I am certainly not the first person to write a song called “Down by the Water.” PJ Harvey has a very great one; Neil Young has his “Down by the River.” I think that there is an aspect to that suggestion, that something has occurred down by some body of water, that lives inside the collective American imagination. It is a part of our folklore to a degree. It probably stems from Irish/Anglo folk songs and stories — there are plenty of broadsides listed in the Child Ballads that report on some activity, likely nefarious, occurring away from the prying eyes of the household or village. Hidden in the willows along the banks. PJ Harvey’s “Down by the Water,” though a bit opaque, owes a lot to the songwriting tradition of the murder ballad/broadside. Neil Young’s “Down by the River” as well: “Down by the river / I shot my baby.” There’s probably a whole dissertation to write about “Down by the Water” songs but I won’t do that here. Suffice it to say, this is my contribution. As far as I can tell, there is no murder in this song, no drowning, which might be a bit surprising considering my predilections, especially when it comes to things happening near bodies of water.

The song really grew out of this first few lines, as is often the case. It had been sitting in my songwriting notebooks for a very long time. This first verse and the melody and chord progression that accompanies it dates back to 2001. I wrote it around the time I wrote “Grace Cathedral Hill.” I’m not sure why I never finished it then; I think I was uncertain about it. I might’ve also been uncertain about that line “Down by the old main drag” which was about as clear a reference to Shane MacGowan’s masterpiece “The Old Main Drag” as possible. Was it an homage or outright theft? I think it was this uncertainty that left the song unfinished for nearly 9 years.

I still like this line quite a bit. There are a lot of lines in songs I’ve written that I regret; there are lines in songs that I thought were genius when I wrote them and later learned to hate. There are lines in songs that were shitty when I wrote them and remain shitty to this day. This is a line I liked when I wrote it and I like it still. Something about that “feeling ‘round for fingers to get inbetween” perfectly sums up that time in one’s life when one is aimless and looking for trouble — any kind of trouble, good or bad. Our hero, here, our tow-head teen is clearly up to no good but at least he’s copping to it. He knows what he’s about. He wants to get in a scrape; he wants to get his heart broke.

I have a suspicion that people mishear this lyric as “the season rubs me raw,” which is wrong in so many ways.

This line doesn’t strictly make sense. Can a summer swell anon? What even is it doing, swelling? And how is it swelling soon (anon)? I’m just shooting from the hip, folks. It makes sense to me. Summer is when the action is going to happen, when the crowds show up to this seaport town. When things really get going. In the draft, as you can see from the photo, this was briefly “the summer swells all gone” which, thanks to God, was abandoned nearly as soon as it was written.

Again with the Old Main Drag. My hometown had a main drag. I’m not sure it’s a thing anymore. Do kids still “cruise the drag?” In Helena, where I grew up, not only did teenagers cruise the drag, but their parents before them had done the same thing. My dad and my uncles cruised up and down North Last Chance Gulch too. I did not, myself, cruise the drag; that was something only the scary jocks and hicks did. If I, a Guatamala-print-wearing theater kid dared cruise the drag, I’d have my teeth kicked in before I got to the turnaround on 6th Avenue. When I was a senior in high school, on the last Friday before graduation, some friends and I staged an elaborate water balloon assault on the drag-cruisers; I remember it involved artillery made of smoke bombs and giant slingshots. The assault was successful and I think we got some cowboys wet, but only after risking life and limb to do so. God, I hated my hometown.

So this is typical for me: right around the third verse, after the first chorus has come and gone, I begin to establish story and place. I’m imagining the scene; I’m laying it out for the listener. This is a seaport town whose population blooms over the summer months. This is a story, to my ear, about townies versus tourists. Or it might be the sort of drama that occurs when a group of ne’er-do-wells descend on a small town, looking for trouble. I think my comps here are Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock and The Who’s Quadrophenia. Our seaport town might be Brighton, England, based on those references, but I think it can stand in for any tourist town. I think I might’ve been imagining Astoria, Oregon, which feels like it would be an apt place to be the backdrop for this song.

Man, I struggled with this line. This is the introduction of the woman who makes things go so wrong for our protagonist. I wanted him to imagine her as some mythical creature, some exquisite goddess. Per the draft, I initially chose Io before making her a modern-day Leda, the Spartan queen who so entranced Zeus. Here she is, flashing her eyelashes coquettishly. But I recall being presented with a conundrum: really, she should be batting her lashes, not flashing them. In the moment, however, I think I determined that “lash-flashing” sounded better, with its assonance and consonance, with that short a sound and the repeated sh sounds. In retrospect, I might’ve chosen differently: lash-batting works just as well and makes more sense. In my defense, sometimes writing songs can feel like watching a runaway train. It’s there and then it’s gone; no use trying to catch up with it. It wanted to be what it wanted to be.

The instrumental break follows the intro chords. The intro chords, at one point in time, were simply Em to D, like the chords of the chorus. We put the C in there while we were recording just to skew it a little more away from R.E.M.’s “The One I Love,” which it always ran the risk of aping. It certainly still owes a lot to that era of R.E.M. We got Peter Buck to come in and play guitar on it because we were like, might as well go all the way. Buck, for the record, gave us the thumbs up. He didn’t seem to think it was overly derivative. So there.

We recorded this in a barn on a farm in Happy Valley, Oregon in the late spring of 2010. We really struggled with it. For whatever reason, I can’t imagine that struggle now. I hear it now or I play it live and it feels kind of effortless. A folk-rock song by the numbers. But we did really tear our hair out over it. Early versions sounded too rock n roll, I seem to remember. It was missing a kind of tenderness, a vulnerability. Usually, we all know the fate of a song once we’ve played it a few times. We played this one in rehearsals leading up to recording and were still uncertain about it. Down by the Water was one of the few instances in my career where a song was saved by small, iterative changes done while it was being recorded. A different drum beat here, a different guitar feel there. It would’ve surprised us, no doubt, if you’d told us while we were working on the song that it would eventually be the lead single of the record and be nominated for two Grammy awards. Good job, little song!

I think I started writing this song — just ruminating on the germ of the song, really — in 2003. I didn’t finish it until 2005. These days, it’s not uncommon for me to labor over something for two years, but it felt like a long time back then when I was singularly focused on songwriting and making work for my band. Oh, the flush of one’s late twenties! I got the idea for the song from a children’s book, Sumiko Yagawa’s 1987 retelling of the Japanese folktale. I found it in the kid’s section of Wallace Books, my place of employ back then. Jenny got me the job; she was working there too. I was busily shelving books in the children’s section when I came across it. Don’t know what called out to me, but I sat there on the floor and read it. It was a beautiful, sad, simple story. I figured a song could come out of it. I think I pretty quickly tried making that happen.

(As it happens, the bookshelves of Wallace Books provided the inspiration for more than one Decemberists song — I had this idea to write an ersatz prog-metal songsuite based on the Irish myth The Tain after someone had brought in a used copy of Kinsella’s translation of the epic.)

