The Decemberists

Points of Order:
. The Hazards of Love gets a Visualizer!
. Band to perform live with the animation in LA
. Tour dates, tour dates!  Last chance to see HoL!

Adored Mailing List Recipients,

September has arrived.  Things once new now fade and dry and fall.  The air has grown crisp in the mornings.  The movies in the theaters arrive just a little more serious, each one mining the potentials of human despair a little more concisely and sentimentally, their starlets’ dewy eyes gazing upwards in wonder at what the Academy might bestow.

And so, dear readers, we Decemberists would like to announce something we’ve had in our proverbial pressure cooker for a while now: Here Come the Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized.  During the making of The Hazards of Love, we Decemberists were secreted away in an underground vault by the suits at Capitol, with only a tape machine, a handful of mics, and a bag of peanut butter and honey sandwiches with which to wile our time.  Occasionally, the then-president and CEO of the company, Walter M. Klammerdale, would visit this subterranean crypt, built in ancient Roman sewer tunnels miles below the Capitol tower, to check on our progress.  Klammerdale, a ponytailed relic of the business and self-described “psychedelic cosmonaut,” would casually ingest upwards of 600 mg of high fructose blotter acid at each meeting, demanding more and more outlandish things of the band.  Chris Funk must play this guitar line in his pajamas.  Colin must sing this lead vocal without ever having heard the backing track.  Nate Query must kegel.  And, most terribly, Jenny must play all her piano parts on a keyboard made entirely from the finger bones of mummified Los Angelinos.  Notably, he commissioned four seasoned animators to provide a visualizer of sorts, an hour-long animation to accompany the music of Hazards of Love, that would play on a loop on a giant flat-screen television in the middle of the vault.  Well, the long and short of it is this: we finished the record, released it, Klammerdale disappeared while on a vision quest in Joshua Tree,  and a Capitol intern, while sweeping the ancient underground Roman vault one day, discovered the DVD of the visualizer.

And so: we Decemberists are pleased to announce the official release of Here Come the Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized, a collaboration between the band and four filmmakers, Guilherme Marcondes, Julia Pott, Peter Sluszka and Santa Maria — each of whom have created an animation to accompany a section of the music.  At Royce Hall on the UCLA campus in Los Angeles on October 19, The Decemberists will perform the entire piece synchronized with the animation, as well as an additional second set of older and newer material. A limited presale will be underway Wednesday at 10am PST at http://decemberists.tickets.musictoday.com/Decemberists/calendar.aspx.  General tickets will go on sale this Friday, September 18.

And, incidentally, autumn marks your last opportunity to catch the “A Short Fazed Hovel” Tour, in which the band is playing The Hazards of Love in its entirety, along with a second set of random material.  Check for your city in the list of dates!

Yours,

The Decemberists
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