Always December

As anyone that has come to my house knows, it is always December in my house. The Decemberists that is. In my house is all Decemberists all the time. So I couldn't end the month of December without a Decemberists post.

What I like about The Decemberists is their lyrics. Every song is like a little story that doesn't always have a beginning or an end, takes place in the past and in the present and doesn't necessarily make sense but there it is. Their songs tell stories of...

...a guy whose mother is a Chinese trapeze artist and his dad was a Russian soldier that were really spies against the Nazis . His sister was born in a barn and abandoned with the cattle and found by a communist that left Communism to move to South Carolina to start a punk rock band and now own a tobacco plantation. He was born in a brothel and was given away after loosing a bet in a game of high-stakes canasta and now is a sailor who wishes to work in bakery.

...of a guy telling a boy about how he should be not be bad to his mother because every night she goes to the harbor and waits for the sailors to take her away and she goes from ship to ship until she has satisfied the entire marina and they throw her thirty dollars and this is how he's fed.

...of a joint suicide between two lovers of different social classes

...of a guy that suffers a bad fall during a high school soccer game and talks about how some people give too much importance to sports

...of a man that worked for the government and fell in love with a spy and gave her government secrets. She was captured and abused and he never heard from her until ten years later when she just drove by and waved.

...of two sailors from different ships that were swallowed by a whale and how their lives were connected. One of them was a boy whose father had died and his widowed mother had accepted the other sailor as her lover and he had ruined the family until they lost everything. When his mother was dying, she made him promise he would find the sailor and kill him. So he spent all his life trying to find him and when he did they were swallowed by a whale and now they were inside it and he was going to die.

...of a man that one day found a crane that was injured and took care of him until he flew away. Years later a woman came to his door and they fell in love and got married. Their fortunes were runing low so he forced her to weaving in a closed room down the hall. The wife grew sad and skinny and later he found out that his wife was really the crane he had saved and her weavings were made from her feathers.

...of two lovers that ran away because their families were enemies but they were found out by the girl's family. The brother meant to kill him but the bullet killed his sister instead.

So if you are still reading this and care to know more about The Decemberists, here is a video