The Decemberists’ 5th LP, The Hazards of Love, started out as an experiment: what kind of story could be made by cobbling together a bunch of archetypes from British and Irish folk songs into one, long multi-part song? And would it be possible to make it all in the key of D? It started out valiantly enough; I made it about four songs in before that majestic key had been rung of all its possibilities. By the time I hit the spot where “Annan Water” belonged, I’d long ago abandoned any hope of keeping to that concept.

One thing I did stick to, conceptually, is writing the whole record pretty much in sequence. “Hazards of Love 1” was truly the first in that series to arrive. In some ways, it was similar to how I’ve approached novel-writing. You start at the beginning and you end at the ending. After you’ve done that, you’re free to hop about the whole of thing, prodding and fixing things as you go. So this song, “Annan Water” was written at the same time that the entire latter half of the record was written: in a little bedroom in a rented farmhouse in the south of France.

This demo recording, too, comes to us from that same little stone-walled room. I had a little midi keyboard with me; that’s doing the vibraphone solo you hear in the interlude. It remained largely unchanged from the demo to the finished LP recording, as it turns out, except for the chorus. In the demo (as you’ll hear), it keeps to the strumming pattern of the rest of the song. By the time I was rehearsing it with the band, I think I’d decided it needed a bigger change — that’s how we arrived at the idea that choruses should be an organ-only affair. But you hear it here as it was initially written.

Of course, this song — and the story it tells — owes a huge debt to the old folk song of the same name that I learned from a Nic Jones recording:

There’s a lot of that kind of thing going on in old folk songs — lovesick dudes and ladies bargaining with bodies of water to let them cross safely, this abundance of bridges being a more modern phenomena. More often than not, the river doesn’t go along with it. Such is the case with our poor William in Hazards: he manages to cross one way, but, as it goes with Willy in another classic Jones arrangement, “Clyde Water,” doesn’t fare so well on the return journey. Alas. Anyway, here’s the demo. Enjoy!

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As I wrote in my post a couple weeks ago, 2004 was a busy year for me. I’d just quit my day job at a bookstore and my band was touring and recording pretty relentlessly. Thankfully, songs seemed to be coming thick and fast — I recall really being carried along by all that was happening. This song, Eli the Barrow Boy, came out of a spate of writing in the summer and fall of 2004 that would also draw down The Engine Driver and Mariner’s Revenge Song.

There was a twelve string guitar on the wall at the Portland Music Company, a Gibson J-185, that I’d long coveted. With the band more than breaking even on touring, I finally had a little spending money and I bought the guitar. It felt really audacious at the time; I was determined to immediately put this thing to work. Most of the songs I wrote around this time were written on this guitar.

Eli started as a strummy, uptempo thing. It was the chord progression and melody that first drew me to the idea and I promptly got the idea down on my tape recorder, letting nonsense words stand-in for lyrics. The cadence of the melody suggested something about a water trough; I imagine if I’d continued down this lane, someone was inevitably going to get drowned. Here’s that initial fragment:

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You didn’t imagine it. This was not some dream-fragment that made its way into your waking life. The Decemberists, at one point in time, were asked to contribute a song to the Hunger Games movie soundtrack. And not just one song, initially: I have a distinct memory of sitting in the backstage of the Egyptian Room in Indianapolis, talking to someone (was it the film’s director, Gary Ross?) about writing a lullaby for the main character to sing. Was there also discussion about an end-credit song? It’s all a bit fuzzy — but suffice it to say, once the fog of movie development had cleared, a lot of the stranger ideas the director had (including hiring me to write songs) had hit the cutting room floor and our contribution to the music of District Twelve would be a single song relegated to a collection of tunes that, as far as I know, do not actually appear anywhere in the movie.

I’m not mad about it; these things happen that way a lot. One should always treat early discussions with creative leads on big projects as aspirational things, ideas that need to float a bit before they are subject to the gravitational pull of outside interests, mainstream expectations, and budget restrictions. It did introduce us to T. Bone Burnett, however. T. Bone was doing the music supervision on the project. I was keen to work with him; I’d always been a fan of his production — I remember first seeing his name on Los Lobos’ By The Light of the Moon and again, later, on Gillian Welch’s debut LP Revival.

This would’ve been in 2011, I think. 2011 was a busy year for the band. We had a number one record in The King is Dead and had a big tour schedule in front of us. I was also finishing the last edits on the first Wildwood book which was set to be published in the fall of that year. The Hunger Games people still wanted to include the band on the soundtrack, so I dug around for a song. I came up with this strange little thing called “One Engine.” I recorded it at home, just me and a drum machine. It sounded like dystopian chase music, which seemed fitting for the movie. I turned it in; people liked it well enough that we recorded it at Flora Studios with T. Bone producing.