The feel of this song owes a lot to Belle & Sebastian’s “The Boy With the Arab Strap.” Of course, they’re not the first to write a song with that major key swingy 4/4 vamp. We’re all, at the end of the day, just borrowing from each other. A lot of times, leaping off an existing song can be a great angle for the start of your own tune. I like to think that song feels/rhythms/tempos are pretty public domain. They may spring from the same source, but they tend divert and branch pretty quickly. You don’t want to carbon copy the song, you just want to get that feel. I’d always loved the gallopy feel in “Arab Strap” and had been keen to try it in one of my songs for a while. I made an attempt at it with “The Infanta” but that ended up galloping in a very different direction. Crane Wife 1 was more of a direct homage.

“Crane Wife 1” was the second of the Crane Wives to arrive. My first attempt was a melody and chord phrasing that became Crane Wife 2. I don’t think I set out to write an multi-song thing initially; I figured I could fit it all in one song. Crane Wife 1 only came about when I had abandoned this first attempt.

The story of the Crane Wife goes like this: a poor, lonely peasant is out in the forest one day when he comes across a wounded crane, downed by hunters. He revives the bird, pulling the arrow from her wing, and the bird flies away. Days later, a beautiful woman arrives at his door. They fall in love immediately and are married (as you do). Together, they live an impoverished life. The peasant convinces his new wife to weave cloth that he might sell at the market. She agrees to do this on the condition that the man never watches her as she works at the loom; she must do this in secret. The man agrees and his new wife retreats to a closed room in the back of their cottage. She emerges the following day with a bolt of cloth that is the most perfect and elegant the man has ever seen. The cloth fetches a healthy price at the market and the man demands his new wife produce some more of this heavenly stuff — even though it is clear that the task of making this cloth is exhausting for the woman. This goes on for some time and the couple become wealthy. One night, however, as his wife is laboring away in secret, the man’s patience overcomes him and he opens the door to the weaving room. There is the loom and the cloth, but instead of his wife sitting at the shuttle there is a large white crane. The magic bird has been pulling feathers from her wings to weave into the cloth. This is the secret that makes the cloth so beautiful. The man has broken his promise and thereby broken the spell — the crane takes flight, dashing out the window and into the sky. He never sees the bird — nor his wife — ever again.

Even though the story is pretty simple, it’s always a trick to get a story into a song. There’s a delicate balance between clearly telling the story and making it not feel like a rote recitation. A song demands something elusive in the telling. Here I am, trying to create an evocative world in which this simple story can take place.

I think I’d already written the first verse of Crane Wife 2 by the time I tried my hand at this one. “My crane wife / arrived at my door in the moonlight” was immoveable, as if set in stone. I also think I’d come to this realization that the meter and tempo of Crane Wife 1, despite my best efforts, would never be able to tell the whole story. Instead, it became the prologue, the setup. I would return to the abandoned Crane Wife 2 to tell the rest of the story.

Ugh, this one was tough. I get a little triggered just looking at it. The chord progression owes a lot to Robyn Hitchcock, I think. It’s got some Veins of the Queen DNA in it. I don’t know how many false starts I had with this particular song, but I know it was a lot. I’d get a verse in and abandon it, come back to months later and try a second verse. Still no good; I’d rewrite the first verse, try a different bridge. Eventually I’d given it up for lost. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get it to hang together. It wasn’t until I’d come up with this idea of it being part of a bigger whole that I had some hope for the song.

There are some rhymes/slant rhymes that come out fully formed, with very little agonizing, and this one: “bells rang sweet for our wedding / and our bedding / was ready…” was one of those that just tumbled out of the pen. It’s not groundbreaking or anything, but I always was fond of it.

Oh look, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists has used a fancy three syllable word in one of his songs, let’s ask him about it in interviews. Fontanelle isn’t that weird, guys. Fontanelle is a word that lots of people know. I probably ended up writing it into this song because A) it fits — the softness of the thread might be like the delicate softness of a child’s skull and B) I had a newborn when I was finishing up this song and when you’re a dad for the first time, you tend to think a lot about fontanelles and worrying about sharp things accidentally going through them. That kind of stuff.

This was one of the first harmonies that John Moen really nailed. He was new to the group still; making the Crane Wife LP was his first recording session with us. For whatever reason, I think our voices really link up with this song. Even when we’ve had auxiliary backing singers — as we often do on tour — I’d always insisted that we not delegate this one harmony vocal to someone else. John really does it so well.

Yeah, I don’t know about this verse either. I think I’m at peace with it now, but I think it always felt a little unsatisfactory. Looking at it now, I suppose it’s not so bad, but I might’ve had higher expectations for this, the last verse of the song. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though! I recall writing and rewriting these last few lines many, many times before I was just, like, fuck it, it’s good enough. Let’s keep moving. Sometimes you just have to do that. And sometimes the offending verse or line mellows in time and you forget that you ever tussled with it; sometimes it sticks in your craw forever. This is one such line. Alas.

I do like this line, though. These last few lines, this bridge-like coda, has always been my favorite part of the song. Both in recording and performance. That word “heart” is at a kind of sweet spot in my register — it’s high but not too high and I can usually really lay into it on stage. I also like how it comes across in the recording, with everyone in the band singing HEART! HEART! HEART! That feels good and right.

This trio of songs were written between 2003 and 2005 in various places around Portland, Oregon. They always seems to have belonged together, these songs, as I demoed them as a suite of songs at home before the band laid into them in rehearsal and in the studio. “Come and See” and “The Landlord’s Daughter” were written on a Gibson 12 string guitar, one of the only instruments of mine recovered from the 2005 theft; “You’ll Not Feel the Drowning” was written on a nylon string guitar, my grandfather’s 1930s Goya.

“Come and See” is the title of a 1985 Soviet film directed by Elem Klimov. I think I had first seen it a few years prior to writing this song and I had earmarked the title as something to use for a song. I might’ve initially thought about making more overt references to the movie throughout the song, but I was just following the thread of the song as I wrote and it never really took me to the subject of the film. It remains, I guess, as a sly nod to one of the great anti-war films of our time.

This song begins with an unofficial 4th part, the instrumental riff that kicks things off. I believe I’d written it after the other parts were written; I felt like it needed some kind of heavy opener before it dropped down into that more-reserved single guitar line at the beginning of the first verse. As you can hear from the demo, it started out in as much more Sabbath-y than it became. I think we determined, in the studio, that just going all fuzz box on the riff was perhaps too on-the-nose, so we jammed on it for a while using different instruments to see if we could get somewhere more interesting. What we arrived at is what you hear in the final recording. The particular arrangement of that opening instrumental bit has never quite settled for me — the decisions about how long each part should go, how long the entire section should last, these were all decided fairly arbitrarily. Why does it repeat the central phrase 4x then 2x, then back to 4 and finishes with 2? Whose idea was that? And why? I’d make it shorter if I could do it again.

An island hidden in a sound, that’s the jumping-off point. Don’t know how I arrived there. To my best remembering, the song started with that Em picking pattern; it sounded mysterious, gloomy. The words that formed from the void were a hidden island. I kid you not: I often envision Margaret Wise Brown’s The Little Island when I sing this song — I wonder if I was influenced by that. That book was an early favorite of Hank’s, and I’ve read it more times than I care to count. Hank wasn’t born, though, when I’d finished this song… so it couldn’t be that.

