The Decemberists: The changing of the seasons

A short drive north out of Portland, Oregon leads you up towards the St Johns Bridge, away from the city's noise and clutter, to where the buildings fall away and the sky grows broader and the roads quieter. Out here, among the Tualatin mountains and overlooking the Willamette river, lies Forest Park, more than 5,000 acres of urban woodland. It is into the forest we drive this morning, around hairpin bends and up steep inclines, the trees growing thicker, the taxi cab groaning. And when we finally come to a halt, outside Colin Meloy's house, the air is sweet and clear and damp.

Meloy moved here more than a year ago, with his wife, the illustrator Carson Ellis, and their young son, Henry. It is hard not to imagine that this relocation, with its mingling of isolation and rural splendour, has exerted an effect on Meloy. And certainly there is a new feeling that infuses his sixth album with the Decemberists, The King Is Dead, a feeling that perhaps could be described as a closeness.

The songs are shorter, keener, than on its predecessor, 2009's The Hazards of Love. And while there are still reassuringly Meloyish tales of miners in Montana, and scores of innocents dying as California falls into the sea, the gaze seems more introverted, perhaps more contented. There has been a shift, too, away from Anglophile prog-folk, and in its stead comes something more new-world – lots of guitars, some provided by REM's Peter Buck, as well as guest vocals from Gillian Welch, which bring a feel that is unexpectedly, unabashedly American.

"I think," says Meloy, sitting in the quiet annexe that makes his study and music room, "that since [2005's] Picaresque we've been making these … not overblown, but maybe a little overwrought songs, and records that we've kind of been inviting ourselves to layer more and more on, in time and parts and movements. And it was always such an exhausting process. After we were done with each record, we would say: 'Next record, we're going to do in two weeks, and do it in a barn!' So, after Hazards of Love, I think I was finally ready to make good on that threat."

It took longer than two weeks, but the barn in question they found on nearby Pendarvis Farm, where Meloy got married. It seemed particularly auspicious, and in mid-May of last year, the band – Meloy, guitarist Chris Funk, drummer John Moen, bassist Nate Query and multi-instrumentalist Jenny Conlee – took tents up to the farm, intending to camp out during a long, warm summer of recording. "It was a best-laid-plans-of-mice-and men kind of deal," Meloy says with a rueful smile. "It rained on us practically the entire time. The springtime was so wet. So wet, in fact, that the plum trees and the tomatoes, everything that should have started at that time, everything was crap. Except for our cucumbers."

It would be glib to call The King Is Dead a more pastoral record, but it would also be foolish to suggest it is unconnected to place. Across its 10 songs Meloy sings of big mountains and wide rivers, of the trailing jasmine, the springtime and the yellowbonnets and pegging out the washing. Two tracks in particular, January Hymn and June Hymn, seem to serve as seasonal placemarkers on the record.

January Hymn was inspired by the first January Meloy and his family spent in their new home, when the winter brought three feet of snow. "Portland alone shuts down when there's any snow, but up here we just don't get touched," he says. "We hardly get any services up here anyway, so when the snow came we were stranded for 10 days with no garbage, no mail." He smiles. "It was awesome. So that song is just about shovelling snow, and thinking about all the snow I shovelled as a kid."

June Hymn tells of when "summer comes to Springville". "It sounds so hokey, but it was just about sitting out there," Meloy nods towards the window, and the view out over rich green woodland. "I think I was just really attached to this area, coming out of that winter and seeing how that environment changed every month, learning more about your surroundings, just kind of watching and witnessing what happens over the course of the seasons."

Meloy recalls experiencing a similar shift in his writing when he first moved to Portland from Montana, where he had grown up. "I was suddenly writing about the ocean all the time," he remembers. "I became borderline obsessed – I think a lot of my maritime obsessions came with just being so close to the ocean, having been landlocked my entire life til then. It used to be such a miraculous thing for me to go to the ocean – when you spend time away from it and then you go back to it. And I've kinda lost that." He says it more plainly than sadly. "You get used to it," he adds. "So I think moving up here into the woods and getting off the grid a little bit, away from the neighbourhoods, has influenced the writing a little bit, too. We'll see."

These feel like the most intimate songs that Meloy has written, after years of telling far-fetched stories about barrow boys and legionnaires and mariners. "I was playing around with actually writing first-person meditations, rather than third-person fantasies," Meloy says, faintly confessional. "It's kind of hard for me to write about myself. For some reason it doesn't interest me. And I'm more excited about writing narratives – though I've certainly written a lot about my own experiences, and certainly on this record I've written a lot more."

The step towards the first person appears to have come more easily than he might have feared. "It comes from just settling in to being a family a little bit, and reflections on that," he says gently. "And I think everybody does that, but I think you become more insular as you're creating the foundation of a family, and I think I've been very aware of that. Almost retreating a little bit, to where you are really satisfied with your four walls and your family. There's a lot of stuff on the record that's about that experience."

