The Decemberists' Castaways and Cutouts, reissued this month by Kill Rock Stars, is one of the most unlikely pop triumphs of recent years, combining swelling pop melodies with some of the darkest lyrical content you'll hear anywhere. Listen with just half an ear and you'll find yourself humming along to tales of abandoned baby corpses, wounded bootleggers holding ruptured intestines in their hands, Turkish prostitutes ripped to shreds, concentration camps and at least one mother who will not be participating in "Take Your Daughter to Work" day. Like Edward Gorey sketches, the songs are meticulously drawn, whimisically jaunty treatments of tragedy. Their unexpected words and images slyly subvert the gorgeous half-trad pop arrangements that light them up from within.

We recently caught up with Colin Meloy, the man behind these bizarrely compelling musical mini-movies, and about where this strange combination of violence and beauty comes from, how people are reacting to it, and where it might take the Decemberists in the near future.

Splendid: So, I saw you guys at SXSW and it was a great show, and it seemed like a great antidote for all the other stuff I was seeing, because it was so beautiful and different from everything else. But now I'm reading the lyric sheet and seeing that a lot of your songs are pretty on the outside and they have this really dark, violent core. Want to talk about that?

Colin Meloy: I think that it's a long pop tradition -- to juxtapose the dark thematic qualities, aesthetics, against the pretty sheen. Anyone -- the Beatles, Elvis Costello -- it's pop practice to write about dark subjects and write underneath pretty pop melodies. It makes for a nice sort of tension. It works on a bunch of different levels.

Splendid: And it's even older than some of those artists that you just cited, maybe going back to more...

Colin Meloy: Oh, yeah, it's obviously a pretty strong folk tradition. If you listen to a lot of the old murder ballads and things like that, it's really more major key, very simple, beautiful melodies, talking about strangling people and drowning them.

Splendid: Yeah, rape and murder and all that stuff. It's a real interesting thing, and it creates these layers of listening to your songs. I wonder how many people are stuck on the first pretty layer, where it may take them a while to get to the deeper layers.

Colin Meloy: Right.

Splendid: The other thing I like about your songs is that you incorporate these really difficult words into the lines. They're words that don't usually appear in music -- they're not the moon, June, spoon rhymes -- and yet everything really scans.

Colin Meloy: I think it makes it interesting for me writing it. I also don't like -- there's a point where people are using big words for their own sake. I like to think that I try to use them as naturally as possible. They're words that are used because they fit into the rhyme and the meter and they make it interesting. They have a rhythm of their own. They're, in some cases, three syllable, odd words.

Splendid: At one point, you rhymed shiraz and mirage and applause, and I thought it was cool the way it fit into the line.

Colin Meloy: It makes sense in the context, the poetic context. Like, reading Dylan Thomas, you will find really bizarre word choices, but the words themselves, because they're so rarely uttered, have this sort of mystery to them; the syllables sort of roll off your tongue in a unique way.

Splendid: You write other stuff besides songs, don't you?

Colin Meloy: I did. I went to school for creative writing, so I did a lot of fiction writing then. I haven't done it as much recently. My girlfriend and I have been toying with the idea of writing a children's story for the last couple of years, but the songwriting has sort of taken over my life a little bit. Also, my sister has turned out to be a fairly well-known writer, so I feel like I would have sibling issues if I were to attempt to do that. I would be trying to follow in her footsteps a little too much.

Splendid: Is her name Meloy, too?

Colin Meloy: Yes. Maile Meloy. In fact, here's a plug: Her first novel comes out in June.

Splendid: Cool. So is writing songs more like writing poetry, or writing short stories, or writing film scripts, or is it its own thing?

Colin Meloy: It's its own thing. You're using a lot of the same qualities as poetry writing. I try to inject, because of my background, some of the same qualities as short story writing, so that each song has a beginning a middle and an end. But then again, the process of sitting down and writing a song is entirely its own beast. You have a number of different rules and structures that you're following. You have to try and fit everything in. Everything is dictated not only by the rhyme and the meter, but also by the melody and the chord changes and things like that. It's unlike any other writing process that I know of.

