The Decemberists

Edwin Outwater regularly works with the world’s top orchestras, institutions, and artists to reinvent the concert experience. His ability to cross genres has led to collaborations with Metallica, Wynton Marsalis, Renée Fleming, and Yo-Yo Ma. He is music director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and music director laureate of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.

Recent appearances include the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Seattle Symphony, and the New World Symphony, as well as the Royal Philharmonic in a multi-concert series opening the Steinmetz Hall in Florida. He also served as a producer and musical advisor for the National Symphony Orchestra’s 50th Anniversary Concert at the Kennedy Center. In December 2022, he premiered A Christmas Gaiety at the Royal Albert Hall with Peaches Christ and the BBC Concert Orchestra, and returned in 2023. 

Outwater has held a long association with San Francisco Symphony since making his debut in November 2001, having served as Resident Conductor, Director of Summer Concerts, and Music Director of the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra.

For more than 20 years, the Decemberists have been one of the most original, daring, and thrilling American rock bands. Founded in the year 2000 when singer, songwriter, and guitarist Colin Meloy moved from Montana to Portland, Oregon, and met bassist Nate Query, keyboardist Jenny Conlee, and guitarist Chris Funk, the Decemberists’ distinctive brand of hyperliterate folk-rock set them apart from the start with the release of their debut EP, 5 Songs, in 2001. After making their full-length debut with Castaways and Cutouts in 2002, the band signed with Kill Rock Stars for the release of the acclaimed albums Her Majesty the Decemberists (2003) and Picaresque (2005), which was produced by Chris Walla. The 2004 EP The Tain—an 18-minute single-track epic—made the band’s grand creative ambitions clear.

Around this time the band’s permanent line-up fell into place with the arrival of drummer John Moen, and they made the unexpected leap to Capitol Records for their first major label album in 2006. Fans’ concerns of whether the band would alter their trademark sound quickly vanished when they delivered their most ambitious and audacious record to date in The Crane Wife, a song cycle produced by Walla and Tucker Martine (who would become a longtime creative partner) that added elements of ’70s prog, hard rock, and even quasi-disco to their palette. The album was met by wide acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Spin, Stereogum, and was named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork.

Three years later, The Hazards of Love—a full-length concept album based on Meloy’s idea for a stage musical—was a Top 20 hit. In 2011, they topped themselves yet again with their first No. 1 album, The King Is Dead, which featured the Grammy Award–nominated song “Down By The Water.” After their 2015 album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World, which included the No. 1 AAA radio hit “Make You Better,” the Decemberists changed up their sound and explored new approaches to making music on their eighth studio album, I’ll Be Your Girl (2018), with producer John Congleton.

Now the enduring indie band is back with their first new music in six years, “Burial Ground.” The song takes the overt fatalism of 2018’s I’ll Be Your Girl and infuses it with the jangle-pop and dreamy harmonies of the Beach Boys (performed with an assist from The Shins’ James Mercer). “‘Burial Ground’” is in that time-honored pop-song tradition, a paean to hanging out in graveyards,” says songwriter Colin Meloy. “The melody hook came to me in a dream and I hummed it into my phone on waking. Most dream-songs are bad; this was the exception.”

The Decemberists will be on tour this spring, with more new music to come.