An old bandit adage: A bell is a cup until it is struck.
We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.
I'd rather have a strong career, playing and selling records to a loyal audience, then having one record that exploded. That would be devastating.
And I am a writer, writer of fictions I am the heart that you call home And I've written pages upon pages Trying to rid you from my bones.
You can't really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness.
There's some things there that you just have to draw the line. Some people are just not going to like it. We would hope that everybody would like it.
As she walked, she breathed a quick benediction to the patron saint of sleuthing. "Nancy Drew," she whispered, "be with me now.
It is better to live presently. By living thus, perhaps we can learn to understand the nature of this fragile coexistence we share with the world around us.
I pretty much draw the line when people want you to do original music for commercials.
When everybody is playing at the same level, there's so much more noise. And there's less incentive for the people who should be rising above that noise to take time and invest in what they're doing. It just becomes about hustling and grabbing attention.
Prog-rock and concept records and some ambitious projects were kind of anathema post-punk. They were destroyed with the advent of punk rock. You don't necessarily need to have a degree in music composition to play in a rock band anymore, which is a great thing.
One thing about hanging out with a baby is that you can remember a little bit better what it was like to be a kid, and all the mystery that came along with it.
Music has been already devalued by the consumer. There's an expectation that it should be free so the race to the bottom has already been won.
When you get respect from the people who are buying your music and coming to your shows, there's an expectation that you have to live up to your own standards.
When I first started writing these kind of songs that would eventually become Decemberists songs, I was writing them because I knew that nobody was listening at the time and that it wouldn't hurt to challenge myself and get weirder and see if I could alienate more people
I wish I had a better range, but I really have a super-limited one. Barely a tenor, dips into baritone - that's about it.
I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.
I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.
Living in war, and being a wartime band, I don't think there's any way that can't somehow influence the songwriting.
There's a little less pressure in doing a solo tour, in some ways a simpler setup. A little bit more relaxed. But then also there's also - doing the big tours is exciting, because you get to put on the big show and everything. But I don't know if I would prefer one over the other. I guess it's no secret that I just don't like touring in general, but it's sort of the reality of the business these days.
Pop music has always adopted the style of marrying upbeat melodies to dour lyrics.
I think the music should definitely underscore the sentiment of the song, and it can work for or against it.
All instruments sound fantastic in a church.
My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris Smuggling bombs for the underground. And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence; He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis.
No-one wants to hear anything spoken in earnest anymore, unless it happens to involve unrequited, teenage love.
