Okkervil River - The Bleeding Heart of Black Sheep

A serious fun

interview by Gabriele Benzing and Martino Buora

The asphalt of Milan is sweating out the heat of a long summer day, near the bridges with their faded air by Stazione Centrale. The hotel where Will Sheff is waiting for us, by contrast, seems intent on exorcising the ghost of global warming with an ice-age temperature… The leader of Okkervil River looks worn out by the tour de force of interviews and promo duties, but he still gives every question his full attention. His thin-framed glasses give him a reassuring nerdy air, which instinctively helps break the ice. Peeking out from under his jacket is an unsettling Moondog t-shirt, the eccentric New York composer who had a habit of dressing up as a Viking, complete with helmet and spear… The release of the fourth Okkervil River album, “The Stage Names”, is the perfect opportunity to dive into the narrative and musical workings of one of the most intense American songwriters of recent years.

As Sheff desperately searches for a bottle of water, the customary opening captatio benevolentiae earns nothing more than a self-satisfied smile.

In 2005, Onda Rock's writers voted “Black Sheep Boy” album of the year…

Ah, cool…!

Compared to the dark atmospheres of that record, “The Stage Names” heads in a very different direction, more outgoing and direct, with nods to rock in the most genuine sense of the word: I've even read about the influence of your love for girl-pop, and in fact when you played in Italy you were sporting a Shangri-Las t-shirt…

Yeah, I really like the Shangri-Las… I grew up listening to that kind of music, because my mom was a huge fan of girl-pop groups: they were a big inspiration to me while I was working on the new record. Obviously we're not a girl-group, since there isn't even a single girl in the band… but I've always thought I was influenced somehow by that kind of music. Take the New York Dolls, for instance: they're a band with a very macho, tough-guy attitude, and yet they soaked up quite a bit from the tricks and attitude of girl-pop, and in some strange way that made their music sound even more masculine.

I like the Shangri-Las and I like Phil Spector's work: I think there was a time when arrangements were very simple and classic, when nobody was afraid to go for big production choices. What fascinates and draws me in most about that music is how emphatic it is, its ability to hit you with such force. We wanted that same approach for ourselves too, in the way we put together the arrangements on “The Stage Names”.

Indeed, “The Stage Names” reveals an unprecedented lightness, not in the sense of being less engaged but as a capacity for self-irony, especially toward the world of rock 'n' roll and entertainment…

Yes, I think that's true. For me, not taking the entertainment industry too seriously is just… (pauses, hesitant) …it's just a way of pushing back a little against this idea that art always has to be some super-serious thing. Speaking of lightness, I think it's an absolutely essential aspect, because there's quite a few people out there who are convinced that Okkervil River is a very, very serious and very, very heavy band, that I have some kind of tortured soul… but that's not who I am, that's not how I feel… and it's also a bit embarrassing that there are people who think that about you! (laughs).

So it wasn't really a deliberate intention of mine, but while working on the new record I realized it was very important for me to get this side of the band across: I've always thought there was humor, irony and a certain lightness in Okkervil River's music, and I believed people would pick up on it, but that hasn't always been the case. On this record I understood clearly that what I wanted was a lighter touch, because otherwise at some point you end up identifying way too much with that kind of “artist who's very aware of how serious he is with himself”, you know?

Even on the new record, as was already the case with “For Real”, the theme of reality is central: don't you think there's a kind of fear of reality nowadays, a fear of letting yourself be wounded by reality, by the possibility that something unexpected might happen in life? Much like the characters on “The Stage Names”, who live wearing a mask, taking refuge in fiction…

Well, I think people have always loved to take refuge in movies, that's why cinema is so appealing… Reality is scary. Movies are more fun than life, right? In films everyone is beautiful and in the end everyone is happy, or at least they live through very romantic or very exciting stories… In real life there isn't always a moral, there isn't always a message, there isn't always an ending that feels like a satisfying ending. It's just… well, life isn't always fair, it isn't always beautiful. I think that's understandable: every one of us, myself included, has a childish part that sometimes wishes it could just slip inside a movie screen.

On the other hand, I think we're living in interesting times. For instance, if you look at American films, you realize there are basically two big strands, even if they're somewhat mixed together: one is absolutely dumb romantic comedies with no connection to reality whatsoever, which are nothing more than a form of distraction. Today reality seems stranger and scarier than ever, and Americans feel like they've never felt before. On the internet there are people terrified of global warming or things like that… It's as if there were a prevailing feeling, for a lot of people, that their world is probably going to become very different from how it is now, and that living in it is going to be a lot scarier. So what you find at the movies is either a total escape from reality, or else very harsh films, like the one with Mark Wahlberg I watched on the plane coming here, “Shooter”… I honestly couldn't figure out what it was trying to say: he's a heroic patriot who goes around shooting people, slitting throats, blowing people up… Then there are films like “Saw” or Hostel, which are basically torture porn. And you can't make a superhero movie anymore without it secretly having something to do with terrorism or ecological problems… I think people are very afraid, and it's as if movies were their dreams, a kind of inviting nightmare.

