SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – The Decemberists’ music is so grand and theatrical that it feels like the band should always be accompanied by a 100-chair orchestra. And earlier this month, it was.
After a nearly two-decade hiatus from the practice, the Decemberists played a symphony show here in San Francisco, with the SF Symphony, conducted by Edwin Outwater.
I’ve been listening to the Decemberists’ music since the early ‘00s, so I was extremely excited to attend their show with the SF Symphony.
First, the basics. Usually, the Decemberists play at folk festivals and small venues. They’ve got a devoted crowd–the kind of people who like to sing along to the Mariner’s Revenge Song, complete with hand motions and screaming.
There’s dancing. There’s raucous energy. There’s 14 minute-performances of Joan in the Garden.
The band’s symphony shows are different. At the SF Symphony, the Decemberists stood on stage in front of a short, glass divider. They wore suits.
Behind them sat the musicians of the SF Symphony. Above them was a gloriously large and imposingly shiny pipe organ.
The crowd was clearly deeply passionate, but not–-in contrast to some other Decemberist shows-–in costume. This was a far different vibe that you’d typically expect at a folk rock show. (SF Symphony provided press tickets so I could review the performance.)
When the band entered and lead singer Colin Meloy started to sing, though, the powerful wall of sound you can only get with a live orchestra was immediately, clearly the perfect compliment to the Decemberists’ talents.
Meloy and the band dove right in, with The Infanta. The song–-about a crowd of subjects rejoicing at the sight of their elephant-borne infant queen–-is already deeply cinematic and a bit melodramatic. Adding an orchestra took that to a delightful new level.
I’ll admit that I’ve never been wild about The Infanta. It usually feels too grand, too sweeping, too wrought.
The pageantry of the song is never fully realized when the band layers its own musicians over themselves endlessly in a studio, up to 65 times. That means The Infanta usually feels a little flat–it can’t quite live up to the potential of its hugely dramatic lyrics.
With the power of an orchestra, though, it gets there. The line “From all atop the parapets blow a multitude of coronets” prompts a literal blowing of coronets. The pounding of drums mirrors the rhythm of the parade. After 15 years of listening fruitlessly, I finally got the song,
Meloy seemed to understand, too. He shared with the audience how nice it was to play alongside an orchestra, and how much the band’s “few beleaguered string players” appreciated their colleagues’ support.
The band then slowed things down a bit with Oceanside. Meloy wrote this song at 26 years old, having moved from Montana to the West Coast. It’s a song about the ocean and being out West–-stacked with plenty of mermaids and pealing of steeple bells, because this is still The Decemberists. It felt like a nice way to ground the performance here on the coast.
Next came another high-energy number, We Both Go Down Together, about two lovers of wildly differing social classes throwing themselves into the ocean-–and not necessarily entirely consensually.
I’ve always found this narrative a bit off-putting. Although the arrangement was lovely, the orchestral backing didn’t change my thinking on it.
Next came some deeper cuts, with The Hazards of Love 4, Why Would I Now?, The Reapers (we’ll get to that in a moment), and Rusalka, Rusakla/Wild Rushes.
I was hoping for a little chunk of R.E.M.’s Green Grow the Rushes dropped in on this one–something that Meloy has been known to add in live performances to other tunes. Alas, not this time. But it was still a lovely song and arrangement.
So, about The Reapers. I was expecting the Decemberists to play a song from their new album As it Ever Was, So It Will Be Again, but I honestly didn’t expect this one.
Meloy called it “a song about death, and agriculture.” The orchestral arrangement served to bring out the song’s mournful character–-rather than asking the SF Symphony to power through Joan, this felt like a good choice, and a nicely surprising one.
The show then moved on to A Beginning Song. This is one of my favorites from the Decemberists’ large oeuvre (see, I know symphony words!). Understated yet glorious, simple but profoundly beautiful, it’s an ode to Meloy’s family and the broader world around him–his wife, “the boys”, “the sunlgiht”, “the shadows”, “the word.”
It’s a deeply vulnerable song– Meloy questions “Should I be wanting?” and “Should I be waiting?” He’s immersed in the blessings and beauty of his life, yet simultaneously wondering whether aloud whether it’s okay to feel some element of suffering, or humanness.
