IN MY ROOM

Colin

Meloy

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The Decemberists’ frontman
takes us inside his Portland,
Oregon home

1CASSETTE RECORDER “Pretty much all of our

songs start right here as 30- to 60-second-long

snippets of me playing or humming onto this tape

deck. I’ve had it since high school. I’ve never attached

much sentimental value to it, but I probably should.”

2MODEL SHIP “I have a fetish I haven’t been

able to shake. This model of Captain Cook’s HMS

Endeavour is the most intense embodiment of it.”

3DOG TAG “A guy who had just come back from

Afghanistan gave this to me. We have a lot of

songs about soldiers—not modern soldiers, but I

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think there’s something they can relate to.”

4CERAMIC BOWL “My great uncle Hank, my

son’s namesake, made this. He actually taught

at Columbia and died tragically young— 49. This

one’s probably from the ’⁴⁰s; now it holds my picks.

There’s a gallery at the University of Montana, the

Meloy Gallery, that exhibits his work.”

5RUSSIAN BANNER “I bought this in Moscow.

There’s a quote from Lenin that says...well, I don’t

know what it says.”

6ACOUSTIC GUITAR “A guy from Chicago built

me this one-of-a-kind guitar. I had the word ‘ahz-

te-rosh-eh-na’ written on the fret board in Cyrillic,

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which means ‘Watch out!’ in Russian.”

7DRAWING “My fiancee, Carson Ellis, did this

drawing for The Perfect Crime #2 EP. She does all

of our album art. Initially, she would just do what-

ever I was conceiving, but at this point she’s much more

involved in the process and puts her foot down. Which

is good; she’s got a better sense for design than I do.”

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8SKULL “I brought this along on my solo tour

because I wanted something onstage other

than just me and a guitar. Somebody from the

audience named her Cheryl.”

9ANNE BRIGGS’ THE HAZARDS OF LOVE EP

“This record is credited with sparking a lot of the

British folk revival. Apparently, she couldn’t stand

the sound of her recorded voice, so she moved to the

Scottish Highlands and became a conservation worker.

I got it on eBay. It was exorbitantly expensive.”

10RUG “After our first big advance from Capitol, I decided I wanted to do one nice thing for

myself. So I bought this Iranian rug. It’s one of

the only relatively conspicuously consumptive things

I’ve done in my life.”

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BY BART BLASENGAME
PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN CLARK