VIA PRESS RELEASE | The Decemberists have announced Live Home Library Vol. 2, the second installment in the band’s live series, to be released September 25, 2026 via the band’s own label, Youth and Beauty Brigade.
Recorded over three nights at Brooklyn Steel in Brooklyn, NY on April 17, 18, and 19, 2017, Live Home Library Vol. 2 captures the band in expansive, full-flight form at a particularly vivid moment in their history. At the time, Brooklyn Steel had been open for only a few weeks, reassembled from the bones of a former steel manufacturing plant in Brooklyn. The Decemberists’ three-night run was among the venue’s first shows.
Over the course of those three nights, The Decemberists covered every era of the band’s music up to that point, playing a total of 62 songs and repeating only nine of them on consecutive nights. This 2LP set collects fourteen tracks recorded across the full run, including “The Crane Wife 3,” “We Both Go Down Together,” “Red Right Ankle,” “Down By The Water,” “Los Angeles, I’m Yours,” “The Tain,” and “O Valencia!” “These shows, to my ears, are the band at its very best with this lineup,” writes Colin Meloy in the album’s liner notes. “There’s a looseness, here, a kind of swaggery suredness.”
Mixed by longtime collaborator Tucker Martine, Live Home Library Vol. 2 will initially be available as a vinyl-exclusive double LP on two limited edition variants—a “Shiny Clear” vinyl, available directly from the band’s online store, and a “Ruby Red Right Ankle” vinyl, available at independent record stores, housed in a custom wide-spine jacket.
For more than two decades, The Decemberists have been one of the most original, daring, and thrilling American rock bands. Founded in the year 2000 when singer, songwriter, and guitarist Colin Meloy moved from Montana to Portland, Oregon and met bassist Nate Query, keyboardist Jenny Conlee, and guitarist Chris Funk, The Decemberists’ distinctive brand of hyperliterate folk-rock set them apart from the start with the release of their debut EP “5 Songs” in 2001.
After making their full-length debut with Castaways and Cutouts in 2002, the band signed with Kill Rock Stars for the release of the acclaimed albums Her Majesty the Decemberists (2003) and Picaresque (2005), which was produced by Chris Walla. The 2004 EP “The Tain”—an 18-minute single-track epic—made the band’s grand creative ambitions clear.
Around this time the band’s permanent line-up fell into place with the arrival of drummer John Moen, and they made the unexpected leap to Capitol Records for their first major label album in 2006. Fans’ concerns of whether the band would alter their trademark sound quickly vanished when they delivered their most ambitious and audacious record to date in The Crane Wife, a song cycle produced by Walla and Tucker Martine (who would become a longtime creative partner) that added elements of ‘70s prog, hard rock, and even quasi-disco to their palette. The album was met by wide acclaim from The New York Times, Rolling Stone, SPIN, Stereogum, and was named Best New Music by Pitchfork.
Three years later, The Hazards of Love—a full-length concept album based on Meloy’s idea for a stage musical—was a Top 20 hit. In 2011, they topped themselves yet again with their first #1 album, The King Is Dead, which featured the GRAMMY-nominated song “Down By The Water.” After their 2015 album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World, which included the #1 AAA radio hit “Make You Better,” The Decemberists changed up their sound and explored new approaches to making music on their eighth studio album I’ll Be Your Girl (2018) with producer John Congleton.
NPR Music wrote “Every band needs to refresh and reconsider its sound sooner or later, no matter how sharp it’s gotten over the course of a long career—even The Decemberists, a band whose records have always come bursting with verve… I’ll Be Your Girl captures a collaborative spirit that keeps the band sounding vibrant and alive.”
In 2024, The Decemberists returned with As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again. Released on YABB Records and produced by the band with Tucker Martine, the sprawling double album found The Decemberists reconnecting with the narrative ambition, melodic sweep, and rangy musical imagination that have long defined their catalog, from the buoyant “Burial Ground” to the 19-minute epic “Joan in the Garden.”
Over the past two decades plus, The Decemberists have toured the world, performed at countless major festivals, and even founded Travelers’ Rest a festival of their own curation in Missoula, Montana. The band has appeared on The Simpsons, collaborated with Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, and released their own crowd-funded board game Illimat.