Meloy has taken other steps closer to home, too. "If there's anything academic about this record, or me trying to force myself in a direction, it was realising that the last three records were really influenced by the British folk revival," he tells me. "And that was really exciting for me: Shirley Collins, Anne Briggs, Nic Jones, Dick Gaughan, this whole world that I was discovering, that I was poring over, learning inside-out. It was a wanting to get away from that. And looking back into more American traditions, reconnecting with more American music."

That realisation came in the summer of 2009, with the release of the remastered version of REM's 1984 album, Reckoning. "I sat down and listened to it all the way through, and it sounded so good," Meloy says, his voice quite thrilled now, "because the CD came to me when I was in high school, and the mastering of that record was notoriously bad, and so listening to it remastered was really eye-opening." Reckoning sent him back to listen to the rest of the music he had listened to back then. "Stuff that initially got me going and writing in the style that I do," he explains, "and I thought to get back to that, and channel that if I could."

What this meant, to Meloy, was something quite simple: "I sat down and thought, OK, I'm going to do what I used to do – just make up REM songs." A couple arrived quite easily. "And since we had been crossing paths with Peter Buck for a bunch of years, I told him that I had been writing fake Peter Buck guitar parts, and maybe he would want to play those fake Peter Buck guitar parts." He chuckles. "And he was into it." He's not joking about the guitar parts: Down by the Water, for example, sounds like a first cousin to REM's breakthrough hit, The One I Love.

The role the band dreamed up for Gillian Welch was one of the ways they wanted to define their "barn record", drawing on the country-rock records of the 60s and 70s. "I felt that one of my favourite parts of those records was that often there would be a male and female voice," Meloy says. "Like Neil Young's Comes a Time with Nicolette Larson, where they're both really hot in the mix, so you can really hear the character of her voice. And that's coming from a tradition – I think they were both really big fans of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, and they in turn were drawing from Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton, and they were drawing on George Jones and Tammy Wynette … And that's what I think we wanted to try to get. But we needed somebody whose voice could stand up to my famous donkey bray." He gives a modest grin. "And Gillian's voice has enough character to stick out."

One of the album's most intriguing songs is named Rox in the Box, a song about the mining community of Butte, Montana. Meloy's face lights up a little when I mention Butte. "Yes," he nods, "I was reading a lot about the Butte miners in the 19-teens," he begins, as if that were perfectly normal for a contemporary songwriter. "I had been fascinated by that era and that place since college when I studied labour history, particularly in the west," he explains. "And Butte is fascinating, particularly what happens in a span of 10 years from 1910 to 1920 – they basically go from being one of the most advanced and progressive situations in the industrial world to it all going out the window when the bosses sold the company to Amalgamated Copper." He was approached about writing a musical at the time he was reading about the miners, and though nothing came of it, he thinks their tale would make a good stage show, "but it's really dry. Even though there's like, explosions and cool things are happening. Potentially that might still be there. Maybe we'll still do it."

But Meloy is a busy man. Last year, he and Ellis signed a three-book deal to write a series of children's stories for HarperCollins, the first of which will be published this year. "It's middle-reader," he says, "eight to 12, which means you don't have to have teenage crushes and romance, but you can still have all the crazy adventures."

Perhaps not surprisingly, it is set in Forest Park, near their home. "It's called Wildwood," he says. "It's the idea that of this modern-day alternate version of Portland where the park is considered an impassable wilderness where no one ever goes. Carson and I had been talking about collaborating on a book for a really long time, and we finally decided to do it."

Writing a book has been "really different, weirdly different" to writing songs. "It's really labour-intensive, but you can kind of count on it a little better. You can go out at nine in the morning and work on it til three, so every day, for months, you have a project. Whereas with songs you would go crazy if you just sat down between nine and three and just tried to write. If I'm going to work on songs I just come out here and sit, stare out the window, strum a few chords and then get frustrated and throw the guitar across the room. And then finally after weeks and weeks of wanting something to come in five minutes a song appears, or five songs appear in a row. Writing a book feels more like steady work."

He suspects the steady work of book-writing has had an effect of on his songwriting, too. "Maybe that has something to do with writing less narrative songs on this record," he wonders. "Because I was working on the book at the same time. I feel a lot of arrogant impulses were set aside writing the book."

We return to talking about the Butte miners and modern musical theatre. "I grew up doing theatre and had designs on writing musicals since I was in my teens," he says. "It once was the popular music of the day, translated on to stage much better, but I think it fell away and the influence and progressiveness of Broadway and West End theatre got mired in styles that are 20 years old. If theatre was as successful was it was in the 30s, we would probably see people like Bonnie 'Prince' Billy or Bon Iver writing songs for musicals – and wouldn't that be amazing?" A little later, he pauses before I turn off my tape recorder. "You know the musical thing," he says awkwardly, "it really is a long way off. And with that and the book … I don't want to seem like somebody who is trying to do everything at once. I'd hate that. I'm just trying to do a couple of things at once."

The King Is Dead is released on Rough Trade on 17 January.