Colin Meloy takes his Decemberists songs solo

“It feels pretty separate in retrospect,” Meloy says of his endeavors in prose and music. “Even in school, songs and short stories probably came from the same place, but prose writing feels more like work, and songs are something I can’t not do. It’s like drinking or eating for me. It’s something that I need.” (For the curious, Meloy cops to enjoying literary classics—“The Dubliners” by James Joyce, “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway, “As I Lay Dying” by William Faulkner—and that his current read is “Shining at the Bottom of the Sea” by Stephen Marche.) “I go through phases,” he continues. “I don’t write at the same rate that I drink or eat, but I definitely have bursts of fertile creative times.”

He’s now on a solo tour with the songs he wrote and made famous with The Decemberists, his third such trip. Each time out, he’s released an album (for sale on tour only) of cover songs from a different artist’s catalogue. On previous trips, it was Morrissey and Shirley Collins. This time through, it’s Sam Cooke. “It’s a good opportunity to learn other people’s songs, or in the case of Shirley Collins, learn some old folk songs,” he says. “Every once in a while, when you learn someone else’s songs, you end up inadvertently kind of stealing from them. I haven’t outrightly done that, but their influence is probably in there somewhere.”

This is Meloy’s second stop in Santa Cruz—“The band played at the university once, but that was forever ago, it feels like.” The solo thing isn’t a branching out, as it is for so many charismatic frontmen who achieve success with a band only to leave it behind. The Decemberists are in great shape, and Meloy sees these adventures as a return to his roots. “When I first moved to Portland,” he says, “I was playing happy hours and coffee shops, and I really enjoyed it. I don’t have that much opportunity to do that day to day anymore.” The venues are a tad smaller as well. “Bigger than last time,” he says, “but a step under what we do with The Decemberists. Part of me loves doing those festivals—actually, I don’t like doing those much. It’s exciting to play in front of that many people, but when we play in some shitty little rock club in Germany, I remember how much I enjoy that experience.”

While the songs are familiar to most Decemberists fans, they will sound closer to the way Meloy wrote them originally. He writes most of the music himself, then brings it to the band for arrangement. “I try to play them like I’d initially written them, just the acoustic version,” he says. “They all started that way at some point. I try to channel that. Every once in a while there are some big loose ends that I leave for the band to work out in the studio together, but for the most part it’s just my writing.”

There may be a few new songs mixed into the set, giving rabid fans a glimpse of what direction the band will zig or zag on its next release. “There’s a real impulse in the band not to make the same record twice,” Meloy says. “We tend to get excited about new ideas and new propositions. When the record’s finished and turned in, I’ve been so immersed in it, I’ll want to do something opposite. It always has to be opposite.”

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