The demo is interesting. There’s an argument to be made that it’s a better arrangement, just acoustic guitar, voice, and drums. It’s a simple song and doesn’t require that much adornment. I remember T. Bone, when we recorded the band version, sitting fixedly at the console during the basic tracking — drums, bass, guitar and vocals — and only stepping away when we jumped into overdubbing, saying, “And then they’ll just put all their shit all over it.” He didn’t say it in a disparaging way (I don’t think); I imagine he mostly wanted to get out of our way. We definitely got some great things out of those overdubs — I particularly like Chris Funk’s Gang of Four-adjacent electric guitar shapes — but you might be curious to hear it without “all that shit.” Here ‘tis for the paid subscribers:

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I am waiting
Should I be waiting?

This song lived for a time being called “Acts of Men,” taken from its earliest first line. I wasn’t sure what that meant at the time. I still don’t. The *truth* of the song didn’t reveal itself till quite a bit later, when I was determined to find a way to make it work. It became “A Beginning Song,” which would be the last song on our record What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World.

Here is the very first demo of the song. I recorded it in my studio up on Springville Hill. I played live drums on it, which is a thing I was attempting to do back then. I remember living with it for a while, never quite satisfied with how it turned out. I ended up rewriting the top of the song and adding a discursive bridge at the end. I think it became a better song, but that song owes everything to this, its embryo-form. Please forgive my time-keeping; I am not a drummer nor, I expect, will I ever be one.

And thank you for being a paid subscriber!

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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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Afternoon, Machinists. Apologies for being away for a bit — I’ve been acclimating to homelife and all the blessed banalities that come along with it. I’ve been to the DMV! Twice! But you are never far from my mind, dear subscribers, and I’ve been meaning to share more of the process outtakes from the making of The Decemberists new record, As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again.

This tune, The Reapers, was one of the last songs written for the record. The genesis of the idea hadn’t been kicking around for very long, either, before I got down to finishing it. I’d been tasked by Laika to write some songs for the characters to sing in the upcoming Wildwood adaptation and I found myself scribbling down a handful of ideas for each pass. The melody, chord progression, and general mien for The Reapers was one of those songs. Not sure why I didn’t finish it out for the movie — I think I felt like it meandered too much for a song of which only fifteen seconds was likely to survive. Anyway, in the summer of ‘23 (remember that one?), I wrote down the verses to the song and dutifully recorded it. Here it is:

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I was digging through the old demo piles and I discovered this little gem: the home demo of “Rox in the Box.” Since you all are a targeted and captive audience for all things Decemberists-related, I figured that this lumpy, misshapen thing might be of some interest to you. It was written for a half-imagined stage musical about Butte, Montana set in 1917 — I’d written “This Is Why We Fight” with that in mind as well. The stage musical never left the confines of my brainpan before it was abandoned and its parts sold off to become verses and choruses for Decemberists songs. Alas. “Rox” changed pretty drastically once the band got its mitts on it — for the better, I think. But I’ll reserve judgment; you go ahead and listen:

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So here’s a funny thing that can sometimes happen while you’re in the studio: there’s so much to-do, so much activity, and the songs that you’ve carefully written and arranged over the preceding months and years are all collected together and you’re recording them one after another, always keeping an eye on that ever-ticking studio clock. Sometimes, in this flurry of activity, you lay down a basic track for a song and neglect to record the whole thing. That feels done, you say. That feels pretty done, say your bandmates. Sounds done to me, says your producer, and on you go, on to the next tune. But you won’t realize until it’s much too late that you’ve left out a big chunk of the song.

This has only happened to me a few times as far as I can recollect. Once was actually during this last go-round of recordings — thankfully the mistake was corrected by some studio wizardry. The most egregious case of this occurring was during the making of Picaresque, in which I recorded this song, “From My Own True Love (Lost at Sea)” and managed to omit its second verse. I don’t know how I missed this, or how it went so long undetected. In the end, it might’ve been for the best — the song, on the album, never felt like it was lacking anything. This might’ve just been a case of some unconscious editing. I’ve since gone on to stick it back in when we play it live (which we kind of rarely do).

Anyway, here’s the home demo, with that missing verse back in:

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I was digging through some old files and I found this long lost gem: a demo of a song that never quite found its way to the band, but managed to spark a whole album full of ideas.

