“Sons & Daughters” by The Decemberists

"Sons & Daughters" comes from The Crane Wife, the Decemberists' fourth album and their first for Capitol Records, released in 2006. Colin Meloy wrote it alone, words and music, and Tucker Martine produced it with Chris Walla and mixed it himself.

Signing to a major didn't sand down the band's bookish streak one bit. The album was spun out of a Japanese folk tale, in which a poor man nurses a wounded crane back to health and then marries the woman who turns up at his door, and it is built around two song cycles, one named for the crane wife herself and another, The Island, drawn from Shakespeare's The Tempest. Carson Ellis, the Portland artist married to Meloy, designed the cover, as she has for every one of the band's albums.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.