Along with an exciting announcement of a summer 2022 North American tour, Colin Meloy, singer and songwriter for the Grammy-nominated band The Decemberists, has just launched a Substack, an online platform that supports subscription newsletters.
“The Machine Shop”, Meloy’s Substack, will be a spot where he will share new music, unreleased demos, personal journal entries, original written stories, serialized fiction and appreciations and analyses of songs by other artists. It will also be a forum through which Meloy will communicate and connect with his audience through the comment sections, discussion threads and unique audio and video features. Free and paid subscriptions will be available.
In his announcement post on Substack, Meloy commented, “Here, I’ll be yanking some of my old songs off the shelf and laying them bare for you to see, showing the guts of the things, the weird lattice that makes them what they are. But not just my own songs; I’ll be carefully unbolting the casings on songs that I love and admire, putting them on the workbench (being careful to remember the order in which they’d been disassembled), and seeing what makes them tick.”
In addition to the perk of listening to unreleased demos, subscribers will get a behind-the-scenes look into the demos of classic and favorite Decemberist songs that have been never before been released. Meloy will also explore how they changed and evolved. He will also publish original written pieces, excerpts and previews of books he’s working on, and new serialized fiction. Meloy also writes in his announcement post, “I hope to create a better connection between myself and you, dear reader, one that is outside of the ad-driven, corporate-sponsored, algorithm-dominated social media space. So: welcome to The Machine Shop. Make yourself at home. Don’t mind the rust and the dust. Everything’s a work in progress here.”
Photo Credit: Sharon Alagna
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