Splendid: Now, obviously, what you're saying is that it's not just the words, and one of the things that's really great about your music is that it's not just a singer/songwriter thing. You have this very rich, very orchestral sound. Let's talk about how that comes about and who the people are in your band and what they contribute.

Colin Meloy: Well, it's becoming more and more a collaborative effort. The last record that we recorded, that's coming out in September, is the most representative of everybody and what they bring -- their contributions to the band. We have diverse backgrounds. We have some people from jazz and classical backgrounds. Everybody shares an interest in good, solid pop music, going back to the '60s or '70s, Big Star, bands like that. Everybody is able to bring their own contributions and energy. At first, I think I was doing a lot of dictating, making sure, keeping everybody in the right spot. Now it's gotten to the point where everybody understands implicitly what sound we're going for. It falls into place a lot more. There's very little wrangling in the arrangement process. It just falls into place. So that's pretty exciting.

Splendid: How long does it take to go from an idea for a song so something that you'd actually want to play or record?

Colin Meloy: Sometimes it depends on how I take to a song. There are songs that I write and then don't even look at until a year later, and then bring in to the band and work from there. The gestation of a song itself can be anywhere from two years to a week. A song can be written in five minutes or a year. Then at the point of working it through with the band, we had a bit of a... not necessarily a time constraint, but we went through a very productive period. We were working on a lot of new songs, getting ready to record them. We were doing two practices a week, which is sort of unheard of for us. And just working at songs, working new arrangements, playing around with different arrangements. Everybody was really involved at that point.

Splendid: Obviously, I haven't heard the new record. What I have is Castaways and Cutouts, which is fairly old for you at this point. I'm just wondering, the organ and the guitar are both such integral parts of the songs, is that something that you heard in your head -- how much direction did you give on that kind of stuff?

Colin Meloy: It's something I heard in my head and then sort of fell together. The acoustic guitar has always been the core of it. I've always been an acoustic guitar player. I, for some reason, cannot seem to play electric guitar to save my life.

Splendid: Oh yeah?

Colin Meloy: Every time I've tried to play one... I'm so used to playing acoustic guitar. It's in my head. That's all I really write on, and that's what sounds best to me in an arrangement. The organ is an integral part. I like to think that it comes from a kind of pop tradition -- the Big Music Movement that was happening in Ireland and the UK in the mid 1980s, spawned by bands like World Party and the Waterboys. A lot of that was really keyboard oriented.

Splendid: I understand that you were in a country band at one point, or that you were interested in country music?

Colin Meloy: Well, it was not necessarily country. It was more like an alternative country. It was a band that I played in in college, and it had more of an alternative country bent to it. In high school, I had a fervent love for Uncle Tupelo, so I think I wanted to be in that sort of band. But near the end of that, I was already starting to get a little bit disenchanted, not only with the music itself, but the scene that had started to grow around it, the whole No Depression thing. It had started to seem a little disingenuous.

Splendid: What do you mean by that?

Colin Meloy: I think it was a lot of egotism and a lot of mimicry. A lot of people writing about their problems as if they were growing up in a poverty-stricken environment --

Splendid: Oh, I see what you mean.

Colin Meloy: And not only that, but I think the music was starting to become more homogenous. It was sort of all falling into one and becoming luke warm, with everyone sounding like either Son Volt or Wilco. I was also starting to get very excited about other types of music at the same time.

Splendid: Is there stuff that you're taking out of that experience now and putting into the Decemberists?

Colin Meloy: For sure. I have a fondness for bands like the Derailers. I still pull out the Uncle Tupelo records from time to time. I like traditional folk music. I adore it. So there's still a side of me that, and I think it pops up a little bit on the record. I still like country music. I don't think that will change.

