UPDATE: If you caught The Decemberists at the Wiltern last month for the Bridesmaid Revisited Tour, you should be pretty excited about the band’s upcoming album The Hazards of Love, which will be released on March 24 via Capitol. The band’s fifth album and the follow-up to 2006’s The Crane Wife, Hazards will feature guest appearances by Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, Becky Stark of Lavender Diamond, My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James, Robyn Hitchcock and Rebecca Gates of the Spinanes.
Singer Colin Meloy said about Hazards in a recent Rolling Stone interview, “It’s a twisty, fantastical story about a woman named Margaret who is ravaged by a shape-shifting animal; her lover, William, who is desperate for the two of them to be reunited; a forest queen; and a villainous rake. “Everyone’s going to call it a rock opera,” Meloy says.
Also according to the interview, Hazards of Love was planned as a musical, to be staged by director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening), but the story ended up “practically unstageable,” says Meloy.
The Hazards of Love Track List:
1 Prelude
2 The Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won’t Wrestle the Thistles Undone)
3 A Bower Scene
4 Won’t Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)
5 The Hazards of Love 2 (Wager All)
6 The Queen’s Approach
7 Isn’t It a Lovely Night?
8 The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid
9 An Interlude
10 The Rake’s Song
11 The Abduction of Margaret
12 The Queen’s Rebuke / The Crossing
13 Annan Water
14 Margaret in Captivity
15 The Hazards of Love 3 (Revenge!)
16 The Wanting Comes in Waves (Reprise)
17 The Hazards of Love 4 (The Drowned)
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