Chris Funk sang this as “A Jenny Conlee over-hanging trees” one time in rehearsal and I cannot unhear it.

A little copped Coleridge here, from “Kubla Kahn:” “…Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea.” I think my island owes a lot to the stately pleasure-dome and all its surrounding gardens and caves of ice. It’s a sublime and romantic place, and one that is full of terrible, powerful things.

I’m not sure I wholly intended this — I can’t really remember why certain decisions were made during the writing of this song — but I do think this is a reference to Algernon Blackwood’s short story “The Willows,” which is a story that really affected me as a kid. I read it aloud on a camping trip with some friends in middle school and it scared the shit out of us. That island on the Danube, where the canoers camp, is an antecedent of my island, with its looming, frightful willows.

More babies abandoned in wicker cradles (in this case, a “briared” one). Without a doubt, this particular baby was birthed underwater in a river to two drowned parents, discovered and placed in this makeshift cradle, only to be discovered again by a group of people looking for their next child monarch and paraded in a palanquin.

A fucking English major wrote this sung, huh.

I’m not going to unpack this too much, it’s mostly just three words that sound good together. A Patagon is a kind-of cryptid believed to have lived in Patagonia, in southern Argentina. I’d just finished reading Bruce Chatwin’s great “In Patagonia” when I wrote this and Patagons were on the brain. Sycorax is Caliban’s mom from The Tempest; parallax is what happens when two viewers see something from two different positions and it skews perception, like what a speedometer needle looks like to the driver vs. the passenger, but in this case the speedometer needle is an abandoned baby in a cradle and the driver is Sycorax and the passenger is a Patagon. Makes perfect sense.

I was in a heavy 60s-70s folk mode when I wrote these songs. While the recording of Picaresque was informed by repeated listens of Fairport Convention’s Liege and Lief, I’d gone deeper into the rabbit hole as I wrote songs for what would be The Crane Wife: Anne Briggs, Nic Jones, Pentangle, Shirley Collins, June Tabor, The Watersons, and Dick Gaughan were all jangling around in my ears like so many beans in a Full English Breakfast. Before, I’d only dabbled in writing folk songs that sounded like they might’ve sprung from a different era; “The Landlord’s Daughter” was my first successful landing of one, I think. The general vibe owes a clear debt to American folk-rock as well, with a quick triplet 12 string picking I might’ve cadged from CSNY’s “Deja Vu.”

Pretty standard folk song elements here: a rake-figure exacts some kind of revenge against someone from the privileged class. Another read, and one I’m inclined to make, is that it is more in line with the “vagabond-makes-good” theme from folk song. There’s no saying that the narrator and the landlord’s daughter don’t make off on horseback to a better life, away from an isolated life of wealth — a la Janet and Willie’s escape at the end of “Willie O’Winsbury.”

As mentioned above, I’d been reading Bruce Chatwin’s “In Patagonia” during the writing of these songs. There’s a great section in that book where Chatwin recounts the nineteenth century sea voyage of a Charly Milward (I think this is correct; I’m doing this from memory — I seem to have misplaced my copy!). The ship hits rough seas; afraid for his life, Charly is huddled in his hammock below decks. A fellow shiphand calls him “little ugly” and advises he should just go to sleep; thereby he “won’t feel the drowning.” I nabbed it and put the whole imagined exchange into a song.

To be used as payment when you’re ferried to the underworld, natch. From the Charon’s Obol myth.

A sneaky bit of Dylan Thomas tucked in here, from Under Milk Wood. “It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, suckling mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah.”

This song was recorded at Kung Fu Bakery, in Portland, Oregon, in Spring of 2006. Chris Walla and Tucker Martine co-produced it with the band. I had initially envisioned “The Island” being the song that kicked off the record, being one of two three-song suites that would bookend the record, the other being The Crane Wife 1, 2, and 3. In the sequencing, however, I was convinced by Chris Walla, the co-producer, to lop Crane Wife 3 and put it at the top of the sequence. He wanted to avoid having these two lumbering song-suites weighing down the record. I think he was right. “The Island” remains one of my favorite songs to play live — we’ve given it breaks here and there, but it has been a mainstay of sets since we recorded it.

My recollections of writing this song are a little fuzzy, mainly because the song was written over a fairly long period of time. It took shape in a pretty haphazard way. The chord progression and verse melody existed first. I think I may have been admiring the chording in Laura Veirs’ “July Flame” and was low-key playing along with it when I landed on my own version of a kind of off-kilter octave chord that jumps around the neck. The off-kilter octave chord in question being that sussy B minor that shows up elsewhere in Decemberists music. The hook, this idea of “making yourself better,” appeared out of the blue while I was driving. I liked the cadence of the phrase and I liked what it suggested. Aren’t we all, forever, looking to other people, to outside relationships, to somehow heal damage that’s been done to us?

As is often the case, the verses come first. I rarely start out with a chorus. I had the chord progression, and the melody grew out of that. This business about thin fingers and fingernails? I dunno. It made sense. It arrived first. And sometimes the first arrivals are the ones that stay. I have a sense that it grew out of my thing with love songs that put a romantic spotlight on lesser-desired body parts. It’s the whole “and you’re drifting off to sleep / with your teeth in your mouth” school of lovesongwriting. I want your fingernails. That makes sense to me.

And here we have a classic folk-song motif — a love that surges and fades with the seasons. As an aside, Kelly Hogan, one half of our dynamic backing vox duo in these days, would fill her lyric book with little illustrations to help her remember certain verses and words. Here, she’d drawn someone in a row boat, “pulling backwards” on their oars. Whenever I sing this line, I can’t help but flash on that illustration. It helps me, too!

Our poor, codependent lovers. They are buckling under the ebbs and flows of romantic attachment, all the while trying to fix themselves, to make themselves better. Which, obvs, is not a healthy way to be in a relationship. Or is it? I mean, don’t we all rely on our relationships, selfishly, to suture our wounds?

This was not the first chorus to live in this song. I think I made several different attempts, but this was the one that stuck. This whole G-G-G-A bit is really leaning into its power pop origins. It’s a thing Big Star would do; it’s a real Cheap Trick vibe.

Even at the time, this was a bit of an anachronism. Who was writing letters anymore in 2013? Unfortunately, emails doesn’t rhyme with “better.” Or sexts for that matter. Neither of them rhyme with “better.” You know what does? Letters.

When you sing a song enough times, it tends to turn into nonsense, like repeating a word over and over again till it stops making sense. When I’m singing this song, I’m rarely thinking about what’s inside the song, the story of the song. I’m thinking about what the next line is, I’m thinking about how my voice is feeling, I’m focusing on whether or not the band is rushing or dragging. So now that I’ve written out the lyrics and am looking at them, line by line, certain things occur to me. I copied these lyrics from Google, and, of course, there were errors. Google has these lines as “It’d make you better,” and I hope that people aren’t hearing it that way. It’s really important to the song that these last few lines of the chorus, an echo of lines elsewhere in the song, are phrased as questions. Did it make you better? I’d forgotten, in all my singing of the song, that it is a question here. And, like the headlines of click-bait articles on the internet that are phrased as questions, the answer is typically no.

