While we fought rain at the second annual All Points West, the newly expanded Decemberists took a break from their start-to-finish The Hazards Of Love renditions to introduce a couple new songs to fans at the 50th Newport Folk Festival, aka the so-called Folk Festival 50. As Colin Meloy notes before the start of “Down By The Water,” it’s the “American debut” of said tracks as well as his “American debut” playing the harmonica (true/false?). There are fits and starts and then it finally … starts. There’s also “an attempt at a copper mining song” called “Rox In The Box” with a shout out to Butte, Montana. Meloy knows how to work the folk fans, for sure.
“Down By The Water”
“Rox In The Box”
You can stream some of the set’s oldies at NPR. At the end of the festival Billy Bragg, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Ben Kweller, Fleet Foxes, the Low Anthem, and the Decemberists joined Pete Seeger on a sing-a-long of “This Land Is Your Land.” My hair just grew an inch. Finally, the band’s upcoming 8/6 show at the Metro in Chicago is going to feature a setlist created “By Request” by Decemberist fans. Check to see if any of the aforementioned songs made the selection list at decemberists.com.
[Photo by Autumn DeWilde]
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everyone knows Down By The Sea is a Genesis song. in two parts.
bring on the downvotes.
holy crap, that’s Home By The Sea.
downvotes for sure now.
“Down by the Sea” is actually called “Down by the Water”. And “A Mining Song” is called “Rox in the Box”.
The Decemberists put on a hell of a great show on Saturday, punctuated with their reenactment of when Dylan went electric some decades ago. The new songs sounded great live. But can we talk about The Avett Brothers for a second? Those guys are unbelievably awesome live.
Yes, we can talk about how awesome the Avetts are live. I was pretty floored, honestly. And that “Dylan Going Electric” reenactment was priceless, although I missed most of their set because I was watching Iron & Wine. I only went Saturday, but the whole thing was absolutely wonderful. Not to mention that beautiful weather that we were thankfully blessed with.
Very Folky
They actually played both those songs at the Vancouver shows, July 21st and 22nd.
But I guess its still the ‘American Debut’
file this one under: who cares….
Folk Decemberists > Decemberists ?