Anyone who has look at their kids with joy, but felt the melancholy of the passing of time or questioned “Am I present enough in this moment?”–or who has stood in the beauty of nature and felt awe, but also the pull of a million worldly troubles they can never fully shake off–will understand where he’s coming from.
Here, the dynamics of a well-conducted orchestra shine though. There’s no crashing of symbols or blowing of horns on this one–rather the SF Symphony contributes a sweetness and warmth to the song that feels understated and perfect.
The Decemberists enjoy ending things with Beginning Song. And in this case, they stayed consistent and did something rock bands rarely do–-took an intermission!
When the band returned, they played several songs without the orchestra. “They’re gone! Now we can play whatever arrangement we want!” Meloy joked, before launching into Down by the Water and The Soldiering Life.
The end of the latter saw a single horn player join the band on stage. A member of the Symphony, he apparently wrote the horn part for the song. I suppose if you have a musician like that in the building with you, you make use!
As the symphony returned, the Decemberists moved into their iconic Crane Wife 1 & 2, more a folktale set to music than a song. Cavalry Captain provided another opportunity for the SF Orchestra to get loud and bang some cymbals.
Arrangement wise, the next song, Rise to Me, was one of my favorites. Taken from The King is Dead–the Decemberists’ successful attempt to make an R.E.M. album–it’s not a song I’d normally think of as orchestral.
Yet here, swelling and fading strings and subtle percussion brought out the lilting, swaying rhythm of the song, making it sound almost waltz-life. It was a neat choice of song to arrange for an orchestra–far less obvious than The Infanta with all its textual trumpet calls and standards–which made it feel unexpected and delightful.
Meloy then warned the audience that he was about to embark on “some A+ local pandering” before launching into a stunning and emotional rendition of California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade. This is my favorite Decembrists song, and hearing it live was a powerful, moving experience.
I suspect I wasn’t alone among the SF-based crowd in feeling that way. If you’ve spent any portion of your younger years driving along the cliffs above Stinson Beach–the crashing waves of the Pacific below you–or lolling about among the vines in Napa Valley, this song will envelop you in those memories.
And Youth and Beauty Brigade has to be one of the strangest, most successful bits of songwriting ever. You won’t get lines like “I figured I had paid/ My debt to society/ When I paid my overdue fines/ At the Multnomah County library” from anyone other than Meloy.
By this time, the applause was thunderous. Meloy explained to the audience “this is when we would normally leave the stage so you could holler and clap until we came back for an encore. But orchestra rules don’t allow that. Once the orchestra leaves, you can’t just bring them back. So instead we’re going to pretend we left and came back, and move on to the encore!”
With the fourth wall sufficiently in tatters, Meloy then moved–appropriately–into a delightfully campy version of I Was Meant for the Stage. Microphone spinning occurred. Foyers were pointed at. Crowd work was performed.
For the line spoken to the narrator’s father, “Even though you told me, son / You’ll never make a living”, Meloy jumped into the audience and embraced an apparently random fan in the front row so deeply that I thought for a moment his actual father was at the show.
The rest of the song featured Meloy sauntering his way down the aisle–-a distraught looking tech guy in tow, furiously unwrapping more mic cable-–greeting audience members as if they were old friends and occasionally leaning in to effectively sit on their laps as he sang about taking his final bows.
Yes, this is a symphony show. But again, this is still the Decemberists.
And then, the actual bows indeed came. To a standing ovation, the band, the orchestra, and conductor Edwin Outwater stood together on stage and bowed, the band’s triumphant return to the symphony complete.
As a long-time fan of the band, this felt like the perfect way to see them perform–a perfect snapshot of who they are, and who I am, now.
I’m no longer the 16 year old diving into mosh pits in strange, smoke-filled clubs on Philly’s South Street. And Meloy–-who has faced vocal challenges in recent years and written candidly about his life on the road-–is not the wayward youth of his Grace Cathedral Hill days, either.
For us to cross paths in this moment, and in this way, felt perfect.
At one point in the show, Meloy paused to tell the audience how joyful it was to perform alongside so many talented musicians. He explained how the most powerful thing about music is the way it allows us to share time–to be connected to another musician in that moment of shared performance.
In this case, I believe that extends to audiences too. Across decades of singing and touring, of listening and playing, here we all were, for a time, together.
