10.08.06
Stories, Fables, and the Crafting of Songs
The Decemberists: The Crane Wife
![[image]](http://verywide.net/blog/wp-content/images/misc_others/decemberists-cranewife.jpg "The Decemberists: The Crane Wife")
I am beginning to suspect that Colin Meloy and the rest of The Decemberists are incapable of doing anything wrong, are even capable of making things you might think would be wrong all right. Now on a major label, the band have demonstrated with The Crane Wife that they are still themselves even as they try out some pretty radical new ideas. Case in point, the 12′42″ track, “The Island”, which — believe it or not — is a prog rock epic à la Yes, Marillion, and older King Crimson. The song is in three parts: i. “Come and See”, ii. “The Landlord’s Daughter”, iii. “You’ll Not Feel the Drowning”. Musically, if you’ve not heard The Tain (the 2004 EP), it is nearly unlike anything you might imagine the band doing — “there’s a lot of exploration about where British folk met prog in the early 70s, late 60s”, says Meloy — except that it sounds like you’d hope it would sound, noodly organ and occasionally romping pace notwithstanding. Lyrically, it is exactly what you’d expect from the band. The mention of “Sycorax” in the song ties it, at least distantly, to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, while the mention of “Patagon” in the next line seems to tie it to a legendary tribe of South American giants reported by Magellan and his crew in the 1500s.
Thus so with the title track, which makes a beautiful, bittersweet, poignant three part song from a famous Japanese folk tale. Briefly, the story goes something like this:
a poor man finds an injured crane on his doorstep (or outside with an arrow in it), takes it in and nurses it back to health. After releasing the crane, a woman appears at his doorstep who he falls in love with and marries. Because they are in need of money, his wife offers to weave wondrous clothes out of silk that they could sell at the market, but only if he agrees never to watch her when she is making it. They begin to sell them and live a comfortable life, but he soon makes her weave them more and more. Oblivious to his wife’s diminishing health, his greed increases and he eventually peeks in to see what she is doing to make the silk she weaves so desirable. He is shocked to discover that at the loom is a crane plucking feathers from her body and weaving them into the loom. The crane, seeing him, flies away and never returns.
The Decemberists made the third part the first track on the album and put the first two parts together as the penultimate track. The third part deals with the loss of the crane wife and the shame of the man who in his oblivious greed abused and spied on her. It is not until we reach the ninth track that we hear how the story began, knowing already how their fate will be sealed. It’s a clever idea. It serves to make the instrumental arrangement all the more heart-tugging. When Meloy reaches the lines (in the second part) — singing them with such sadness — “But I was greedy, I was vain and I forced her to weaving / On a cold loom, in a closed room down the hall”, your heart feels torn in half.
It was also a good idea not to end the album on such a sad, sad note. The final track, “Sons and Daughters”, though lightly touched with a wistfullness defined by what isn’t said, is an uplifting, hopeful piece. If it is the ultimate statement of the album, then what it says is this: life is prone to tragedy, love is hard and doesn’t always overcome the folly, but we can always try, because we still might make it in the end. We need to remember the stories, and we need to keep trying. The Decemberists have given our effort a new soundtrack, and it is very, very good indeed.
