The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy on chart success and chicken feed

After their last album debuted at No 1 in the US, Portland’s indie-folk rockers disappeared for four years. Their frontman talks about his bestselling children’s novels, life on a farm and why they needed a break

The Decemberists: ‘We’re going to suck it up.’ Photograph: PR

First he has to feed the chickens – they haven’t been laying many eggs recently. There’s a quick lecture on the barn, which contains the longest single-piece beam in Oregon, apparently, and is home to some llamas that were left by the previous owner. And only then does Colin Meloy of the Decemberists retire to the workroom in an outhouse on his mid-19th-century farm in the hills above Portland, Oregon, to talk.

It’s all very bucolic. In fact, it would be hard to think of a much more stereotypically Pacific north-western liberal setting for someone whose music seems to tick all the stereotypical liberal boxes: wordy, playful, often acoustic-led and based on the folk tradition. When I first met him, a decade ago, Meloy said of his crowd: “I look at the people in the first 10 rows and they all look kind of pale and bespectacled. I honestly look out every night and think, I could be friends with every single one of them.” One might be forgiven for suspecting a certain smug insularity about both the Decemberists and their fans, what with the audience participation in numbers about whales swallowing seafarers and wild enthusiasm for songs about “chimbley sweeps”.

In fact, the smug insularity of Portland’s liberal middle class is something he’s increasingly disturbed about (“It’s too in its own bubble, and that scares me,”) and on the Decemberists’ seventh album, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, there are two songs that take aim, gently, at the band’s fans. The opening track, The Singer Addresses His Audience, mockingly portrays a singer trapped in his creation by the audience, despite his desire to evolve: “We know you threw your arms around us in the hopes we wouldn’t change/But we had to change some.” The second, Anti-Summersong, sees him referring to previous Decemberists songs: “But I’m not going on just to sing another Summersong/So long, farewell/I’m not going on just to sing another singalong suicide song.”

“Those two songs were very self-reflexive,” Meloy says. “It was right after we’d finished touring and I was feeling almost embittered, and wanting to make those kind of statements. It felt therapeutic to me. The songs were about songs, about songwriting. When I brought Anti-Summersong in, Jenny [Conlee, accordion and keyboards] was like: ‘That’s your retirement song, your fuck-you-world song.’ There have been many times I’ve wanted to do that, but I keep getting drawn back in. It was a humorous way of making fun of myself: I’m not going on just to sing another Summersong, but here I am doing it on a record. You’re torn between throwing it all away and never wanting to give it up.”

Therein lies the great tension of the world of a band, from the perspective of fan and musician: on the one hand, every fan wants the artists they love to express themselves creatively and develop artistically, but at the same time they want them to carry on doing the same thing they fell in love with in the first place. “And I’m aware of that,” Meloy says. “There are certain people who figure it out. We just saw Fleetwood Mac and they’re clear: people want us to do the greatest hits, no more, no less. Maybe Lindsey Buckingham’s solo records satisfy [his need to be creative] and Fleetwood Mac is just an expression of the other side. I think about ourselves: do people want us to keep having The Mariner’s Revenge Song to finish every set? And I guess they do. There’s a certain obligation that you have to satisfy, and I think that’s why people continue to come to our shows. We’re mindful that there is a tacit agreement; we’re going to suck it up.”

Meloy escaped from having to suck it up when the Decemberists finished promoting their last album, The King is Dead, by announcing that the band were taking a hiatus from summer 2011. Although the album had topped the US charts, life wasn’t easy for the group. Meloy had always found touring more a chore than a pleasure, Conlee was diagnosed with breast cancer in May 2011 (she is now in remission), and he simply wanted to do other things. One was to write his bestselling Wildwood series of children’s novels, illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis (“I think it eclipses the Decemberists in some places,” he observes), and the other was to be with his family.

Ellis and Meloy’s elder child, Hank, is autistic. A good chunk of the past few years has been taken up with trying to make sure Hank gets the education that best suits him. At first he went to a school in the public system, but that didn’t work for him. “There’s this idea that an inclusive environment is the better one, but we never felt there was a culture of inclusion in the public school system,” Meloy says. “There are people who do make the public system work. You have to be a tireless advocate for your kid, but we got tired of fighting the school, fighting insurance – because if you’re in the public system, you have to augment with private services – and it can be a little taxing.”

He enters into a long and involved explanation of the politics of autism advocacy – he’s on the side of seeing autism as part of neurodiversity, an expression of a non-neurotypical personality, rather than as a condition for which a cure must be sought. “It’s a huge part of his personality, and you can’t remove that piece,” Meloy says. “Some people are like: ‘Autism has robbed my child from me.’ Well, who is your child? Who did you want? Clearly your child was only the expression of what your child would be. With Hank, I wouldn’t trade his autism. It presents challenges to him, but it’s also given him incredible gifts and his personality is so much due to the personality he’s been given because of his autism.”

