Decemberists and Gunnerkrigg

[plaid]

The Decemberists' most recent album is called The Hazards of Love, and it's a concept album concerning two halves of a world, divided by an impassable, supernatural river - on one side is a magical forest, inhabited by characters like the Queen (whose body is made up of the forest itself) and William (a skinchanger who transforms between a fawn and a man), and on the other side is the town inhabited by humans. The river featured in the album, incidentally, is called Annan Water, which according to a bit of research is also a real river in Scotland.

Now, obviously GC began before the release of the album on March 24, 2009. The frontman of the Decemberists is a folklore and literature buff who often writes songs with elements from such things. I'm curious if this is a common theme throughout folklore that Tom and the Decemberists have both drawn on, an important myth I haven't heard about, or if there are some other shenanigans I'm not aware of.

[ding]

They both draw from, and play with, cultural myths. Crossing from a "rational," human-constructed environment into a magical, naturalistic one is a device used in literature for characters to discover their inner-most, most essential selves.

Best example I can think of is Midsummer Night's Dream, where human characters escape their court to find themselves and forge relationships in an ethereal forest, which fairy queen Titania rules. Puck stands in as the trickster god.

My current take on GC is that the setting, which is beautiful, is not so important as character development, the Court/Forest binary is a device by which Annie is challenged to discover herself in the magical realm and confront her father in the rational realm.

[Mezzaphor]

Tom and Colin Meloy are clearly also both fans of English folk music. "Annan Waters" is the name of a folk song, covered by Kate Rusby (on her album Hourglass), among others (the Decemberists' "Annan Waters" is quite different from the folk song, however).

(And I suspect that Jon and Margaret, the protagonists of the Decemberists' album, were named as a reference to the song "Drowned Lovers", which was also covered by Kate Rusby on Hourglass.)

The names Willie Winsbury and Reynardine also both come from folk songs, both of which were covered by the hugely influential Anne Briggs on her self-titled LP. This was Ms. Briggs' second release; the first was an EP titled "The Hazards of Love".