Decemberists bring different spin to love songs

It was the Chinese trapeze artist who really sold Chris Funk on the whole idea.

The Chinese trapeze artist who didn't really exist.

At the onset of the decade, Funk was approached by literary songwriter Colin Meloy about joining his band, the rustic, theatrical The Decemberists.

Funk initially was drawn to the group by the early Decemberists tune "My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist," which the guitarist initially took to be autobiographical on Meloy's behalf.

This would be his first introduction to Meloy's sweeping lyrical flights of fancy.

"I was like, 'Wow, your mom was really a contortionist and your dad was part of the resistance in the war?' And he was like, 'No,' " Funk recalls, laughing heartily. "It was like, 'Oh, OK.' It wasn't your typical cliched love song. It was just a different spin on things."

This is The Decemberists' defining trait, twisting time-honored Shakespearean love tragedies into new forms, creating something distinct and intimate from a series of universals.

Take the band's bittersweet "Red Right Ankle," a bruised love song that revolves around a girl's ankle being scarred from riding a bicycle. It's an unorthodox entry point to well-worn themes of heartache and loss.

The Decemberists always dress up their tunes in such elaborate threads, their songs populated with chimney sweeps, soldiers and ne'er do wells, awash in detailed character studies with broad narrative arcs.

The band's latest disc, "The Crane Wife," for instance, was inspired by a Japanese folk tale of the same name.

"It's just good fodder," Funk says of the story, where a man's curiosity eventually gets the best of him. "It's a tragedy, and it has a compelling visual quality. I would say that it's a little world that you can kind of crawl into it, and get inside for three minutes or eight minutes or 12 minutes, whatever the case may be with some of our stuff."

The Decemberists' repertoire tends to be dense and enveloping, a mix of traditional folk instrumentation (accordion, banjo) and modernist flourishes like Moog solos and squalls of electric guitar.

It's led some to connect the band to the '70s prog rock oeuvre, a comparison that Funk chafes at.

"I think that's coming from one song, 'The Island,' and it's coming from one part of the song where it sounds like Emerson, Lake & Palmer," Funk says. "I think people are cheap, they read one thing and they just think, 'Oh, that's who that band is, they're the literate prog rock band that sounds like Neutral Milk Hotel with Belle & Sebastian.'

"I think it's misleading to say we're a prog rock band," he continues. "I think if you're a fan of Gentle Giant or Can or Hawkwind, you'd be completely let down if you came to one of our concerts."

Ultimately, what most distinguishes The Decemberists from the prog tradition is how quick the band is to celebrate its imperfections, with raw, warts-and-all production values and endearingly uneven singing that, like the characters who inhabit their tunes, are all the more affecting thanks to their shortcomings.

"We're just who we are," Funk says of the band's unvarnished aesthetic. "I guess it comes from listening to a lot of folk music and classic American music. Those people aren't good singers or very good musicians, they're just who they are.

"People can feel that," he continues. "In these times, as pop music gets more produced, I think people might enjoy that," Funk concludes with a chuckle. "Or they might think it's horrible."