Taking a break also allowed Meloy to locate what he liked about being in the Decemberists in the first place. After six albums, being in a band becomes a career rather than an act of self-expression, and he wanted to relocate the expressive part of his work. “At some point, you have to step away from it to make sure you’re not just on the sort of conveyor belt where you get into that record-promote-tour cycle and lose track of why you’re doing it,” he says. “Having a family and a mortgage and people who rely on you for an income [Meloy is the only songwriter in the Decemberists] is a weird thing and has affected me personally.”

He says he can still find that mental space he occupied when he was first starting out, when he wrote songs simply to get them out, rather than because he needed to find 12 tracks for an album. This time around – with no deadline from the label – it was a bit easier than it had been. But still, he says, he knows he approaches writing differently than he did 15 years ago. “I’m thinking: ‘OK, I have a fanbase who are expecting things, I have critics who I think about more than I should, I have peers I’m looking at …’”

What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is the second Decemberists album in a row to be made up of relatively concise, straightforward pop songs, as opposed to the prog-folk-metal concept album The Hazards of Love, or its predecessor The Crane Wife, which included a couple of 10-minute epics. It was the first time Meloy had not entered the studio to record an album in its entirety – the songs were instead recorded a few at a time. While he was writing his novels, the songs tended to be removed from the narratives he made his name with, “but as I was finishing the books, I could feel the narrative slipping back in. I was so wrapped up in writing about other people for the books that the songs were a kind of respite from that.”

Given that he writes books and songs now, what single noun would he pick to describe himself? “I don’t know under what circumstances other than doing an interview I would have to describe what I do like that,” he answers, not testily, but not helpfully. What about on your passport? It’s a question beloved of bureaucrats, too. “That’s true,” he concedes. “I say musician/writer, which if you don’t space them is one long word. I think writing is the common denominator. That would maybe best encapsulate all the things I’m doing.”

He is aware, too, that being in a rock group at the age of 40 has something of the infantile about it. He identifies that as a strain of privilege: “We’ve gotten to a point where adulthood is no longer decades of terror and stress and making sure you can provide for your family and be a good role model.” Instead, you be selfish: collect Star Wars memorabilia, or worry about getting the most fashionable trainers, or be in a rock band.

That sense of privilege turning people solipsistic is what makes him uneasy about his home town, where people get so consumed about issues they view as moral standpoints that they forget only the wealthy can afford to take those positions. He talks about the successful campaign against the fluoridation of water, and how its supporters said those who wanted fluoride should visit their dentist: “It’s a kind of magical thinking, as if everybody can afford to do that.” He mentions a row over the labelling of GM food, and how opponents of GM said everyone should be able to afford organic food. “Well,” he points out, “people can’t.” Too many people in Portland and other big liberal cities, he says, are “out of touch with the way the rest of the world works. We’re living alongside people who are being forgotten, who aren’t of that privileged class, and it drives me crazy.”

Colin Meloy at the Ottawa Folkfest. Photograph: Mark Horton/WireImage

When we meet, in early December, the issue of the people outside the privileged class is dominating the headlines in the US, in the wake of the Ferguson verdict and police killings elsewhere in the country. Meloy despairs of the attitudes he sees around him in America, that those communities and those men brought those events on themselves. “It’s a totally wrongheaded idea that doesn’t recognised the decades and centuries of systemic, institutional racism at all levels of the government. I’m a pro-government liberal. I think it’s important to have those institutions. But some branches of those institutions, such as law enforcement, are fairly corrupt and support that institutional racism in certain parts of the country. And there’s this idea that we have a black president, so we’re post-racism and no longer need to have accommodation for minorities. But we do. We need them more than ever.”

Meloy is glad he didn’t become famous – well, as famous as he is – any younger, because attention has changed him. He remembers things he did early on that he regrets – such as detailing what he didn’t like about bands he didn’t care for (“These people weren’t humans to me. I was still in the mindset that they were pop culture entities and they could be batted around.”) He’s grateful that, since he was already an adult, he didn’t make worse mistakes when he became known. “I didn’t have to manage that transition when I was 22 – I can’t even imagine what that would do to you. I would have done drastic damage to myself.”

The next phase of the Decemberists’ career will be conducted on strictly adult terms. There’ll be no more album-tour-album treadmill, and the hiatus will be the model. “Over the past four or five years, my perspective has shifted, my priorities have shifted. We’re in a position where we can slow down production a little bit. I’ve also sold another couple of books and that’s a big part of what I want to do. I think this might be the new regime.”

What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World is released on Rough Trade on January 19. The Decemberists tour the UK from 13 February, decemberists.com. Michael Hann’s trip to Portland was paid for by Rough Trade.