I almost gave my life last Thursday night to see my favorite band.

On a wild road trip to… I almost gave my life last Thursday night to see my favorite band.

On a wild road trip to Cleveland to see the almighty Decemberists, my borrowed car broke down, forcing my girlfriend and me to walk half a mile down the interstate to the nearest mile marker because we had no idea where we were. Then a police officer with great timing showed up just as we found some handguns in the trunk (they later turned out to be pellet guns) and phoned for help.

We quickly drove to the nearest truck stop, where we were accosted by a nearly 7-foot-tall unibrowed hitchhiker named Mike who handed me a quartz crystal and said, “I’ve gotten out here from King of Prussia – I just want to get to my girl in Cleveland!” Who was I to say no? So together, we all made it to the Agora Ballroom, a club in a neighborhood that makes Oakland look like Beverly Hills, where I got in a verbal altercation with the staff because – whattaya know? – they didn’t have my tickets.

When I finally procured my tickets, though, we made our way into the show, and I couldn’t have been happier. My favorite band – the geniuses of literate indie-folk rock, the Decemberists – were keeping a crowd of 500 enthralled with perfect renditions of the tunes from their four albums, the most recent of which, The Crane Wife, was just released on Capitol Records. The band’s doughy, bespectacled frontman, Colin Meloy, gave me chills with his acoustic, solo encore “Red Right Ankle,” and belly laughs when he verbally led the crowd in a re-enaction of The Battle of the Somme. That’s right, from World War I.

I drove back to Oakland that night with a set list, a new man-crush (Meloy) and the notion that I’d just seen one of the best shows of my entire life – even though we’d missed the first half.

Now there’s nothing quite like live music, but for me, one thing comes close: getting inside the minds of the artists that create it. Earlier that day, I got the chance to spend some time talking on the phone with the band’s keyboardist and accordionist, Jenny Conlee, just as she was pulling into the venue I would stumble into much later that night.

The Pitt News: Tell me about the first time the whole band played together.

Jenny Conlee: We were asked to score a silent film for a Portland film festival, and I just thought I was doing a cool project with these guys – not that I was really a part of a band. Then Colin told me we had practice next week, and I was so surprised. The first time all five of us played together, though, was a club in Portland