All The City Lights

Perhaps no band’s lyrics better lend themselves to pseudo-academic analysis than those of The Decemberists. The Annotated Decemberists is an attempt to puzzle through the Portland, Oregon, group’s entire catalog song by song—examining all the obscure vocabulary, historical references and poetic subtext—or go crazy trying.

This song is a bit problematic. I’ve been dreading writing about it ever since I started in on Castaways and Cutouts, because essentially what we have is a fairly horrific description of the gang rape of a prostitute set to jaunty accordion music. While it’s not exactly played for laughs, it is a bit quirky—it can’t help but be with that oom-pah rhythm. The theme of women at the mercy of dastardly scoundrels comes up again and again in The Decemberists’ discography, but nowhere else is Colin Meloy quite so … flip about it. And then there’s the grim punchline at the end of the song, which confirms the song’s setup: This whole cautionary tale is being told like a bedtime story to a child as some sort of ill-conceived lesson about appreciating one’s mother. Continue reading →