The Road Is Not So Lonely For Colin Meloy

If the open road is as lonely as countless musicians and writers have made it out to be, Colin Meloy hasn't noticed.

The Decemberists frontman left his band behind in 2006 and headed out on tour with only an acoustic guitar. The solo status was comfortably familiar.

"When I first moved to Portland and started writing and playing around town, that's what I did," Meloy explains. "I played solo shows.

"I played bars and coffee shops and happy hours... I enjoyed the process of doing a solo show. In 2005, after four years of being a Decemberist, we had a little down time. It felt right for me to get back to that."

Meloy didn't know it then, but hand-picked portions of that tour would become Colin Meloy Sings Live!, a record that includes work spanning his entire career. While the songs offer fans a peek at Meloy's voice unmasked by his booming band, the album's strongest aspect is the between-song banter and audience exchanges for which he's famous.

"I just sat down last summer over a few months and just kind of listened to all the shows and made note of what I thought were the strongest performances," he says. "A lot of the time the strongest performances didn't involve me singing perfectly in key or remembering the words, but they had a vitality to them that warranted their inclusion on the record."

Appropriately, Meloy will embark upon another solo tour in support of the record, which will be released on April 8. When he performs at Toronto's Phoenix Concert Theatre on April 19, you can expect to hear songs from his former band Tarkio, Decemberists tunes up to Picaresque, and music from Colin Meloy Sings Sam Cooke, another new release featuring covers of the American soul singer that's available for sale at shows. He has issued similar records in the past featuring his interpretations of songs by Morrissey and British folk artist Shirley Collins.

Decemberists fans need not worry. All this alone time isn't an omen of a band hiatus. The group will head into the studio in July to work on the follow-up to 2006's The Crane Wife.

"Solo stuff doesn't require that much attention," Meloy concludes.

Here are the songs on Colin Meloy Sings Live:

"Devil's Elbow"
"We Both Go Down Together"
"Evoking A Campfire Singalong" (banter)
"The Gymnast, High Above The Ground"
"Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect/Dreams"
"Dracula's Daughter"
"Wonder"
"A Brief Introduction To Shirley Collins"
"Barbara Allen"
"The Engine Driver"
"On the Bus Mall"
"A Skull, A Ship, And A Sheep"
"California One/Youth And Beauty Brigade/Ask"
"The Bachelor And The Bride"
"A Cautionary Song"
"Red Right Ankle"
"Bandit Queen"