Colin Meloy quotes:

My mother was a Chinese trapeze artist in pre-war Paris Smuggling bombs for the underground. And she met my father at a fete in Aix-en-Provence; He was disguised as a Russian cadet in the employ of the Axis.

The jam stuff doesn't appeal to me in general. My newfound love for the Dead came from Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia's songwriting, not the elaborate guitar solos. I'm a song person. Once it starts to break out of that structure and become loopy, it's uninteresting to me.

As she walked, she breathed a quick benediction to the patron saint of sleuthing. "Nancy Drew," she whispered, "be with me now.

An old bandit adage: A bell is a cup until it is struck.

If Broadway musicals were as popular as they were in the 20s, 30s, and 40s, then people like Sufjan Stevens and Iron & Wine would be writing for Broadway, which would be amazing. As it stands, it's the worst stuff that's mired in pop music.

No-one wants to hear anything spoken in earnest anymore, unless it happens to involve unrequited, teenage love.

It is better to live presently. By living thus, perhaps we can learn to understand the nature of this fragile coexistence we share with the world around us.

I don't feel like we're setting ourselves up to be exclusive. I don't want to set up an attitude where we're telling people 'You can't listen to our music if you don't have a college degree.

We are the inheritors of a wonderful world, a beautiful world, full of life and mystery, goodness and pain. But likewise are we the children of an indifferent universe. We break our own hearts imposing our moral order on what is, by nature, a wide web of chaos.

When I first started writing these kind of songs that would eventually become Decemberists songs, I was writing them because I knew that nobody was listening at the time and that it wouldn't hurt to challenge myself and get weirder and see if I could alienate more people

I wish I had a better range, but I really have a super-limited one. Barely a tenor, dips into baritone - that's about it.

It was a nice relief to be able to work on individual songs.

I pretty much draw the line when people want you to do original music for commercials.

Pop music has always adopted the style of marrying upbeat melodies to dour lyrics.

I like all sorts of things, not necessarily just Victorian. Even though I tend to read a lot of Victorian novels, I like a lot of contemporary stuff.

There's as much benefit to wishing the world away as there is in demanding a bud to bloom," responded Iphigenia as she patted Prue's hand gently. "It's better to live presently. By living thus, perhaps we can learn to understand the nature of this fragile coexistence we share with the world around us.

Music has been already devalued by the consumer. There's an expectation that it should be free so the race to the bottom has already been won.

There's some things there that you just have to draw the line. Some people are just not going to like it. We would hope that everybody would like it.

Living in war, and being a wartime band, I don't think there's any way that can't somehow influence the songwriting.

And I am a writer, writer of fictions I am the heart that you call home And I've written pages upon pages Trying to rid you from my bones...

I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.

All instruments sound fantastic in a church.

I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive.

When everybody is playing at the same level, there's so much more noise. And there's less incentive for the people who should be rising above that noise to take time and invest in what they're doing. It just becomes about hustling and grabbing attention.

When you get respect from the people who are buying your music and coming to your shows, there's an expectation that you have to live up to your own standards.

It's hard for us to talk about how we disdain file-sharing when in fact it probably has been a great resource for us.

One thing about hanging out with a baby is that you can remember a little bit better what it was like to be a kid, and all the mystery that came along with it.

I think the music should definitely underscore the sentiment of the song, and it can work for or against it.

You can't really come into a concept record objectively, because you immediately associate it with Yes, stuff from the 1970s that punk rock kicked against, the pretentiousness.