This part, the bridge, came last. I had the verses, I had the chorus, but it felt like it needed more. I liked the idea of the song opening up a bit, expanding out from its structure. The chording and feel definitely gives a nod to some perennial favorites — it’s the two headed love-child of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” and the chorus from “You Can Go Your Own Way.” I had initially envisioned it turning into a wild Chris Funk guitar solo bit, something that might stick around a bit longer that you’d expect, but it didn’t quite translate in the studio, despite our efforts. So we kept it tight. I still feel like it telegraphs that energy, without it overstaying. When we’ve played it live, we’ve given into that original impulse, and have let Funk’s solo go on for quite a bit longer. I’m on the fence though; I think it works better in its truncated form.

In the demo, this line is “All I wanted was a minute of your time,” but it always felt like a place-holder. I must’ve rewritten it in the studio, and I think I made the right choice.

As you can tell from the demo, which I posted last week, the build that we eventually got in the studio was not there from the start. It was an all-hands-on-deck kind of situation, making it work so that this chorus towered over the two that came before it. It’s not an easy task, trying to out-big yourself. It took some doing. I think a big part was Kelly Hogan and Rachel Flotard’s backing vocal energy. I hadn’t expected that to be a part of the arrangement when I was writing the song; the concept of having two backing singers was a thing that developed as we worked on the record. I had always been curious about Leonard Cohen’s thing for working with women backing singers and wanted to give it a shot myself. The idea ended up, in my mind, defining a lot of the stuff that we’ve done for the past ten years. I’m less inclined to work in that mode now — I think I got it out of me — but I’m forever grateful to Kelly and Rachel, and Nora O’Connor, who took Rachel’s place on our tours, for opening up these songs in a way I couldn’t have anticipated.

“July, July!” was written in July of 2001, by my best guess. It’s not dated in my notebook, but the song on the previous page, “Song for Myla Goldberg,” has 6/22/01 written at the top. I wish I dated lyric pages more; I did it a lot when I was younger, but got more and more out of the practice as the years went on. I don’t know what’s stopped me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that putting the day’s date on a song in a notebook gives it too much credence. It becomes a fixed thing, a thing worth noting, and I’m loathe to do that to most songs till they’ve had their full due. Also, it feels a tad self-serious, dating things. Whatever. Anyway, this song was written shortly after “Song For Myla Goldberg,” which was written on June 22nd of 2001. I’d forgotten that “Myla Goldberg” was written earlier than “July, July!” Makes me realize that, at the time, I didn’t feel like “Myla” was good enough for the Castaways and Cutouts sessions. I seem to recall worrying that “July” was a bit too poppy and upbeat — I was wanting to make strange music at the time, being surrounded by a musician peer group who all seemed to be trying out-strange each other. I must’ve lost some of that worry when the sessions for Her Majesty The Decemberists came about. I think “July” passed muster in these early days because, even though it was as upbeat a folk-pop song as you could possibly conjure, it at least featured blood, chicken ghosts, and people with their innards falling out.

I have no explanation for this line or where it came from. This is a song about the building that I lived in at the time, the Oak Street Building in SE Portland, but the thing about a road meeting a road that goes there… who knows. If I was pressed, I’d say the bit about “and how it green grows there” is some reference to the fact that one of the tenants had a bonsai tree greenhouse on the roof of the building. I’ve always worried that people would read that line as a reference to smoking weed. For the record, it’s not about smoking weed.

This, too. Your guess is good as mine.

Here we find harbor in more grounded reference: this was based a distant relative of mine who ran a grocery in Windsor, Canada, and he got tied up in a booze-running operation between the US and Canada during prohibition. It was a scandal to my grandparents, who were chagrined whenever it came up, which it often did when the younger generation gathered. It was a good, salacious story. Something went awry, in the cellar of that grocery in Windsor, and this relative ended up shot in the belly by some nefarious gangster. I don’t know if his guts were falling out and he had to hold them in, but it made sense for the song. Besides, this isn’t about *my* relative who was a crooked French Canadian, it’s about yours.

In the original lyrics, posted above, the French Canadian is a “crooked, cold Canadian,” which is not as good. It must’ve been changed on the fly during recording.

More scattershot poesy. But we did have a toilet in the kitchen, in this particular warehouse apartment. There was a shared bathroom in the hallway so we called the kitchen toilet “Plan B.” It was also good for food disposal, though probably not great for the plumbing. Ah well. Not like we ever got our deposit back.

A few thoughts on this chorus. For one thing, the central motif, the “July, July” bit is a direct borrowing of an Innocence Mission lyric, from their great song “July.” (“July July / The man I love and I…” I imagined it was an homage to that band, whose songwriting accompanied me a lot during my twenties. It also happened that that summer, the summer of ‘01, was when Carson and I were trying to figure out our relationship. We were pretty new sweethearts, having been close friends for three years, and there were some bumps along the way. I think the strange July that this song references was that very July, when Carson and I were falling in and out with each other at a fairly regular pace. We eventually got it figured out.

The Oak Street Building is a former poultry slaughterhouse, and there were little holes in the wall here and there where the old slews used to carry the blood out of the building. I imagine many thousands of chickens were murdered in that warehouse, and I wondered about their ghosts. So many chicken ghosts, rattling the chains they forged in life.

This song is a portrait of a very particular time in my life, that summer of 2001. It’s about the warehouse where I lived and my own hangups and fascinations at that time. It’s about Carson and I in the first throes of our relationship. This verse is about her, even though she didn’t have a nappy blueish gray camisole. I think those lines were more about the passing of time and the frailty of memory. Here we are, now, growing old and ancient and there are many instances of one or the other of us remembering those spritely magenta things that were in fact much more grayish.

There’s that chicken blood again.

I copied these lyrics from the internet and then fixed the errors. For lyrics pulled from the internet, they were surprisingly in good shape (no giggle holes here), so thanks to whomever might be responsible for transcribing July, July! to wherever Google sourced the words. I did appreciate that the transcriber went to the effort of writing out all of the “ays” in this last, elongated “strange.” It’s gotten longer over the years; this original version seems so concise.

This song was written in 2001 — in February of 2001 to be exact. I know this because it happens that, at that time, Carson (of Slowpoke fame) was doing this weird practice of minutely journaling every moment of her day for a week, and it happened to be the week that I wrote this song. There’s a couple mentions of the song in her journal; I guess I played it a few times for her during the course of the week. Back then, I didn’t really have a home recording setup, so I would often resort to just playing a song over and over till it was lodged in my memory. No demo exists of the song; I would’ve just taught it to the band during rehearsals. The title is a deliberate crib of The Red House Painters’ song “Grace Cathedral Park” which was (and remains) one of my most favorite songs of all time. The song itself is a pretty straightforward account of the activities of a single day during a trip I took to San Francisco around New Years, 2000-2001, to visit Carson and help her move to Portland.

