![News Added Oct 25, 2014 On Friday morning, the Decemberists' Colin Meloy joined the recent trend of busking musicians by performing solo with a guitar on a corner in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. He played in front of a mural bearing the cover art of the band's new album, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful […]](https://hasitleaked.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Folder-320x320.jpg "The Decemberists : What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World")
On Friday morning, the Decemberists' Colin Meloy joined the recent trend of busking musicians by performing solo with a guitar on a corner in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood. He played in front of a mural bearing the cover art of the band's new album, What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World. It's the follow up to 2011's The King Is Dead.
What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, is the Decemberists 7th album. It’s the band’s most varied and dynamic work, both musically and emotionally.
Since their last album, The King is Dead, which went to No.1 in the US, the band have contributed a song to the Hunger Games soundtrack and appeared in The Simpsons. Colin Meloy, the band’s frontman, has also been working on the Wildwood series – a narrative saga about two seventh-graders drawn into a hidden, magical forest, illustrated by his wife, Carson Ellis.
Many songs on the new record represent the more personal side of Colin Meloy’s songwriting, a change from the strong narrative thrust that characterized much of the Decemberists’ work. “Writing books as this raw, fantastic narrator has been the outlet for that part of my brain,” he says. “Having a family, having kids, having this career, getting older—all of these things have made me look more inward. So some of these songs are among the more intimately personal songs I’ve ever written.”
Perhaps most notable is “12-17-12,” a song named for, and inspired by, the date that President Obama addressed the nation following the Newtown school shootings, and read the names of the victims. “I watched that speech and was hit by a sense of helplessness, but also the message of ‘Hold your family close.’” This bewildering, conflicted feeling came out in a phrase near the end of the song—“what a terrible world, what a beautiful world”—that gave the album its title.
1. The Singer Addresses His Audience
2. Cavalry Captain
3. Philomena
4. Make You Better
5. Lake Song
6. Till the Water Is All Long Gone
7. The Wrong Year
8. Carolina Low
9. Better Not Wake the Baby
10. Anti-Summersong
11. Easy Come, Easy Go
12. Mistral
13. 12/17/12
14. A Beginning Song