Splendid: You don't have a country voice, though?

Colin Meloy: I don't. That's funny -- the very last song on the new record, our bass player described as 1972-era Stones fronted by Morrissey.

Splendid: That sounds wonderful.

Colin Meloy: So I like to think that I have a country voice, but reality proves me wrong.

Splendid: Now, you guys get compared a lot to Neutral Milk Hotel, and obviously that's a huge compliment.

Colin Meloy: Yes.

Splendid: But it seems to me that your work is very different. You use different instruments, your voice is very different and your writing style is different. How do you feel about the comparison?

Colin Meloy: I don't know. It's something that a lot of people have seen. It's an easy flag to fly. It's easy to make that comparison. But I think it's a huge compliment. I think they're a great band and Jeff Magnum is one of my favorite songwriters. I'll admit that when I heard In an Aeroplane Over the Sea, it certainly changed the direction of my songwriting to a degree. I think the instrumentation is different. I think we're a different band. But in the end, I would certainly take that as a compliment. It sort of confuses and befuddles me from time to time, but at least I'm not being compared to Neil Sedaka or someone like that.

Splendid: (laughing) Yeah, I hope that never happens. I guess that one of the things that I get from listening to your album and In an Aeroplane Over the Sea is that they're both very philosophical, spiritual albums, and they're not afraid to consider things like death and what, maybe, comes after it. Let's talk about that, this willingness to talk about a child who's born at nine and dead at noon. All these horrible things. It seems like you're very comfortable talking about all stages of life.

Colin Meloy: I think the dramatic effect of that is sort of unparalleled. Like I said before, it's sort of drawing from the murder ballads, at a time when not only in America, but if you go back to a lot of the Eastern European stuff, all the early fairy tales did not censor the material at all. It was intended for children, but it was really bloody and dark by today's standards. But I think it was important at that time not to hide that from kids, because it was the reality. And it's interesting that when you get into World War II, a lot of the same things started to pop up. There's a lot of literature -- holocaust literature -- that drew from the old European folk tale tradition. To a certain extent, this is where there's a little bit of a likeness with Neutral Milk Hotel, that there are a lot of holocaust motifs. I think we get into that a little bit. It's the only time, really, in the 20th century when you would have something that would fit into fairy tales, so macabre and so dark, as to be almost fairy tale-ish.

Splendid: Yes. So, "How I Dreamed I Was an Architect", is that a holocaust song?

Colin Meloy: It almost is. That's a little bit of a -- almost a stream of consciousness fantasia. And a lot of -- the first stanza, talking about the soldier, obviously a Nazi, although I think everyone should have their own interpretation of the song.

Splendid: It's pretty oblique. It's not obvious.

Colin Meloy: It's intended to be. It's a marriage of a really pretty pop melody, the music, and then, here's somebody walking through a concentration camp. It's almost a dark humor to that. A lightening effect. I don't want this taken the wrong way, but it's poetic in a way that shocks you.

Splendid: What is the Spanish stanza in that song about?

Colin Meloy: That, I have no real explanation for. It's just sort of a stanza by stanza fantasia. A travelogue. A series of dreams. The third stanza is the most fantastic of them all. I think I had just read, just finished reading again, For Whom the Bell Tolls. I got caught up with that idea of being in Spain, being a gypsy Spaniard and drifting about.

Splendid: There's a lot of military imagery in several of the songs -- and I know you probably wrote those songs before we were involved in a war, but I was wondering if you feel that the context for them has changed now. Are people perceiving them as more anti-war?

Colin Meloy: Yeah, I've been asked that before. A lot of those were written well before the war. I think it's obviously of such a different era that I think it's almost a literary genre to have that sort of military writing. So I think that I still cling to this sort of motif, and in fact we have a song called "The Soldiering Life" on our new record. It sort of plays up the homoerotic tension between soldiers in World War I. It was drawn directly from Paul Fussell's book, The Great War and Modern Memory. So that's another one of the dichotomies that we like to play around with -- the idea of the military life -- and we juxtapose that with a very soft, melodic pop melody and you have a really interesting tension. The masculinity of the subject and the sentiment of the music itself. It became more prominent when the war happened. It is almost an anti-war message.