I think I’d only been to San Francisco a few times prior to this trip. I hadn’t made it to Grace Cathedral, even though, because of the RHP song, it was lodged pretty doggedly in my imagination. I think this was the trip that I convinced Carson to accompany me up the hill to visit the cathedral. It was New Year’s Day, 2001.

This reads as “All wrapped in th’ bones of a setting sun” in the original lyric sheet; I think I sneak a “th’” into the line when I sing it live, but the articles are all gone in the recording. Never quite scanned. I liked the lazier swing of the line without them.

Oh, how sad we were, all the time, back then. Everything felt very bleak and very sad. We were so broke, all my friends and me, and it seemed like we had few prospects. I was working at a pizza place in Portland; Carson was cocktail waitressing in the Bay. Our circumstances lent themselves to particularly morose lyric-writing, as evidenced here.

I did this, in a chapel in the cathedral. Lit a white candle and dropped my quarter in the little box.

Incidentally (and I have told this story many times), Carson worked briefly as a hot dog vendor on the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. Famously, she nearly set the pier on fire when, as customers were approaching, she absently flicked a cigarette to the ground. A cart patron — a little kid, I seem to remember — saw the smoke billowing up from the wooden beams of the pier and hollered FIRE! Carson, in a moment of inspiration, grabbed the bucket of hot dog water from the cart and extinguished the inferno, just as the fire brigade was arriving. She was proclaimed a hero; she had her picture taken with the fire fighters and the kid. I haven’t seen this photo, but I imagine it exists somewhere. In my mind I see it: there is still a little tendril of smoke coming up from the pier, just behind the hot dog cart, and there’s twenty-something Carson, with her baggy cargo pants and tanktop, grinning alongside a half dozen beefy firefighters in their helmets and suspenders. And right in front is this cherubic kid, this smiling boy, and in his right hand is a hot dog all slathered with mustard.

I’m not sure if this is a faded memory, or if it’s a real thing — but I *think* there was a busker, a trumpet player, down there on the pier as we were wandering, looking for a hot dog, and he was playing The Star Spangled Banner and he was dressed in a Superman costume. I’ve never received any kind of affirmation from San Franciscans that this was, in fact, a thing — that in the early aughts, there was a guy who would loiter the Hyde Street Pier playing songs on his trumpet, one of those songs being the National Anthem, while dressed as Superman. Perhaps one of you could disabuse me of this hallucination.

This was before Carson and I were a couple. When we were just friends, with our own separate hardluck stories about love affairs gone wrong and crushes unrequited. She was infatuated with this guy who lived in her warehouse who had a motorcycle and he would ride her around the city on the back of it.

This song is not so much about me, about my trip to San Francisco as the year 2000 tipped over into the year 2001, but about Carson and her relationship to this city, this city that she loved so much but was also so ready to leave. It’s also a pretty great portrait of our friendship at the time. We were always together, we were always happiest together.

Another half-borrowed line, this one from The Innocence Mission. Their 1999 record “Birds of My Neighborhood” was one that both Carson and I loved and listened to a lot around that time. I don’t know if I consciously cribbed the line from them, or if it just found its way in without me realizing it, but it must’ve been halfway birthed from the last line of chorus of “You Are The Light”: Are you feeling better than before? Now that I think about it (and I’m listening to “You Are The Light” now and remembering this time), I imagine that my inclusion of this line might’ve been a very intentional call back to The Innocence Mission, as a kind of bond Carson and I shared in that record. Are you feeling better now?

Because, oh, we were so sad. And I think we were both just constantly trying to make the other feel better.

No idea, really, where this notion came from. Fifty three bucks for a halo. I think I just thought it sounded nice. There were lots of pills then, though. Always pills.

This was a friend of Carson’s — a coworker, I think — that I was crushed out on. But I think I’d only every met her once or twice, and I don’t think I would see her again after this trip. The infatuation was brief and it left as soon as it came, as so often they did then.

It bugs me, to this day, that this is a slant rhyme, that vinegar and curl are supposed to rhyme here and they don’t, but I was so deadset on those particular words, that particular pattern. Apparently there was no dissuading…myself.

And then we packed up and left; we drove through the night from San Francisco to Portland, myself and our friend Nathan in his truck and Carson in her Honda Civic. We arrived at dawn in Portland and moved her into this warehouse where we were all living, a warehouse that had formerly been a poultry slaughter house, where at night, if you listened closely, you could hear the ghosts of those chickens, rattling their chicken chains.

“June Hymn” was written in the spring of 2009. Carson and I had just moved, the summer before, to a house in far northwest Portland, just south of Linnton and above the St. John’s Bridge. It was a little house in a neighborhood tucked into Forest Park, and it had a standalone garage that we immediately converted into studios — the upstairs for Carson and the downstairs for me. Our son Hank was three at the time. We’d moved from inner SE Portland and were living outside of the city for the first time. We were surrounded by woods; we took walks in the woods every day — the street that ran past our house deadended at a neighborhood trail that led into Forest Park. I was still recovering from some massive rock tour burnout, though the tours for Hazards of Love, which were all happening around that time, were a kind of balm for my tour-weary soul. That was a good crew, the Hazards of Love team; the tours were successful. I remember coming off of them feeling renewed, but also excited to dig back into work, to writing. There was also a kind of defiance to the Hazards of Love tours — I was insistent that we play the record, start to finish, every night. Our own shows were an easy sell that way — we’d play the whole record, take a break, then come back out for a second set of material from out other records. Not so for the festivals we were playing at the time, where, to the chagrin of our agents and manager and promoters, we would just play The Hazards of Love, start to finish. I think we left a lot of people scratching their heads. In 2007-2008, I wanted to make difficult music. In 2009, I was ready to move away from that. There, up in Forest Park, amid the trees, away from town, feeling rejuvenated, I suddenly wanted to make songs that weren’t dark and violent (or at least not *too* dark and violent); I wanted to make songs that were catchy and people would want to sing or learn to play themselves. June Hymn was born out of that.

In my lyric book, I have the title as “Summer Comes to Springville Hill.” From the outset, the song was a kind of homage to The Waterboys’ great “Spring Comes to Spiddal,” but maybe I thought the title would be too on the nose. I’d also toyed, I remember, with calling it “Summer Hymn” and its sibling song, what would end up being called “January Hymn,” “Winter Hymn.” But Fleet Foxes’ lovely “White Winter Hymnal” was everywhere those days I didn’t want to cadge from that fantastic title. And so this song would need a different title. The odd thing is that it was not written in summer; it was written in late spring. Summer was coming — it hadn’t yet arrived. Oh well.

This is one of those songs where a whole universe, the universe of the song anyway, springs from the first line: “Here’s a hymn to welcome in the day.” I think I had the chord progression first — or at least the first handful of bars of the chord progression — and the words just came out of that. In so many ways, I imagined it as a kind of call-back to the Reverend Eli Jenkins’ ode to Llareggub at the beginning of Dylan Thomas’s “Under Milk Wood.”

Some poetic license is taken here. Bulbs, in Oregon, start popping up in February. By the time summer comes, all those bulbs have finished their comin’ in and most have died back. But it’s forgivable, I think. Being a transplant from Montana, my seasons tend to be all mixed up. I associate the explosion of bulbs and lilacs as summertime phenomena, not the late winter, early spring ones they are out here.

