The Decemberists Test | Music

Answer: Cautionary Song

"The Cautionary Song" from "Castaways and Cutouts" is a song in which a father tells his child the horrific things his mother puts up with to earn the money necessary to feed him. The idea is to guilt the child into eating his collard greens.

Answer: Shanty for the Arethusa

"Shanty For the Arethusa" is a song from "Her Majesty the Decemberists" in which the narrator is a pirate telling a story of himself and other pirates. The pirates kill everyone they can find in the bars and hotels and then rape whatever young women they can find. Then they get sent to Australia to hang.

Answer: The Mariner's Revenge Song

"The Mariner's Revenge Song" is a BRILLIANT eight-minute story of a sailor whose mother gets involved with a crazy young man. The young man gives his mother syphilis, then he spends all of the family's money on whores, alcohol, and gambling. He leaves after spending all the family's money on junk. Thanks to him, the family can no longer pay for their house which gets re-possessed.

The mother goes insane, and then she dies. Right before she dies, she tells her son to avenge her. The narrator vows to make good on his mother's promise.

Many years later the narrator learns where his enemy is, then joins a privateer ship. He finds him and prepares to kill him but then a whale knocks over both ships and chews to death everyone except the narrator and his enemy.

The music at the end of the song matches the music of his mother's last wish, implying that the narrator did exactly what his mother told him to do. They both decompose in the whale's body.

Answer: O Valencia

The music video for "O Valencia" shows the Valencia Hotel in San Francisco. In addition, during their second concert in Atlanta in 2015, Colin Meloy introduced "O Valencia" as "another song about San Francisco." So it's clear that the song refers to the hotel in San Francisco and not the city in Spain.

The reason he said "ANOTHER song about San Francisco" is because they had already played "Grace Cathedral Hill" earlier in the show.

Answer: False

They had not released it yet when they put out "The Crane Wife", but the Decemberists do have a song called "The Perfect Crime #1." The song is available on the internet if you know where to look.

Answer: Don't Carry it All

This song from the "King is Dead" is about a family whose boy has died, and the entire neighborhood grieves for them. Each neighbor takes a bit of grief so that the affected family does not have to carry all the grief by themselves. Strangely, this song does not appear on the "We All Raise Our Voices to the Air" live album, which was recorded on the "King is Dead" tour and features seven songs from that album.

Although this song isn't on that live album, they did play it at some shows on that tour.

Answer: Rise to Me

Colin wrote "Rise to Me" for his son Henry, who has autism. His autism is hinted at in the line "Hey Henry can you hear me? Let me see those eyes." Autistic people have trouble with eye contact. "Better Not Wake the Baby" and "12/17/12" were written about Colin's second child.

Answer: 12/17/12

"12/17/12" was written a few days after the Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut. Colin's wife conceived their second child around this time. Colin was wondering what kind of world his child would grow up in. He acknowledges that it is generally a beautiful world, but there are some horrific things in this world.

Answer: O Valencia

During the "King is Dead" tour, the Decemberists played "Dracula's Daughter" many times right before "O Valencia." Sometimes he would sing "Dracula's Daughter" right before the third verse of "O Valencia" and get the audience to sing along.

Answer: The Calamity Song

During Colin's 2013 solo tour and the Decemberists' "What a Terrible World What a Beautiful World" tour, Colin sometimes said "I wrote this next song to encourage my son to eat his breakfast." Then he would play a tune seemingly called "Hank, Eat Your Oatmeal" which has an "Oooooooooh" similar to the the "Oooooooh" in "The Calamity Song." Then he would play "The Calamity Song" to confirm that's what it became.