The Decemberists let their inner weirdos shine, with songs that hark back to a literary tradition of gruesome morality tales and also embrace more modern abominations such as the Shankill Butchers. Singer Colin Meloy talks to Jim Carroll

A COUPLE of years ago, Colin Meloy had a day job in a bookstore in Portland, Oregon. "I remember one day seeing this children's storybook, The Crane Wife, coming into the store. I had an idle hour and I flicked through it and I was really taken by the story." When it came time for his band, American indie folk-rockers The Decemberists, to record their fourth album, that old Japanese tale about a poor peasant who nurses a sick crane back to health kept coming to mind. It seemed to be the perfect starting point for an album which Meloy felt could be both epic and quirky.

"It's an amazing story, and I suppose what I find interesting is that you have all these different themes about greed and curiosity and love running through it, which have an universal application beyond what that one tale is about."

The Crane Wife is a hugely ambitious undertaking for The Decemberists, one of the most thoughtful and bookish of America's new indie school. The album consists in the main of longform songs reminiscent in some ways to their earlier work, The Tain, which was based on the Ulster mythological story once also musically explored by Horslips. The Crane Wife is a major league outing from a band raising their game on every level.

Meloy has always taken an interest in ancient fables and tales, particularly the more gruesome ones.

"Since I was a kid growing up in Montana, I've always been fascinated by folk music. More recently, I've become more interested in those British folk revival bands, like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span and Shirley Collins and June Tabor. That has been really eye-opening to me, especially the material they chose to do. They had a tendency to pick murder ballads or fables which were more gruesome than winsome."

Meloy points out that many of these tales of horrific deaths and dastardly deeds also found their way into fables directed at children. "Life was more visceral and gruesome in the old days, and there was a different sense of what children could handle," he says. "Obviously, that has really changed over time and we've become a lot more protective of our children's imagination. In centuries past, there were so many things going on in the world which were unavoidable. There was no point trying to keep them out of stories because they were part of the reality of life."

The singer, who became a father himself last year, doesn't agree with the modern impulse to protect the child from such sights and stories. "I'm a big proponent of feeding a child's imagination rather than trying to keep them cloistered from reality. I believe that kind of protectionism makes matters worse and tends to cause confusion when the child does, as they inevitably will, come into contact with violence or sexuality or rank gruesomeness. Kids are really attracted to that stuff because it plays on their imagination."

One song on The Crane Wife was inspired by brutality of a very Irish kind is Shankill Butchers. Meloy, who describes himself as "a bit of a Hibernophile", read about the notorious Belfast loyalist murderers in No Surrender, Johnny Rogan's biography of Van Morrison.

"Rogan described the killings in some detail and their effect on people in the city. He also said that parents used them as a bogeyman and a cautionary tale to keep their children in line. That stayed in my imagination for a few reasons. Here was a horrific event which was of such enormous horror and absurdity that, in order to make sense of what was going on, the community turned it into a folk tale of sorts and recast these murderers as the devil incarnate.

"It interested me because it showed how, in times of real duress, communities make sense of these moments of shock and horror. The song is an imagining of the dialogue between the child and the parent."

Elsewhere, what comes across time and time again on The Crane Wife is Meloy's confidence in his ability as a songwriter to craft gripping, hugely literary narratives. Long, complex songs such as The Island, a murder ballad in three parts, are testament to these skills.

"For a while now, I really wanted to write songs which were lengthy and dramatic. It became clear when I started writing The Crane Wife that there were at least three songs there which felt like they were part of a bigger whole, so The Island was just a question of bringing those three threads together."

While the album will be released on the Rough Trade label in Europe, The Decemberists have moved from über-indie label Kill Rock Stars to Capitol Records in the US. Meloy says the band opted for the transfer at this point because they thought they should take some risks.

"The time was right for a new challenge. We had built enough of a platform and a support base that we could make the move to a major without worrying about them trying to change us in any real way. We knew we could tap into a much more powerful marketing and promotional budget, too, and that seemed like an exciting resource to us."

He points out that the move from little label to large label didn't effect how The Crane Wife turned out. "I'd started working on these songs before we signed the contract with Capitol, but they could not be more supportive or enthusiastic or understanding of what we were doing. They had heard all the more ambitious stuff we were doing at an early stage and they were as excited about it as we were."

Meloy knows it's an interesting time to be embracing a major label. Given the changes which have already occurred in the record label sphere in the last while and those rapidly coming down the line, many observers and fans may question the wisdom of what the band have done.

"There are always doubts," he admits. "In my opinion, a lot of the power that indie labels and bands have now, especially because of the internet and MySpace, has forced major labels to rethink how they approach their roster, aesthetically at any rate.

"You now see a lot of major labels acting like indies, bringing in more interesting acts rather than a constant stream of bankable acts. That's where we think we fit into the scheme of things."

The Decemberists play Vicar St, Dublin tomorrow. The Crane Wife is released today on Rough Trade Records