putting together the puzzle pieces. The last song of the record, though, The Drowned, was entirely written and recorded in that drafty farmhouse attic and it’s here for all you beloved subscribing Machinists (thank you!):
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