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HOW DO YOU KNOW when you've made it as a rock band? Is it when your hometown gives you your very own day?

January 20 was declared Decemberists Day in Portland—the same day the Decemberists released their seventh album, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. The band performed as a mayoral proclamation was read and a collaborative art piece was unveiled, and from the Decemberists' perspective, the experience may have been more bizarre than anything else. Lead singer and songwriter Colin Meloy was recovering from an illness on that particular day. "However surreal it was," he says, "it might have been a little bit colored by that. But it was really fun. It was cool."

As to how it came about, Meloy says, "Somebody had suggested it to city hall and they were game for it. It was surprising how easy it was. It might have even been somebody from our label. I think it's actually a fairly easy thing to do, as it turns out. I would recommend that anybody at least contact city hall to see if they would be willing," he jokes. "I mean, not to diminish it. They've got a lot better things to be doing than naming days after bands. It was a kind thing for them to do."

In some ways Decemberists Day marked the finish line for the incubation process of What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. The album was born after a hiatus in band activity following 2011's The King Is Dead. During that period, four-fifths of the Decemberists—guitarist Chris Funk, keyboardist Jenny Conlee, bassist Nate Query, and drummer John Moen—sowed their wild musical oats with Black Prairie, while Meloy and his wife, illustrator Carson Ellis, created the three volumes of their Wildwood trilogy of young-adult novels.

"I was working on the books over the last four years, and that was my primary objective," Meloy says. "And it allowed me to kind of use songwriting as a procrastination tool from my day job, which is what songwriting had been to me for as long as I did have a day job. I don't know if I really got back to that, or if I was being overly nostalgic or sentimental or precious about it, but it was nice to be able to do songwriting as a side thing for a little bit, and not have so much pressure."

For What a Terrible World, the band took the recording process at a deliberately slow pace, recording songs piecemeal rather than tackling the full album in one fell swoop, as they'd done in the past. For a time, the protracted gestation meant that the final product remained slightly out of focus.

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