The Decemberists' Colin Meloy on double album, love song ... and Dokken

Colin Meloy, the frontman for the Decemberists, laughed when he was informed of a band listed under the influences header on the group’s Wikipedia page. Listed among contemporaries like The Postal Service, Death Cab for Cutie, The Shins and Modest Mouse, one group stuck out: Dokken, a 1980s glam metal band.

“Is that in our Wikipedia page? No, we were not influenced by Dokken,” Meloy said Thursday in an interview from outside Portland, Ore. “I’ll have to take a look at the Wikipedia page. … There was a time when we were messing with our own Wikipedia page. I think we were bored in the studio, and we started messing with each other’s Wikipedia pages. And I wonder if some of that stuff sticks. I’ll have to look. Who added that?”

While Meloy cited Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and other proto-metal bands as part of the group’s DNA, the Decemberists are more known for their expansive, folk-round sound. That’s evident on their upcoming double album, “As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again,” set for a June 14 release. The band just launched their Peaceable Kingdom tour, which includes a stop on May 7 at Stage AE in Pittsburgh.

With nine studio albums under their belt, creating a setlist that satisfies everyone is an impossible task.

“It’s an ever-expanding problem and gosh, it was easy, the first couple records. Early on, we didn’t even have enough, so you’re augmenting with covers and things like that, which made for an interesting set,” he said. “I feel like there was a sweet spot maybe around ‘05, ‘06 where we had enough material we could mix it up, but not so much that it felt like we weren’t playing stuff that people wanted to hear. Now it’s like, all bets are off. At this point, you just sort of have to build it however you feel is a good show.”

Three songs from the new album have been released as singles so far — “Burial Ground,” “Joan in the Garden” (which clocks in at 19 minutes, 22 seconds) and “All I Want Is You.” The latter is a straightforward love song, which Meloy said didn’t come easy.

“It’s just a question of wanting to get it right, you know?,” Meloy said. “My sensibility is always even writing songs that are basically love songs, I always tend to want to hide the sentiment a little bit in like irony or a little tongue-in-cheekness.

“I think there’s a kind of protective quality not wanting to totally wear your heart on your sleeve, and this one felt like it just wanted to be this very simple statement of devotion. And so I just kind of followed that lead.”

The new album features Meloy as a co-producer alongside Tucker Martine, with a change in the album’s genesis. On the past few records, the band had convened, arranged a song together and built it up from the drums and bass. This time — to “create new constraints for ourselves that would maybe foster more excitement” — Meloy and Martine spent a few weeks in the studio together, starting with Meloy’s voice and guitar as the basis of the songs.

“Maybe there wouldn’t have been any difference between that and the way we typically do it,” Meloy said, “but I have a feeling that there’s some choices and decisions that we made that we wouldn’t have otherwise if we had done it the old way.”

Martine’s connections paid off with a guest spot from former R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, who guests on piano and vocals on “Joan in the Garden.” Mills, who had been in Portland for a show with The Baseball Project, rearranged his flight to make an appearance on the record. Former R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck guested on three songs from the Decemberists’ 2011 album, “The King Is Dead,” so what will it take to get the other two former members of R.E.M.?

“(Drummer Bill Berry) would probably be the more difficult … because he’s retired,” Meloy said, “but (singer) Michael Stipe might be a little hard to get onto a record.”

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“As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again” is split into four thematic sides, with the sequence of the songs holding special relevance to Meloy. Side Two, for example, features spare, stripped-down songs, while “Joan in the Garden” occupies all of Side Four.

“While this record is not a concept record, I feel like any album is a collection of short stories or something, and the way those different songs arrive, how they’re informed by their neighboring songs, that’s something that I’ve always appreciated in records that I love, growing up,” he said. “Even if not that much thought as it turns out is put into it, I’m aware that listening to an album from start to finish, there’s an important cadence that you can do, and then also we had an opportunity, I think since it was a double record, that sort of symmetry, four individual sides on an LP, have this idea of actually making sure that each side feels like its own little world.”

The Decemberists have always walked their own path, whether it’s writing Civil War-referencing ballads or floating a giant inflatable whale at live shows (during “The Mariner’s Revenge Song”), so the double album isn’t too much of a shock.

“I feel like the audience has been along for the ride for other weird left turns that we’ve done,” Meloy said. “I can’t imagine that this would come as much of a surprise. If anything, being away for six years, I would hope that the wealth of new material would be exciting to people.”

In the six years since the Decemberists’ last album, Meloy has continued with his literary career, which includes several children’s books, an upcoming science-fiction book and the “Wildwood” series, which is being adapted into an animated feature.

“Sort of my first love was writing stories. As soon as I was invited to write stories in class in elementary school, that unlocked something really powerful in me,” Meloy said. “It’s just something that I’ve always been drawn to. So writing the books lets me kind of scratch that itch.

“And I feel like they’re very different things, book writing and songwriting. I assume they come from the same place in your brain; they’re just very, very different beasts. I like them both for different reasons.”