The darkness of pregnancy
I interviewed Colin Meloy of the Decemberists for Venus Zine. We talked about the new album, and he said some things about pregnancy that I think are really interesting:
The album is so dark and gloomy. Not exactly what you’d expect from someone who’s just had his first child.
The songs were written in January and the first part of February. My son was born at the end of February. I was discovering that a lot of the songs I was writing at the time — even though the expectation is that when a songwriter is having a child, they end up writing kids’ songs — I found myself pushing in the completely opposite direction. There’s a darkness to pregnancy, to a certain degree, and it’s really messy and kind of unpleasant. [My girlfriend] Carson’s body was kind of fighting against this alien thing, this thing in her belly that wasn’t part of her body. Her body was trying to support that growing life, but there’s another side of her body that’s trying to get rid of it. That process really struck me, and really influenced the songwriting.
I also asked him about being a male artist who writes songs about rape, and whether any of the war-themed tracks on the new album were inspired by the current fiasco in Iraq. Check it out.
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It's a relief, actually, to read Meloy say that. My wife, who's about 9 weeks into her first pregnancy, has described the experience in almost exactly the same way. It's even more isolating than it has to be, also, because although it's acceptable for pregnant women to talk about, say, morning sickness, they're supposed to do so within a broad narrative of the wonders of pregnancy.
You're definitely not supposed to refer to the baby as "this alien thing." My wife said something like that once or twice, and then she stopped because it seemed to make people very uncomfortable, as if she was telegraphing that she was going to be an emotionally distant (i.e. bad) mother.
Anyway, I guess that's what we needs artists for, to say the things that us normals are uncomfortable saying.
You're definitely not supposed to refer to the baby as "this alien thing." - Daniel Oppenheimer
But the fact of that matter the fetus is an alien thing. Anti-abortion folk often forget this (even as they act as if the fetus is somehow free living), but it's important for physicians to keep this in mind ... as you never know when the woman's body will start treating the fetus as such.
In your interview, Meloy mentions Child (capital C) ballads. Perhaps you were unaware that that set of ballads (published as The English and Scottish Popular Ballads) were named for the man who collected them, Francis J. Child.