Today marks the release of The Decemberists’ eighth studio LP, the synth-accented I’ll Be Your Girl, and fans who opted to pick up a physical copy of the album may have noticed a surprising name in the liner notes. Special counsel Robert Mueller, the man tasked with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, is thanked by Colin Meloy and his merry band of musicians.
Appearing on Kyle Meredith With…, Meloy addresses the album track “Everything Is Awful”, which was written in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election. “I hope the song is a rallying cry, or a blanket we can all share,” he explains. “Immediately after the election, there was a real onset, for me at least, of depression and despair that was not funny, thinking about my kids, my family, my country. But then finding there were so many other people who felt the same way, there was this community. People coming together under this feeling that ‘everything is awful,’ why did it take us so long to discover this? Let’s do something about it.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Meloy touches on I’ll Be Your Girl’s influx of synths—”I have no interest in rebranding us as some synthesizer-heavy band,” he clarifies—and the significance of the title track.