This line, too, tips my hand as a newcomer to the woodier areas of Portland. We were surrounded, in our new home, by birdsong. Thrushes and nuthatches and chickadees — all singing throughout the day.

We didn’t have a clothesline; this was an invented scenario. I think we had one of those fold-up wooden racks that we used to dry clothes in the house, but no clothesline. But it sang so well, this line, and it really fit the tenor of the song. So I kept it.

*This* is real, though. When we renovated the garage, we built a staircase that ran from the ground up to the second floor, up to Carson’s studio, and we planted jasmine plants at the base of the piers, carefully threading twine up the side of the posts so that the jasmine would, eventually, create an arbor. Thing is, the jasmine never really took. It didn’t train well. I think we ended up replacing the jasmine with some other evergreen vining plant.

This might all seem very myopic to the listener, but I picture this building every time I sing this song. The brown, cedar-sided garage, the staircase leading up to Carson’s door, the landing outside the door where she had a little wicker chair. She would sit there and have her coffee. It’s all there in my mind; I think I wanted this song to be as accurate a portrait of our lives at that time that I could manage — absent clothesline notwithstanding. And the war she shouldered all the night before? I’m sure it was some dark cloud that came over, as dark clouds do — even in times of remembered joy.

These yellow bonnets, I think, were the dandelions that would thrive in our backyard. My cousin, who was maybe five at the time, loved to sing this line as “yellow vomit.” He does still, to this day.

Springville Hill was my own invention, or at least I must’ve heard it casually spoken somewhere in that neighborhood. It’s not called that on a map or anything. It’s sweet that, as far as we know, it’s still called that by a few of its residents today.

It happens that I was working on the initial fragments of a draft that would end up being my first book, Wildwood, at this time. I think I was bouncing back and forth between writing the book and writing songs, and the wall that separated those two worlds occasionally became very gauze-like. This shows up elsewhere in the songs I was writing at the time — the body of a boy laid on a plinth of trillium and ivy in “Don’t Carry It All” comes to mind. I was ever-mindful of the waste that the ivy was laying on the woods around us. You could see the vines topping the very tips of the Doug Firs that surrounded our property. It was a scourge then; it still is to this day.

I see this lyric misheard and miswritten often. It might not make a ton of sense, but it does to me. The sun would set behind our house, behind the hill to the west, and the last rays of it, all pink and warm, would come in through our living room windows. It was such a sweet little house; I still miss it.

I’m fond of this bridge. I like the melody and the change and the simplicity of it. I like the idea of writing a kind of postcard or note, some day, giving my best to Springville Hill. “When this old light / Isn’t ambling anymore”: I think I’m imagining a time and a life where I’m not traveling, where I’m not touring. It’s a long ways away, I think.

Written in a duplex in NE Halsey, Portland, Oregon, fall of 1999. Like a lot of songs, this one grew out of the chord progression, which was just two chords: C and D. The D is played like the C, just slid up two frets. The melody followed from there. It stayed untitled for a long time, until such a time when the thing just needed a title, so people knew what to play and, eventually, what it should be listed as on the back of the record. “Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect” was floated as a name and stuck. Looking through the lens of time, I wish I’d named it something else — “Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect” is awfully wordy. It was a hassle, just now, to rewrite it. The song’s called “ARCHITECT” on the setlists and I don’t think I’ve heard anyone inside the band refer to it by its full name. But, alas, here we are.

Oh boy, right off the bat. We’re in Holocaust territory. This was written around the same time as “Odalisque,” a song which also owes a debt to a particular book that was stuck in my head around that time: Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. I might’ve read it in a Holocaust Lit class in college; I can’t remember. If you haven’t read it, you should. It’s a powerful and moving narrative about a boy’s voyage through a wartime landscape. I had also recently seen the movie Come and See, and was fascinated by that era in history. What particularly fascinated me — and this really shines through in The Painted Bird — was how the horrors of the war and the pogroms and the concentration camps had transformed the European landscape into a kind reality that seemed unmoored from itself, where everything seemed to take on a folktale-like hue, at least in the retelling of it. How these atrocities, beggaring imagination, required a different, more ancient form of storytelling to recount them. So here’s our soldier, or rather the narrator’s dream of the soldier, enjoying the perfumed air of a newly-arrived spring, thinking fondly of his true love. It’s a folktale-like beginning — a very In the merry, merry month of May kind of mood, and yet hidden, just beyond that copse, are the camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. I found this incongruity interesting at the time, the friction between the tone of the song and melody and the actual landscape hidden inside the song. Would I write this verse now? I’m not sure.

I remember this word provoking a conversation with my sister, Maile, who copyedited the lyric sheet for me when we were putting together the record. Grammatically, it should be “lie.” The “lay” in the subsequent line about the rifle is okay — it’s just the “lie with you” that’s wrong. I’ve gone back and forth on this; I think I started correcting it to “lie” when I sang it live — even though it’s probably one of the lesser grammatical offenses I commit in my songwriting. Maile’s take was that it should be given a pass. Rock ‘n’ roll exists beyond the bounds of grammar. Nobody told Dylan that it should, ahem, actually be “Lie, Lady, Lie.” Or maybe they did, but we’re all thankful that Dylan did not take their advice. “Lie, Lady, Lie” is a terrible song, or at least a very different song. “Lay, Lady, Lay” is lovely.

The chorus follows in the footsteps of so many choruses before it — the grand tradition of creating a chorus out of a jumble of words just to get through the thing. It’s nonsense. Or rather, I should say, it invites the listener to make meaning out of a series of abstract notions. I think my intuition was that there was so much packed into the verse, so many words and ideas and notes and things, that I could not only get away with a whatever chorus, but it would actually serve the song, give the people a break from all the poesy. Similarly, I remember being a bit baffled about the shape of the chorus. I was stuck there for a while. All along, I think, I was aware of the chord progression’s similarity to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” which is also just two chords revolving back and forth through the verses. I think the challenge I set to myself was this: write a chorus that distinguishes itself from the verse but doesn’t add any more chords. So I inverted the two chords, swapping the D and the C, and voila, a chorus was born. The Mac has one up on me in that the whole song is just those two chords (aside from the instrumental break). But we can’t all be the Mac.

Even though I tend to think of these “occupation songs,” as I’ve called them, usually are pieces of fiction — in that I feel like I’m writing about a character outside of myself — this verse is probably as personal as I’d written in those days. This idea of constructing a barrier around a relationship or a partner to keep you safe — it’s a powerful idea and maybe a dynamic that I was prone to in my twenties. I’m not sure I was aware how personal it was until well after I’d written it, when that relationship had disintegrated, when the balustrades had come down and we were free to go, and I was playing it and I thought, “Huh. I guess this is about me.”

