When The Decemberists announced that they would release their fourth full-length album with mega-label Capitol Records, indie music-loving eyebrows around the world shot up in surprise. Visions of peeling back the cellophane packaging on The Crane Wife only to find a pepped-up, TRL version of the band mingled with self-righteous cries of “sell-out” from high school cafeterias around the nation. Yet a month after the release of The Crane Wife, it would seem that those people can safely shut up.
The Crane Wife is more of the good stuff—hauntingly beautifully ballads woven together by a masterful, if somewhat eccentric, storyteller. Drummer John Moen defended the band’s move to a bigger label and explained, “the biggest way that it affected the recording experience was that we had a bigger budget. I know that isn’t necessarily what people think about in the world of fans and music listeners, but for us it was the biggest difference … Really, in a studio, time costs a lot of money.”
Moen also pointed out that having more studio time allowed for more exploring. “Because it was relaxed like that, it meant we could really experiment with instrumentation. I just started playing the cello, so it would take me a lot longer to get it good enough to record. But we had enough time to do that. A lot of people think, you sign with a major, you’re gonna start limiting your experimentation, but [it allowed] us to go in different directions and not worry about whether or not we’re wasting time.”
While the band may have moved on to the musical big leagues, they’ve managed to stay true to both their sound and their values. Since 2004, the Decemberists have been working with Music for America, a grass-roots organization founded in 2003 by three recent college grads with the goal of uniting musicians and fans to bring about social change. The premise is simple: you get to see your favorite band play for free, in exchange for getting people registered to vote after the show.
“We wanted to do some political stuff without really browbeating our audience,” explained Moen. “In 2003-2004, it was really about getting people registered to vote and educated about the 2004 election … and now Music for America has transformed a little bit, it’s still about getting people to vote, especially young people that are just turning 18, but it’s also about the issues that they [are] educated about, dictated by the [Music for America] members. So they tend to be things about student debt, increasing the minimum wage, things that are important to people under 30, especially to people under 25. It’s a really exciting organization.”
It’s just as exciting to see the band pushing its music and political activism to a new frontier.
More information about Music for America can be found at www.Decemberists.com.