There are times when certain lines or turns of phrases stick out to you and you sort of file them away with the idea of sounding them out in songs. The phrase “the hazards of love” was one such phrase, one that I’d borrowed from the title of an Anne Briggs EP. On the EP, no song was attached to the name; I figured it was fair game.

I was playing this kind of Marr-esque jangle-pop guitar line, came up with a decent verse melody, and landed the chorus using this phrase that had been stuck in my head. “And oh, the hazards of love / You were here and then you were gone.” A nice sentiment, fading youth and love and all that. I always liked the song pretty well, but I had the feeling that that line, the one about the hazards of love, had a greater purpose. I ended up writing a couple more songs using the line as a chorus hook — and that lead to making a whole record around the concept.

Anyway, here’s the innocuous tune that sparked that whole idea, recorded in a basement in SE Portland in 2006:

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Songs take very different journeys from their beginnings to their finishings — some songs come into the world a half-formed thing and require the intervention of a lot of minds and fingers before they begin to takes shape, while some songs arrive an entire organism. This one, “The Infanta,” was one of those latter ones, as evidenced by its demo. Lots and lots of instrumentation was added to the finished product — 65 tracks of instrumentation, if memory serves: drums and guitars and keyboards and percussion and horns and even a shofar — but the structure of the song stayed remarkably close to this single-take home recording. Even the key change and the modulation to that key change is there from the beginning, something I typically set aside for rehearsal or the studio. I don’t remember much about the writing of this song, aside from the fact that I’d wanted to do a kind of galloping spaghetti western-style song for a while. I was influenced, I recall, by a Belle & Sebastian song I can’t place anymore and Mirah’s Cold Cold Water. I’d also wanted to write a song about an infanta, a child monarch. Beyond that, not much remains. Makes me think I must’ve just written it in one quick go, which was typical in those heady days. Enjoy, ye paid subscribers!

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One of the earlier songs written for the WATW,WABW sessions, “Make You Better” existed as little fragments in the notebook for a few years before it became a song. Here I am, with the chords and the rhythm shape barely under my control, recording a home demo to share with the band. There’s a scappy-ness here that’s maybe gone in the final recording, but that’s what happens when you actually learn how a song goes, I suppose. Anyway, you heard it here first, paid Machinists, the home demo of “Make You Butter”:

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This song is really two songs, and they both had been kicking around for a while, unrecorded. In 2007 we were invited to contribute a song to a compilation that the guys from The National were putting together. It was going to be a new volume of songs to benefit the Red Hot Organization. I’d always loved the earlier Red Hot comps, No Alternative and Red Hot + Bothered, and the cause was near to my heart — HIV/AIDS research and awareness-raising — so we jumped at the chance. It can be a tough call, though, being asked to contribute a previously unrecorded song to a compilation — you might have a body of work collected for another record; why hand away a song that could be the lynchpin to a record?

Sleepless, which was written in the early days, the Castaways and Cutouts days, never quite had found its place on a record, for whatever reason. For the demo, I appended another early orphaned song to the top of it for reasons I cannot now fathom. That song, the D minor bit that kicks the song off, was written in the early early days, when I’d been asked to put a band together to score a silent film at the Medicine Hat, a long-gone rock club in NE Portland. I picked out this Russian silent film, and in the film a man thinks his wife has died and he’s bereft. He sits down by her body and sings her a song. This being a silent film, there’s no words to the song, you just see him singing. So for that portion of the film, I wrote a song for him to sing. It was too long for the scene, and I ended up going with a different movie anyway, so the song was put aside. And then, for reasons beyond me, in 2007, I put it on the top of this song, Sleepless, and handed it off to the band to record it for The National and the Red Hot Organization. I remember worrying that they were going to be aghast at how long it was, but they didn’t say anything.

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This behemoth was written in 2003, in an upstairs apartment in NE Portland, on a twelve string guitar. It was born out of that A minor strum; a melody landed that immediately called out for something grander, something overlong and theatrical. I think I sat on it for a while before having the guts to finish the thing. I was emboldened, I think, by the fun we had making The Tain and wanted to do more music like that: long, rangy, narrative pieces. The song didn’t change much, from demo to final recording, aside from Rachel singing the part of the mother and the instrumental bit during the seafaring section. I hadn’t the foggiest notion that it would become a staple in our live set; I didn’t even know if it had a place on the album. It felt a bit too peculiar, maybe playing too hard to the galleries. Chris Walla, Picaresque’s producer, didn’t want it on the record. He thought it would make a great b-side. We prevailed, but I often wonder…

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I wrote this song in/around the spring of 2009 — not sure where the inspiration came from. I think a lot of it had to do with this drive (that I’ve spoken of before) to write simpler songs. This one leapt out of a pretty standard country stomp G chord (capo’d at second fret, I believe). That wasn’t anything to write home about, but that neat little tip-toe up to the Cmaj7 (again, capo’d into second gear) suggested something…I dunno…more enigmatic. You keep on stealin’ / Till there’s nothing left to steal. The chorus, a bit of a throwaway, caps off with a line that is (yet another) humble offering to the time-honored tradition of onanistic songs.

