Colin Meloy Quotes
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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.
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No-one wants to hear anything spoken in earnest anymore, unless it happens to involve unrequited, teenage love.
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As she walked, she breathed a quick benediction to the patron saint of sleuthing. "Nancy Drew," she whispered, "be with me now.
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I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.
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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.
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I pretty much draw the line when people want you to do original music for commercials.
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The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.
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It's hard for us to talk about how we disdain file-sharing when in fact it probably has been a great resource for us.
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An old bandit adage: A bell is a cup until it is struck.
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We actually have been toying around with a theatrical element. We even had outfits that we wore on stage for the last tour. But I think when people come to see us they ultimately expect a rock show, so we're pulling back on that aspect a bit. We do play in front of a backdrop, though.
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Look at the leader of my country, he is somebody I cannot relate to at all. He is so far removed from me - politically, personally and morally.
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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
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Sometimes, when the world is falling apart around you, all that's left to do is dance, right?
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Meloy's balladry brings to mind vaudeville, ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, 'Sweeney Todd,' the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Kurt Weill and Nick Cave, 1960s psychedelic rock pop and roaring pub sing-alongs.
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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.
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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.
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I just saw her. She was so … alive.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If Broadway musicals were as popular as they were in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, then people like Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine would be writing for Broadway, which would be amazing. As it stands, it's the worst stuff that's mired in pop music.