The Crane Wife

The Crane Wife
Studio album by The Decemberists
Released	October 3, 2006
Recorded	March–June 2006
Genre	Indie rock, folk
Length	60:15
Label	Capitol
Producer	Tucker Martine and Christopher Walla
Professional reviews
The A.V. Club (A) link All Music Guide link Being There Magazine link Music Box link Pitchfork Media (8.4/10) link PopMatters link Rolling Stone link Subculture (favorable) link Yahoo! Music link
The Decemberists chronology
Picaresque (2005) The Crane Wife (2006)

The Crane Wife is an album by The Decemberists, released in 2006. It was produced by Tucker Martine and Chris Walla, and is the band's first album on the Capitol Records label. The album was inspired by a Japanese folk tale, and centers on two song cycles, The Crane Wife and The Island, the latter of which was inspired by William Shakespeare's The Tempest. National Public Radio listeners voted The Crane Wife the best album of 2006.^[1]

The story of The Crane Wife

The Crane Wife is an old Japanese tale. While there are many variations of the tale, a common version is that a poor man finds an injured crane on his doorstep (or outside with an arrow in it), takes it in and nurses it back to health. After he releases the crane, a woman appears at his doorstep with whom he falls in love and marries. Because they need money, his wife offers to weave wondrous clothes out of silk that they can sell at the market, but only if he agrees never to watch her making them. They begin to sell them and live a comfortable life, but he soon makes her weave them more and more. Oblivious to his wife's diminishing health, his greed increases. He eventually peeks in to see what she is doing to make the silk she weaves so desirable. He is shocked to discover that at the loom is a crane plucking feathers from her own body and weaving them into the loom. The crane, seeing him, flies away and never returns. Band leader Colin Meloy found a version of this story and decided to write music based on it.

Track listing

1. "The Crane Wife 3" – 4:18
2. "The Island": – 12:26
   1. "Come and See"
   2. "The Landlord's Daughter"
   3. "You'll Not Feel the Drowning"
3. "Yankee Bayonet (I Will Be Home Then)" (duet with Laura Veirs) – 4:18
4. "O Valencia!" – 3:47
5. "The Perfect Crime #2" – 5:33
6. "When the War Came" – 5:06
7. "Shankill Butchers" – 4:39
8. "Summersong" – 3:31
9. "The Crane Wife 1 & 2" – 11:19
10. "Sons & Daughters" – 5:13

Bonus tracks

1. "After the Bombs" (iTunes bonus track) – 5:04
2. "Culling of the Fold" (Tower Records bonus track) – 4:24
3. "The Perfect Crime #1 + The Day I Knew You'd Not Come Back" (Starbucks bonus track) – 15:17
4. "Hurdles Even Here" (Starbucks bonus track) - 4:31

Reception

The album was well-received by critics, earning an 84% positive out of all reviews culled by Metacritic.^[2] It was ranked #41 on Pitchfork Media's list of the top 50 albums of 2006. Humorously, Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun-Times called it "the best Jethro Tull album since Heavy Horses."^[3]

References

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ Metacritic: The Decemberists: The Crane Wife (2006): http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/decemberists/cranewife?q=The%20Crane%20Wife
3. ^ "Positively prog", Jim DeRogatis, Chicago Sun-Times, Nov 5, 2006

External links

• NPR listeners pick The Crane Wife as best CD of 2006
• Decemberists Push the Envelope on 'Crane Wife'
• Crane Wife Review and NPR interview with Colin Meloy on YellowSubterfuge.com