We eventually recorded it during a soggy spring in 2010 in a barn in Happy Valley, Oregon. I remember being a bit studio-burned when we laid into it, but Annalisa Tornfelt’s fiddle added a kind of spark to the session and we made it through. It was tracked live — not sure how many takes we attempted, but it was a bunch.

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Hello, good morning, good evening, my fellow (paid subscriber) Machinists!

I was digging through some old demos, as one does, and I discovered this interesting gem: a home demo of “Won’t Want For Love.” This song — and this demo in particular — was among the first glimmers of what would eventually become The Hazards of Love. I wrote the chord progression and the riff while futzing around with a germanium overdrive pedal and a guitar in DADGBE (the ol’ classic) tuning. Sometimes that’s all it takes to get things moving. The next thing I knew, I had the rough outline of what might transpire in the song and the songs around it: a young woman, not unlike the young woman in Tam Lin, has gotten into some mischief with the local enchanted fawn-boy, and is trying to work out what to do. Becky Stark would eventually knock this one out of the park, but here, in 2007 or 2008, when I had written it, it was just me and an acoustic guitar. Enjoy!

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Here’s the home demo for “On the Bus Mall,” a song that would eventually find its way on to The Decemberists’ third LP, Picaresque. I recorded it in my studio room in NE Portland, in our little upstairs apartment, on a Martin twelve-string guitar that would eventually — within a year or so — be stolen by meth addicts only to be later recovered from a roadside ditch. The demo, to my ears,

sounds like a pretty hasty job; I was just getting it down for the band to learn it. That extra guitar line, obviously, was a placeholder till we had a better, more Marr-esque line to introduce the song. I don’t know when this song transitioned its preposition from “at” to “on.” I thought it was always “on”, but clearly I am mistaken. “On” is better. Anyway, here ‘tis for you paying Machinists. Thanks for your good work.

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Here’s a home demo I made for the song “Foregone,” a song that would be destined for the b-side bin (or the outtake EP bin) after we’d assembled all the songs that would become The King Is Dead. I haven’t revisited it in a long time — I’d forgotten that I rewrote a verse and axed another. It was a much longer, stretchier song in its demo form. Listening to it now, I am recalled to the place I was in when I was writing it: a new transplant to a house in the woods up off of Springville road in NW Portland, settling into the strange and complicated life of being a dad, and feeling a flush of song inspiration. It’s pretty heart-on-the-sleeve kind of stuff. I maybe wanted to tamp that down after living with it for a bit, which might’ve been why I changed so much. At the end of the day, though, even the edits couldn’t save it from its fate. It’s sweet to listen to it now; I wish I’d kept it as is, maybe even *added* another verse.

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Another home demo from The King Is Dead — can’t remember when this one came down the pike (a phrase which I have just now had too Google to make sure I wasn’t misremembering; turns out pike and pipe are interchangeable and, yes, something coming down the pike is a thing) but wow is it quite a bit slower than how the band ended up taking it on Pendarvis Farm during the sessions. This was me leaning back into a mode of songwriting and playing that’s been a bent of mine from the time I started playing guitar, and a kind of songwriting that, at that point, I more associated with my early 20s songs. It was interesting, at that time, to just give in to that impulse — the lyrics certainly fall on the page differently than they would have from the pen of my college self. I recorded this at my home studio up on Springville Hill; extended hot licks on the back end are from the fingers of yours truly.

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As I put “The Engine Driver” in the column of “Occupational Songs,” so I put this acerbic gem into the small wastepaperbasket of “Fuck this, I quit” songs I have written over time. It should come as no surprise to most people that I have a wildly swingy love/hate relationship with this absolute dream job that I’ve landed, this being a singer and a songw…

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Between 2003 and 2005, Carson and I rented an upstairs apartment from our then label president Chad Crouch. We each had workrooms of our own, and mine faced Fargo street. I wrote and recorded all of what became the songs for The Decemberists’ 2005 record, Picaresque, in that room. This one, The Engine Driver, came pretty easy, I remember. I might do a d…

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