Second chorus, same as the first. But this one is followed by a double instrumental break. How do you like that? This might be the one flaw in the song — nothing happens in that double break. I’m sure we recorded with the idea that something would go there, some kind of solo or something, but nothing ever arrived. The best we get is an organ fill over the piano that sort of hints at a solo, but is not one. Like my guitar forebears, Johnny Marr and Peter Buck, I have a certain amount of discomfort with a guitar solo and, particularly during this era of my music-making, I was loathe to even include them in songs. I am, however, very proud of the little electric guitar lick that runs throughout the song. It’s the best kind of picky guitar filigree that I love so much, simple and repeating, always almost overstaying its welcome.

Originally, this was castanets, not marionettes, which is miles better, but I was mindful that I’d already used the word castanets in a song for the record. It’s in “Clementine”: And I’ll play the clarinet / Use clamshells for castanets. I figured that I could only use the word once so I had to pick between the two — is it the clamshells? Or is it the Spaniard’s grave companion? I chose the former, because, I don’t know, I was more fond of it. So I had to find another thing a Spaniard would choose to be buried with, one that was, ideally three syllables long. I think it was Ezra that suggested marionettes and I just went with it because we didn’t have much time in the studio. So it stuck. I don’t love it, to be honest. Castanets is way better.

I like this line. I don’t know what it means, but I like it.

The song goes off the rails during this verse; we’re launched into more absurdist territory. Why Spain? Why the Spaniard? I think I thought it was funny at the time, a kind of unexpected right turn into the world of these Spanish vagabonds. Traveling without seat belts, tsk tsk.

Classic 2XL chorus at the end, that old saw. But with slightly changed lyrics! Who’s winning and who’s losing? It’s still nonsense, my friends. Still just words on the page. I remember playing the “CD Release Party” for this record (remember when we had those?) at the Blackbird in NE Portland and forgetting the double chorus. I’ve muffed many a song in my time, gentle reader, but there are some mistakes that stick with me forever. This is one of ‘em.

Simon Widdowson recorded this song at his studio in industrial Southeast Portland. The studio was called Are You Listening and was in a building a few blocks from the warehouse I was living in at the time. I think we only had a week or so to record all of Castaways and Cutouts so we had to move fast. Nate put it all on his credit card, bless his heart.

This song was written in 2004, in NE Portland, in a room overlooking NE Fargo street. Carson and I lived in that house for a few years; we rented it from Chad Crouch, the owner and operator of Hush Records. The Thermals practiced in the basement. I wrote this song on a twelve-string guitar, a Martin dreadnought twelve-string that I’ve since sold, and it’s always been a twelve-string song. The driver (ha ha) behind the song is those verse chords — Cmaj7 > Em > Bm > Cmaj7 > G > D — and the lyric and melody grew out of those chords. I always thought the chords had an interesting weave to them — the part that you might call the bridge or the pre-chorus (“And if you don’t love me let me go”) effectively inverts the pattern of the verse chords, going Cmaj7 > G > D > Cmaj7 > Em > Bm. It’s a neat trick and it gives a nice feel to the pre-chorus that sets it apart from the verse, but to this day, it has occasion to trip us all up.

Why an engine driver? And what is an engine driver? I’m sure this engine driver is somehow related (second cousins?) to Ivor from The Who’s “A Quick One While He’s Away” — that song was an inspiration to me in those days and, in my mind, is the model for a lot of the wild and wooly multi-suite songs we did then. It is the gold standard for all tongue-in-cheek, don’t-give-a-fuck rock ‘n’ roll symphonies. “The Engine Driver” also slotted in my mind as another one of my Occupational Biographies, and our engine driver was taking his place alongside the architect and the soldier, the Spaniard and the chimbley sweep, the legionnaire and the Chinese trapeze artist. For a while, it was an interesting way for me to find my way into a song, a way to define clearly from the outset who was singing, or what this voice was singing about. To my mind, it was always following in the grand tradition of Lou Reed’s “…Says” songs (Lisa, Caroline, Candy, Stephanie, Sister Ray — they all have something to say). These people — these occupations — all feel of the same piece, existing in the same universe. Their job is the basic describer that gets you in the door, and then you can hear the rest of their story. He’s an engine driver; I’m sure he’s got some tales to tell.

Here’s that pre-chorus I was talking about, the one that is sung over an inversion of the verse chords. I don’t know where these lines came from — I think they were just drawn out of the chords, the melody, and the forward momentum of the song. I didn’t labor them, they were just there. I think the thing that makes these lines work is that the word “love” is sung on the first hint of the chord progression inversion: It arrives on a G major; if it was sung over the verse chords, that chord would be an E minor, the relative minor of G. Two very different feels there. So you have some lift on the word “love,” and I think that makes it really sing. Is this too much inside baseball?

Here we have a new voice, a new occupation. And another callout to another foundational song: “The Wichita Lineman,” written by Jimmy Webb, made famous by Glen Campbell. Like most people, I knew this song growing up, but in a peripheral way — it was just a song that occasionally popped up on AM radio. It wasn’t until I was in my twenties, when I was really starting to write songs, that I dug into the song and learned its mysteries. Talk about a puzzle of a chord progression — that “Searching in the sun for another overload” line and the chords that underpin it still kill me; it’s so unexpected and yet fits so well. I felt like my engine driver shared some connection to Webb’s lineman — both are effectively solitary jobs, lonely by their very nature. So I put a lineman in the song, another aspect of the loneliness of the engine driver.

The Hi-Line is the northern-most run of railroad in Montana — the northern-most railroad line in the lower 48, as a matter of fact. It runs from Havre to Whitefish. It also serves as a name for that entire region, all the small towns and communities the line connected, or that have, over time, grown up around it. The Hi-Line is some of the most incredible country you’ll ever see. It is massive granite mountains and wide open plains. It is also some of the most desolate and lonely country in the world. The idea of the Hi-Line, and the people who live in it and grew up in it, has been a source of fascination for me since I was a kid. It has a kind of mythical status, both because of its beauty and its desolation. What better place to put our lineman than on the Hi-Line? Loneliness is in his bones.

I met a Montanan lineman in college, a friend of a friend. He didn’t work on the Hi-Line; he was stationed mainly around Butte. I remember him telling me stories about working the power lines, servicing poles and towers in the middle of nowhere. I’m sure it was thankless work, but he seemed pleased. He was a typical Montanan, smitten by his home state, and he loved being out in the prairies and woods and backroads. To my mind, this sentiment, this being fated to working the electrical lines, seemed both a romantic idea and a kind of curse.

Random thought: I remember teaching this song to the band and rehearsing it in the basement of Rachel Blumberg’s house — she was our drummer at the time. Our guitar player, Chris Funk, was in the middle of a nasty breakup, one of those ones that never seem to end, and I remember him repeating that line, “If you don’t love me let me go,” at a rehearsal, in a kind of wistful way. The line didn’t feel like it belonged to anyone else at that point, it was still new and fresh and just some words in a song. But when he connected with the phrase, it struck me there was something universal there, something everyone could latch on to for one reason or another.

