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Colin Meloy, Live In Concert: Newport Folk 2013

Colin Meloy performs at the 2013 Newport Folk Festival.
Meaganc Beauchemin for NPR
Colin Meloy performs at the 2013 Newport Folk Festival.

After a long flurry of activity culminating in the release of The Decemberists' 2011 album The King Is Dead, frontman Colin Meloy announced his long-running, best-selling band would take a lengthy hiatus. Several of the remaining group members began to focus on the side project Black Prairie — which is also playing this year's Newport Folk Festival — while Meloy has focused on writing, child-rearing and performing solo. Even before putting his band on hold, Meloy had released a live solo album and the self-explanatorily titled EPs Colin Meloy Sings Shirley Collins, Colin Meloy Sings Sam Cooke and Colin Meloy Sings Morrissey.

Watch Meloy perform with some special guests as part of the 2013 Newport Folk Festival, recorded live on Saturday, July 27 in Newport, R.I.

Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)