Colin Meloy's Machine Shop

Drinking wine, wearing a Darth Vader mask. There was a bunch of these in the original layout of the book and album — but the legal team at Capitol made us pull them all for fear of litigation. The Machine Shop’s legal team is much more lenient. In the spring of 2010 we were prepping to make our 6th LP, The King is Dead.

Here I am, listening to other people’s music and clearly enjoying it. I am not, as the illustration would suggest, likely listening to Sunny Day Real Estate’s 3rd LP because I do not own it — that’s just Carson making up a fake record sleeve.

Many of you, upon purchasing the Live Home Library Volume 1 back in the halcyon days of 2020, may have wondered when a second volume in this robust series would be released. You might’ve been surprised to learn that it would be six years later. We, dear reader, are as surprised as you. And yet, here it is: Live Home Library Volume 2.

Machinists! Sorry for having been absent from these pages the last few weeks. As it happens, I’ve been at my laptop keyboard a lot since the beginning of the year, working on one project or another, and I’ve found that my writing juju has been a little bit exhausted once I’ve needed to turn my attentions to the Machine Shop. But here I am! I’ve traveled from Portland to South Carolina in the space of 48 hours and I’ve lived to tell the tale.

It’s two minutes and twenty five seconds, sixteen years in the making. The first trailer for the Wildwood movie from Laika has alighted, like a maquette eagle, on the branches of the interweb. Please viddy it here: It’s a surreal thing to see your own story turned into a three-dimensional thing (literally: Laika is a stop-motion animation studio; almost everything you see in that trailer is handmade by someone, or a team of someones — all those trees and coats and ferns and cannons).

“Rusalka Rusalka / The Wild Rushes” arrived in July of 2017. It would’ve certainly been one of the last songs written for the I’ll Be Your Girl sessions, which began in September of that year. I can tell from listening to this demo that I was inclined to just get the song down in a recording — there is little added accompaniment, it’s just guitar, bass, and a single vocal on the second half of the song, with drums added at the top.

For whatever reason, I recently got to thinking about witchy songs, witchy music. I’m not sure what to owe this to — it might’ve been that I recently went through a bit of a Kate Bush swoon, as I am occasionally wont to do. I was thinking about her song “The Sensual World,” her inspired adaptation of Molly Bloom’s mind-wanderings in the last pages of Joyce’s Ulysses, and how she had to rewrite it because the Joyce estate didn’t want her using text word-for-word from the book.

“Earthset,” taken by the Artemis II crew This brought tears to my eyes this morning: “We will always choose Earth,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, said once the crew members regained communications. “We will always choose each other.” It’s from this short NYT article (gifted in case you don’t have a subscription). The Artemis capsule lost contact with Earth when it circled around the far side of the moon. This was their message when communications returned.

On this last day of February This was written by my great grandmother, Carrie Meloy, as put down in calligraphy by my grandmother Harriett, her daughter-in-law. It’s from her journals. Carrie was living on a ranch near Townsend, MT when she wrote it. I imagine winter on a ranch in central Montana in the 40s could be dreary stuff. When she says it “makes living a little bit harder,” I can only imagine what kind of hardships those might be. How would they compare to our February hardships in 2026?