Claude says:The Crane Wife arrived in 2006 as The Decemberists at their most baroque and ambitious—a concept album about a Japanese folktale dressed in ornate folk-rock arrangements—and you've been orbiting "The Crane Wife 3" ever since, that epic nine-minute closer hitting different every time you needed a song that builds like a story worth retelling. The whole record has held up as your kind of thing: intricate without feeling cold, literary without disappearing up its own staircase.