The Decemberists spread their wings with their first major-label offering.

Colin Meloy has earned his share of renown as a storyteller. The singer, guitarist, and lyricist for the Portland, Oregon–based Decemberists majored in creative writing at the University of Montana, and his songs often have reviewers cracking Roget’s Thesaurus to find synonyms for hyperliterate. Meloy populates his lyrics with soldiers, sailors, and hard-luck scullery maids, whose wanderings find them on battlefields and in the bellies of whales. Not all of the tales Meloy relates spring from his own prolific imagination, though.

The Decemberists’ newest album, The Crane Wife, takes its title, and the inspiration for several of its tracks, from an old Japanese folk tale. “It’s set in rural Japan,” Meloy explains, reached at a Columbus, Ohio, tour stop. “A peasant finds a wounded crane on an evening walk. He revives the crane, who has an arrow in its wing, and the crane flies away. A couple days later, a mysterious woman shows up at his door. He takes her in; they fall in love and get married, but they’re both really poor. The woman says that she can weave this amazing cloth that he can sell at the market. And she starts doing it, the only condition being that while she’s in the room weaving, he can’t look in at her. They get pretty wealthy that way. One day the peasant’s curiosity gets the best of him and he looks in. It turns out she’s a crane and she’s been pulling feathers from her wing and putting them in the cloth. Him seeing her has broken the spell, and she flies away.”

The Decemberists’ version of the story is told, in part, through the 11-minute-plus “The Crane Wife 1 & 2”, a folk-pop epic that grows from elegantly fingerpicked acoustic guitar to a near-orchestral grandeur incorporating Hammond organ, glockenspiel, and multilayered vocals.

Working with producers Tucker Martine and Christopher Walla, the Decemberists took the opportunity to stretch out sonically; that was a luxury afforded by recording with a major label, EMI, for the first time. “I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that we just had a lot more time on our hands, so we could really follow our whims and not be afraid about defining ourselves, [or being] painted into a corner,” Meloy says. “Anything was reversible. Everything felt correctable, because there were no time constraints. That felt really freeing.”

The most obvious manifestation of this new freedom is The Island, a 12-and-a-half-minute suite with three movements (“Come and See”, “The Landlord’s Daughter”, and “You’ll Not Feel the Drowning”) that are ambitious in scope and boast enough shifts in tempo, time signature, and dyna ­mics to earn the band the admiration of even the snootiest progressive-rock fan. Meloy himself uses the P word, but he points out that its influence isn’t coming from his area of the Decemberists camp.

“When I was writing that stuff, I was coming more from a background of ’60s/’70s British folk-revival stuff, like Pentangle and Steeleye Span,” he says. “I think once I lobbed that at the bandmates, especially [multi-instrumentalists] Chris Funk and Jenny Conlee, who was always a real big ELP fan, that was where the prog came from. So I think, for that reason, a lot of the stuff is a real summation of everybody’s various influences, which is kind of fun.”

The Crane Wife isn’t all epics, mind you. The disc’s shortest track, “Summersong”, is a wistful, accordion-fortified lament for that most fleeting of seasons, while “O Valencia!” is a tale of star-crossed lovers straight out of Romeo and Juliet (or West Side Story), whose lyrics of death and vengeance are carried along by an insistent beat, jangling guitars, and Meloy’s indelible melodies. “O Valencia!” sounds like a natural choice for a single, but Meloy asserts that it wasn’t included to appease the EMI brass.

“Regardless of what sort of experimentations I may play around with in songwriting, I still feel like I’m a pop songwriter, so with every record there’s always the challenge of writing the representative pop song for the record,” he says. “So that was already built in. There was no pressure necessary from the label for that sort of thing.”

Fair enough. Poppy as it is, “O Valencia!” shares at least one trait with the more rock-operatic selections on The Crane Wife: it’s a damn good story.

The Decemberists play the Commodore Ballroom on Saturday and Sunday (November 18 and 19).