Behind the Scenes at Paste's Decemberists Cover Shoot

The day that The Decemberists gathered at Portland's Newspace Studios to get all dolled up and shot for Paste's May cover by Chris Hornbecker and his crew, no one could believe the weather. After months of sporadic blizzarding and general wintertime malaise in the Rose City, the sun was shining, the mercury was inching up towards 55 and shirt-sleeves were getting gleefully rolled up all over the place. "It was snowing this time last week!" one dumbfounded PA exclaimed, standing out in the parkinglot, squinting up at the cloudless sky.
 

It would have been a lovely day to be out in a real forest, but photographer Hornbecker had another idea. Three days before, he'd headed to the woods for a few hours to scrounge up "sticks and moss and miscellaneous fauna" out of which to build his own indoors woodland set. Later, he would piece together the band's studio shots with photos of an actually-woodsy cove to highlight what he calls "the subtle details that come with [the] false reality" of the constructed set.

Vintage carte de visite photographs sparked the feel of the band members' individual portraits. (Unbeknownst to Hornbecker, illustrator Carson Ellis had used the same sort of images as inspiration for her work on the band's Hazards of Love artwork, so that was some nice synchronicity.) Frontman Colin Meloy immortalized guitarist Chris Funk's individual portrait session in all its grainy iPhone glory via Twitter. And, in a totally unintentional moment of meta-weirdness, I immortalized his immortalization while snapping a random shot of the scene in lieu of note-taking. So if you were curious as to what the Master Microblogger looks like in action, or if for some reason you were just itching to confirm that Funk was indeed wearing pants in his photo, here's your goldmine.

After the shoot, Hornbecker and Paste's art director, Metaleap's Jose Reyes, worked their design magic to transport the band into a hazy, leafy glen. The tree debris has surely long been cleaned out of the studio, the cover's now gracing newsstands all over and Portland's weather has improved (well, a little). But, Hornbecker told me recently, "I do keep finding spiders in my Volvo wagon."