The indie rock band whose 2006 album The Crane Wife features a song cycle based on a Japanese folktale was The Decemberists.
The Crane Wife was The Decemberists’ fourth studio album, released on October 3, 2006. Its title refers to a traditional Japanese story in which a wounded crane becomes a woman, marries a man, and weaves beautiful cloth from her own feathers. The story’s themes of love, sacrifice, secrecy, and greed shape the album’s central songs.
The record is organized around two major song cycles: “The Crane Wife,” inspired by the Japanese folktale, and “The Island,” which draws partly on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This literary approach reflects singer and songwriter Colin Meloy’s habit of building songs around historical narratives, legends, and dramatic characters.
The album was The Decemberists’ first release on Capitol Records and was produced by Tucker Martine and Chris Walla. NPR listeners voted it the best album of 2006. A common mistake is to treat The Crane Wife as a single song only; it is also the album’s title and the name of a multi-part sequence within it.