You guys play Coachella the day after you’re in Vegas. Anyone you’re hoping to catch there?
Arcade Fire would be nice—I’ve never seen them before, apart from a little bit on the Internet—but they play right after us on the opposite stage so I’d probably have to get a golf cart to take me over there and then climb over everybody from Hollywood to watch them play. So I’ll probably stand in the back and watch it from afar on a TelePrompTer. At those music festivals you really have to, like, drop acid with your friends and get a tent going and get your suntan lotion and go in whole hog. For me, when you’re standing backstage, it’s not as fun.
Did you ever envision playing a proggy 13-minute song like “The Island” when The Decemberists first set out?
Well, the spirit of the band’s always been to do whatever we wanted ... “Okay, we’ll sign to your big label [Capitol], but we’re gonna do what we wanna do.” With “The Island,” we’d been talking about doing a prog-rock song; we kept joking around about doing an elf song, a gnome-rock song, Lord of the Rings music. But in reality, “The Island” is just three songs kinda smashed together, and the transition work and instrumentation and feel are a perfect example of the band working on something together.
How upset would you have been losing your Colbert Report guitar-shredding battle to Stephen Colbert, instead of his “injury stand-in,” Peter Frampton?
Well, technically I guess I did lose to Stephen. But I’d hang my head in shame equally low either way, I suppose. [Frampton] was just the icing on the cake to me. They were like, “We want you on the show, and Peter Frampton’s gonna come out and kick your ass.” And then when I got there and Henry Kissinger was there, and Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick was there and [New York governor] Eliot Spitzer was there. It was a blast. And now more drunk people randomly scream out “Stephen Colbert” at the live shows now, and I don’t know how to respond to that.
With My Brightest Diamond. April 27, 7:30 p.m., $22. House of Blues, 632-7600.