In typical fashion, the chorus centers around the dominant major chord of the scale, that wide-open G. This is a new voice, a new first person pronoun — my own voice, I suppose. The writer. For whom the lineman and the engine driver (and, eventually, the moneylender) are all aspects. He’s a writer of fiction(s). Made up stuff. I’d only just quit my day job at a bookstore and was finally reckoning with this thing I was doing, writing songs and playing in a band. I think I was reflecting on the inherent loneliness of my own, very new job. I don’t think I’d ever really considered how much of the real work of musicianship and songwriting was done in solitude. There’s a thread to be drawn between songwriters and engine drivers and linemen — that sweet sort of melancholy.

Again with the bones. Bones this, bones that. I have no explanation; I like bones.

This remains a bit of a mystery to me, this moneylender. I think a lot of my songwriting — particularly at this time — was not labored over very much, and often the first idea that made its way on to the page was the thing that stuck. This moneylender feels a bit out of step with the rest of the characters in the song, and doesn’t quite have the romance of the lonely steamtrain driver or the Hi-Line lineman, but I imagine that’s what initially appealed to me. I wanted something a little less picturesque and something more… I dunno… picaresque. I mean, it makes sense, it follows: Moneylending, I imagine, is also a solitary job, inherently lonely. Isolated.

This line was initially “I am tortured, sweetly tortured.” I changed the “sweetly” to “ever” somewhere between the writing of the song and the recording of it. I remember thinking that I was relying on “sweet” as a descriptor a little too often and wanted to change it up. In retrospect, I might’ve kept it. I played this song on my first solo tour, before we recorded Picaresque, and the moneylender’s torture, then, was of the sweetly sort. After the record came out, someone came up to me after the show and told me they were bummed I’d changed it to “ever tortured.” Alas! You can’t please them all…

According to setlist.fm, we’ve played this song live 248 times. Huh. This is the first time that I’ve reckoned with that statistic. That’s a lot of times. And yet: I’m not sick of it. You might be, but I’m not — not so far. I always seem to find something new in it. And looking out into the crowd and watching a sea of faces sing that pre-chorus is never not moving. It feels like a real shared moment, that thing that transcends music and just puts us all into each others’ spaces, letting us all feel something real together for a moment. That kind of shared loneliness.

Another borrowed title — or a reused/recycled one. I’d say the song was named after the Oregon coastal town were it not for the fact that Robyn Hitchcock’s particular “Oceanside” (from Perspex Island, 1991) was a more obvious lodestone at the time. This song was written in 2000, in an apartment in SE Portland, and I was newly single and on the make. I was also a brand new transplant to the Pacific NW, having come from landlocked Montana, and was absolutely smitten by the ocean and the wild, battered Oregon coast. It was ocean this and sailing ship that — for many, many years following this move seaward. Never more evident than on this tune, recorded at the old Type Foundry in Portland by Jason Powers. It is the first song on the first recording made available by The Decemberists — a thing we initially intended to be a gig-getting demo but ended up being a five song EP. I burned and handstamped the CDs myself — Stumptown Printers did up a letter pressed sleeve for us. It had a drawing of a sailing ship on the cover. Of course.

This name, Sweet Annabelle, was originally another person’s name, one that fit the same meter. It was a real person’s name, a girl who I was taken with at the time. That crush never panned out, and I felt sheepish putting her name into the song, so I changed it. Too bad for you, Bleet Cranadel! (Joking, that wasn’t the name, but I’m not going to tell you the real name, are you kidding?)

There I go with the ocean business. And this was only the start! But I always liked that image, this person is clearly some kind of sea-borne creature.

Here there are some AAHs in the recording, a nice backing vox color, that I did not include in the lyrics, because that would be silly. In the original recording, they’re sung by myself and Ezra Holbrook (who comports himself very nicely, vox-wise, on this song). Ezra, incidentally, had broken his leg just before the recording sessions began and had to play the kick drum with his other, unbroken foot.

Ne’er-do-well! Now that’s a word. I figure it’s a word you can use exactly once in your entire songwriting oeuvre, and I did it right out of the gate. And twice! It’s a great one, though, and it’s got three syllables, with the emphasis on the first syllable, which are the best words. Fare-thee-well, ne’er-do-well, we hardly knew ye.

So much sleeping! I was a sleepy person in 2000 and I remain one to this day.

This is “clanging” in the original written lyrics (see: the attached photo) and I must’ve changed it to “pealing” in the studio, which is a much better word for this context. Well done, young Colin.

We get our first taste of smut here, with the muscles going wide. I was twenty six when I wrote this song, newly detached from a years-long relationship, and sex was on the brain. I also appreciate a good bit of smut written into songs that appear, at first glance/listen, to be chaste — see also: most of Leonard Cohen’s repertoire. Incidentally, there is a remarkably loud upright bass clunk right here — I think it’s the sound of Nate’s bass string hitting the fretboard. It’s something that happens, but you usually re-take the section or edit out the noise in the mix-down. We didn’t have time for those kind of antics — we were on a very tight schedule. I believe Five Songs was recorded in three days, mixing included, so the flubs would have to remain. I have a distinct memory of Nate saying, after having just finished a pass on a bass track, “It’s only a demo.” If only it were, Nate!

Arguably this word, lolling, should follow the same rule as ne’er-do-well: it’s a one-time usage kinda deal in songwriting. But I am a card-carrying, union-supporting songwriting scofflaw. I don’t know how many times I’ve used the word lolling (or loll, for that matter) but it’s certainly enough to have raised the ire of the Songwriting Police, no doubt. Sorry, not sorry!

That’s me on the twelve-string electric guitar, ripping this solo. When it comes to guitar solos, I am first and foremost a student of the Jesus & Mary Chain/Velvet Underground school of guitar virtuosity and am an appreciator of a stupidly simple guitar break. I did not own a twelve string electric guitar at the time and I borrowed this one from Dave Klopfenstein, of Sauvie Island Moon Rocket Factory fame, a little-known Portland band in their time and somewhat lost to history, but they were great and had perhaps the best band name ever. I would later teach this solo to Chris Funk, all six notes of it, when it was time for us to perform live, and it bedevils him to this day. It is so simple as to be impossibly hard.

Incidentally, this was in the running as a possible band name, prior to the Decemberists. I think it started out as June Brides, then moved a month later to July Brides, before settling all the way into December Brides. We were billed as December Brides in our first showcase, at Berbati’s Pan in 1999, but my friends vetoed the name during pre-show drinks at the Shanghai Tunnel. The Decemberists was suggested, approved, and hastily whispered to the show’s MC after he’d just introduced us.

Oh, you dirty bird.

Now this is interesting. I have been performing this song since it was written and recorded, going on 22 years now, and I have always sung this line as a slight alteration of its former appearance: I guess I’m nothing but a ne’er-do-well / Even though that’s something I could never do well. I did not remember that the original version is just a straight up repeat of the earlier line. And I have had to nag myself, all along, to remember to switch the something for the nothing. Arguably, the version I’ve been singing is better — you get that slight change being something of a thing to be nothing but a thing, which is decisive, and then you get that nice word flip in "nothing but a ne’er-do-well” and “something I could never do well.” The somethings don’t repeat, which is nice. And it looks, from the written lyrics, that I was moving in that direction while writing. So, folks, I’m here to say that this version, this recorded version, is the inferior version. I have no idea how or why I made that decision in the studio — the world is strange.