Colin Meloy Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Meditation. That's the key. Supposedly. Calming your mind ind total silence. Understanding your connection to the natural world and all that. You do that, and you can hear it. All the talking.

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.

Was there ever any doubt?
And as the spotlights fade away,
And you're escorted through the foyer,
You will resume your callow ways,
But I was meant for the stage.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Two men, one fairly dragging the other along, suddenly entered the clearing and, their eyes trained behind them, ran headlong into the owl's creation and knocked it, every maple branch and every twig of dogwood, to the ground in a splintering crash. The owl fell backward, devastated.

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.

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.

And at that very moment, when the kiss was laid on the boy's head, and the mother's arm were firmly wrapped around her child as they'd been when she'd first held him, when she'd first cradled him as a baby, when she'd held him as a child crying over some lost bauble, when she'd held him as a boy when a fever had come on strong, when she'd held him as a young man in the full throat of summer, and when the horse had thrown him and he lay motionless on the flagstones and she'd held him then- at that very moment, the ivy ceased its endless writhings and lapsed into immobility and fell quiet.

Alexandra held out her arms; her son stepped into them and laid his his head, softly, on his mother's chest.

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

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