Colin Meloy announces new Decemberists album by busking in Brooklyn
If you saw a familiar-looking busker in Williamsburg Friday, you’re not crazy — it was Colin Meloy of The Decemberists. Unless you just passed by your roomate playing Black Flag songs on a ukulele, in which case, we don’t have a lot to say about that. But back to Meloy: The Decemberists frontman performed solo with an acoustic guitar on a corner in Brooklyn, and there’s a very good reason for that: He was announcing a brand new Decemberists album!
Meloy performed two songs — new track “Make You Better,” and classic Decemberists fan favorite “The Engine Driver,” from 2005’s Picaresque — in front of a large tapestry showcasing the artwork for new album What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. The new record follows 2011’s The King Is Dead, and though there isn’t a release date just yet, we can take an educated guess that it’s bound to arrive in early 2015. It seems that Meloy fared a little bit better than Erykah Badu did when she took to busking in the streets of New York City. C’mon New York, get better at recognizing these people!
Some of Meloy’s performance was captured via Instagram, which you can watch below.
A video posted by Katie Burton (@peachypiedesigns) on
Jeff Terich is the founder and editor of Treble. He's been writing about music for 20 years and has been published at American Songwriter, Bandcamp Daily, Reverb, Spin, Stereogum, uDiscoverMusic, VinylMePlease and some others that he's forgetting right now. He's still not tired of it.
I spent a lot of time wishing LOOP, Neutral Milk Hotel, my bloody valentine, and Sleater-Kinney would return. How is it possible that in all that time, this band never really went away? By the way, having NMH return was probably Colin Meloy’s worst nightmare since it only serves to remind people that his band is very much the poor man’s NMH.