Splendid: Hmm. Yeah, so I was on your web site, and it looks like you're in some kind of old-fashioned military uniforms.

Colin Meloy: Oh, the civil war stuff?

Splendid: Yeah, what is that?

Colin Meloy: They were just some civil war costumes that we rented. I came up with this idea that it would be an interesting photo shoot. Typically, I don't really like doing photo shoots. I don't know of many bands that do. Everybody does it because you have an obligation to do it. Everybody's like, well, all right, we'll walk down these railroad tracks and have our photos taken. But I think it's a good opportunity to play around with it and have fun. I think that we've sort of made an identity for ourselves by being a little strange, a little off the cuff. I thought it would be good to have that translate into the photos.

Splendid: So you're not one of those re-enactor types, really? Where someone just took some candid photos as you were putting on a civil war battle?

Colin Meloy: Right. Something like that. We were just some escaped musicians trying to find our way home.

Splendid: Have you done a video yet?

Colin Meloy: No, but we're going to do that. We're going to do a video. Kill Rock Stars is putting out a DVD. We're going to do a video with Greg Brown, who actually did a couple of the Shins videos. He's a local Portlander. But we're also trying to lobby Guy Maddin, who is a Canadian film director, whom I absolutely adore. We're trying to get him to a video for us.

Splendid: What movies has he been involved in?

Colin Meloy: He did a bunch. Archangel, a movie called Careful, a movie called Twilight of the Ice Nymphs. He's drawn a lot from early silent movie genres, almost the same motifs that I draw on. When I discovered him, I was like, oh my god, I love this guy. A lot of early Great War, World War II motifs, and drawing on really odd mythology. Really, really bizarre. Actually there's a sound sample of some dialogue from one of his films on Castaways and Cutouts.

Splendid: Oh, yeah, that's in between the last two songs, right?

Colin Meloy: Just before "Youth and Beauty Brigade".

Splendid: That's interesting. So it sounds like doing a video with him wouldn't be as painful as these photo shoots you're talking about, because you'd be working with a director whose vision is in line with yours.

Colin Meloy: Exactly. We're really not into making anything that's run of the mill. I would love to have to do a video that's almost a made-up movie, or act something out. We're not the sort of band that's totally hiding behind their own attitude. We're sort of open about our geekdom.

Splendid: (laughs) Well, I guess that's good, isn't it?

Colin Meloy: It's great. I grew up in Helena, Montana, and was always trying to hide that weird side of me. There's no sense. I think that, a lot of what, as far as the songwriting goes, a lot of that is imagination unchecked and not thinking about, oh, are people going to think that I'm strange because I'm singing about a legionnaire stuck in the desert? People seem to grab onto it and enjoy it.

Splendid: So what kind of kid were you?

Colin Meloy: I was a strange kid. I was sort of in my own -- my parents friends had a name for me. They called me "Underwater Boy" because I always looked like I was underwater, swimming about, not quite ... didn't have my feet on the ground.

Splendid: In your own little world. And were you always interested in writing and making up stories and all that?

Colin Meloy: Yeah. I actually wrote a play when I was in second grade called "The Bloody Knight". It was really violent. I look back at it and it seems like a Pacino movie or something. It was full of all kinds of gangsters.

Splendid: I used to write poetry when I was small, and my mom was always asking "Jennifer, is that you really feel?" like she was about to pack me off into therapy or something?

Colin Meloy: Yeah, no kidding. Thankfully, I had parents who were fine with it. I started writing short stories after that. I really wanted to be a writer.

Splendid: So just you and your sister, and you're both writers.

Colin Meloy: Yeah, surprisingly enough. My sister sort of did it for longer. And all the sudden she was getting published in The New Yorker and everybody was like, "Oh wow, she's a writer."

