Her Majesty the Decemberists by The Decemberists

Her Majesty the Decemberists, the second full-length from Portland's Decemberists, came out on Kill Rock Stars on September 9, 2003, with Larry Crane producing. It followed Castaways and Cutouts, and it puts Colin Meloy, singing and playing guitar, right up front, with a voice that sounds like it swallowed a dictionary and liked the taste and a songwriter's fondness for history and folklore. Rachel Blumberg was in the band alongside him.

The oddest backstory belongs to "Song for Myla Goldberg", which Meloy had written years earlier, after working as the novelist's media escort on the tour for her first book, Bee Season. The sleeve is by Carson Ellis, the Portland artist who was Meloy's longtime girlfriend (later his wife) and who has drawn the art for every Decemberists album. American sales stood at 40,000 by November 2005, and Picaresque came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.