The Decemberists' Hazardous Musical

Leave it to The Decemberists to weave an album out of the remains of a musical based on a 16th century teen's love life.

Producers Tom Hulce and Michael Mayer, from the Tony Award-winning Spring Awakening, approached Decemberists frontman Colin Meloy last year about writing a musical. When the project started to take shape, Meloy realized the music wasn't meant for the stage.

"We started working on it [as a musical], but it ended up being a little too abstract," says Meloy. "It would've been kind of clumsy if it had been literally staged, I think, without it being really changed and going back and rewriting everything, which I didn’t want to do because I was really fond of the music as it was panning out."

The music was instead turned into The Hazards Of Love, the Portland, Ore. quintet's fifth full-length album and first rock opera. It tells the story of Margaret, who's impregnated by a shape-shifting forest dweller. She sets off into the woods in search of her lover and is confronted along the way by a jealous queen and a cold-blooded rake.

The story was inspired by Meloy's recent fascination with the '60s British folk revival and, in particular, Anne Briggs' 1966 The Hazards Of Love debut EP.

"There was no actual song called 'The Hazards Of Love' on the EP," says Meloy. "It was just the title and the theme of the 45.

"It was four songs that basically laid out the different perspectives of the hazards of love for your typical 16th century teenager.

"And that's sort of a common theme for a lot of the songs that were selected, especially I feel like by female members of the British folk revival of the '60s. I think it was sort of an interesting time to review and rediscover these songs that dealt heavily with violence and misogyny. And in light of the 20th century, it took on kind of a different sheen."

Meloy particularly zoned in on the British folk revival because of its focus on traditional music.

"The founders of the British folk revival were keen, kind of exclusively, on reviving old, classic songs," he says. "They weren't so focused on writing original material, writing topical material, because there was no Woody Guthrie that was supporting the idea of not only bringing these old songs back into play, but also writing new songs, topical songs."

As Meloy listened to more and more records, he started to see a trend.

"I was discovering all these recurring motifs, characters and events that were popping up throughout all these different folk songs, and I thought it would be interesting to just carve out some of those events, some of those characters, and throw them all together into a really long song or series of songs, and see what kind of narrative would be created with as little invention of my own.

"Since these characters and these events are being archetypes, being motifs for these songs, they kind of come packing their own inferred narrative, so I thought combining them would create a new narrative."

When it came to casting the characters, Meloy sought out two diamonds: Lavender Diamond's Becky Stark to play Margaret and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden for the part of the queen.

"Initially when I was considering this as a musical, I was very keen on the idea of casting it from sort of my musical peers rather than trying to hire a bunch of Broadway singers," he says. "Becky and Shara both came to mind not only because of their musical abilities and their amazing voices, but also because they had theatrical sensibility in what they did and it seemed like they would be fitting in that environment.

"So as I was writing it, really, their voices were the ones I was hearing in these different songs, and thankfully they were willing and available when the time came to record it."

Other musical guests on the album include Robyn Hitchcock (who was returning the favour since Meloy appeared on Goodnight Oslo, his latest album with The Venus 3), the Spinanes' Rebecca Gates and My Morning Jacket's Jim James, who just happened to be passing through town during the Hazards recording sessions.

"He came in for a day in the studio and I just had him do choral parts, these one-man choral parts for the entire record, 'cause he has such a knack for creating layered harmonies," says Meloy.

The album was recorded over "four tumultuous months" last year, according to a somewhat cheeky Decemberists newsletter update from December. Barack Obama (The Decemberists' pick) was elected U.S. president and three people associated with the band were married.

"It was crazy," says Meloy. "The recording of the record itself was particularly challenging, but at the same time, there was all this other stuff happening around us.

"People getting married and obviously it was a crazy time to be an American, with the primary initially and with the general election and the hackneyed, tired approaches of the McCain campaign, and that Sarah Palin thing was so bizarre... It was really just a nutty time to be an American, and maybe that was a good distraction from the challenges of the record."

Although Hazards was ultimately turned into an album, Meloy hasn't abandoned the idea of making a musical.

"There was going to be another aspect to this, another story happening in 1917 in Butte, Montana that was jettisoned, which I think will probably end up being its own stand-alone musical," he says. "That's my next project, anyway."


Decemberists: Mad Men?

In the second season of Mad Men, the television series jumped outside of its 1962 box to prominently feature The Decemberists' "The Infanta" in a montage. Meloy saw the episode and thought it was both cool and weird to hear his voice during the sequence.

"I'm a big Mad Men fan," he says. "When they asked us to use our music, I was of course totally into it. But I was totally taken aback.

"I assumed they would've used one of the more instrumental passages because it does kind of have a '60s sort of vibe to it, but they used one of the passages of me singing, which was strange, but I guess it worked.

"It was probably kind of a polarizing moment with the music in the show, but it was cool to be a part of it."

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