Splendid: That's the big time, though -- The New Yorker.

Colin Meloy: She's done really well.

Splendid: Your parents, are they artists, too?

Colin Meloy: No, actually, my dad's an attorney and my mom works for the county.

Splendid: Were they at SXSW?

Colin Meloy: No, they weren't.

Splendid: Because I was standing right behind someone who looked a lot like you, but sort of dad-aged, and I thought maybe that was your dad.

Colin Meloy: A woman?

Splendid: There was a guy and a woman, but the guy looked like you.

Colin Meloy: Because my sister was there, but no other family.

Splendid: Just a coincidence, I guess. So, getting back to the songs, you have some really brutal images of women in your songs -- "Leslie Anne Levine" and the prostitutes in "A Cautionary Song" and "Odalisque". Are you getting any flak from women? From feminists?

Colin Meloy: From time to time. I think after we released the record, just looking at some of the lyrical content, it is a little challenging. Some of the subject matters aren't really that easy to deal with. I think that all along, we were like, can we do this? Should we do this? Can we say this? But then at that point, we felt that we really didn't have anything to lose. I didn't feel like censoring the work at all. So surprisingly, I think people haven't really grabbed onto it or labelled me either a misogynist or a anti-Semite. I have to think that people are taking it in the right way or reading it in the context. I think that it's a series of narratives that run the gamut of personalities.

Splendid: That's how I was taking it. There are a lot of songs in popular music that are about rape or non-consensual sex, and I usually don't like them at all, but yours were so clearly stories that it seems different and okay.

Colin Meloy: I think when you put them in the context of something in the 19th century, you're still addressing it, but it takes on a different feel. There's a whole different world that it's creating. Not that that makes it any more acceptable. Like I said before, like all the early fairy tales, the early Brothers Grimm stories, were really, really gory. There's something in that that sparks the imagination. So I'm trying to put that into the songs. I get a few people who, in "The Cautionary Song", sort of get a little perturbed about the fact that it's basically a rape theme. But surprisingly few. I think that the people who have trouble with that aren't really getting it.

Splendid: Well, it is a very disturbing song. It's got this nice happy accordion and this awful story to it, but it's very well done.

Colin Meloy: Yeah.

Splendid: So right now, I guess that Kill Rock Stars is reissuing Castaways and Cutouts. Is the reissue exactly the same as the record you put out on Hush Records last fall?

Colin Meloy: Yes. It is.

Splendid: So is that kind of strange that a lot of people are perceiving the songs as new, but you've probably been doing them for a year or more?

Colin Meloy: Uh-huh. Yeah. I think we all like the songs well enough that we're willing to play them however long. We've been playing the newer songs off the upcoming album quite a bit, back in Portland. But for the purposes of this tour that we're doing now, we're supporting that record and doing most of the songs off of it. It gives us an opportunity to revisit them. It's certainly better than the fate that the record could have had. If Kill Rock Stars hadn't reissued it, it would have fallen by the wayside and been forgotten, so I think we're all pretty proud of it and glad that it has a second chance.

Splendid: Do you want to talk about the new album and what people will notice that's different about it?

Colin Meloy: It's a bit more of a collaborative affair. As I said before, we all together worked on it. It was all songs that were written within the last year, after Castaways and Cutouts was recorded. A lot of the stuff on Castaways and Cutouts was a body of work that I had created since I moved to Portland. This was a lot of stuff -- there's a little bit more freshness. And also it gave us an opportunity to -- the band at the point when we recorded Castaways and Cutouts, I felt like I was really calling all the shots, producing it. This is more of a collaborative work. Everybody added to it. It follows in the same line. The thematic content. I would like to avoid being pigeon-holed as someone who writes exclusively about 19th century motifs or characters, but they're still there. There are still a few of those that pop up. But we move around a little more and play around with a lot of different motifs this time.