Especially now, in America, we live very comfortable lives, in beautiful houses with air conditioning, and it's as if we've always known that a life like that comes at a price, as if we've always known that all this air conditioning and all these giant cars aren't exactly good for our planet. The convenience of all these cheap goods we buy comes from the fact that they were made in some sweatshop exploiting cheap labor. But now it's becoming harder and harder to ignore that reality, and people are becoming more and more aware of this idea – which may or may not be true – that the world is becoming scary and ruthless.

And while all this is happening, entertainment keeps gaining ground, and people's experience of reality becomes more and more mediated by entertainment. It's an interesting issue, people are really frightened…

Searching for some kind of comfort…

Exactly, some kind of escape.

With the image of the black sheep you had summed up the spirit of Okkervil River, the refusal to resign yourself to the dominant mindset, to what people want from you. Did you experience the stories of the characters on “The Stage Names” with the same personal involvement, or did you observe them with more detachment, from the point of view of an outside observer?

On some level I always feel like I'm looking at things from the point of view of an outside observer, because a lot of the songs I write aren't necessarily about me. Some of the things I tell, though, really happened to me, and I took them and put them into a song so that the character in the story could experience them. But maybe the character didn't experience them in the same way I did, even though they're the same experiences… So in a sense I am an observer, I see things firsthand: but I don't feel detached, because I feel a lot of affection and compassion for my characters, I don't want them to be unhappy or to suffer… or rather, I don't want their suffering or their unhappiness to be something you feel detached from. So I don't think the new songs are about me, but I don't feel 100% detached either.

The gestation of “Black Sheep Boy” had been very complicated. Some of the new songs, on the other hand, had already been played live for some time. Did the new album come together with an immediate approach, like the last EP “Overboard & Down”, or was it a more painstaking process?

Well, I'd say a bit of a mix… It's not like there was some long, conceptual writing process when we started working on the record, it was always somewhat intuitive. “Overboard & Down” was made up of first takes recorded at my place, and that's how it was meant to be. “The Stage Names” is an album we really worked hard on, and yet on the record we played the same way we do live, trying to have fun… So it's a bit of a middle ground between trying to be intuitive, spontaneous and fun, and at the same time paying close attention to every detail of the work.

The last track on the album, “John Allyn Smith Sails”, is inspired by the American poet John Berryman and his suicide, and pays homage to a classic like “Sloop John B”: what did you want to express with this juxtaposition?

I had no idea… I was writing that song and suddenly “Sloop John B” just jumped into it. You know, I love John Berryman, he reminds me of some people I know, in the sense of the same kind of story. I read his biography, which is really wonderful, and I often used to read “The Dream Songs” while I was writing “Black Sheep Boy”. “Sloop John B” just sort of came in out of nowhere. The strange thing is that “Sloop John B”, in the Beach Boys version, is a very sunny, cheerful song, but actually the Beach Boys took it from a traditional Bahamian folk song, so it's a song that has a lot to do with pop music and with the folk music collected by Carl Sandburg, and also with American literature. It's a cheerful song, but its message is: “It's over, I give up”…

“I wanna go home”…

Exactly, “I wanna go home”… I think it's a bit like he's talking about suicide: “It's over, I give up, I'm done for”. There's always a multiplicity of levels of interpretation when you're dealing with John Berryman, especially in “The Dream Songs”: he writes about himself, but he does it by stepping into the role of his character Henry, and Henry in turn has a kind of alter ego, Mr. Bones… So there are layers upon layers of fictional personas: John Berryman, Henry, Mr. Bones… and then John Allyn Smith, who is the real person behind John Berryman. It's as if there were four different lives, but when they die there's only one death, an entire world collapsing in on itself, and that's what I tried to express with that song.

They say you're a perfectionist when it comes to your music: yet the urgency you express with Okkervil River isn't afraid to use imperfection as a means of communication either... How do you reconcile the two?

Well, I think you could say I'm a perfectionist when it comes to making a record, but my idea of perfection doesn't necessarily coincide with technical perfection. What I mean is that I don't always sing in tune... I'd like to be able to, but even if I could, I'd still want not to be, always: things aren't always perfectly in tune on a record, sometimes you drift off time or run into other issues, but we always leave the mistakes in. To me it's about feeling: what I've always looked for in music is humanity, in the sense that the music you listen to is made by people, and people aren't always in tune, sometimes they go too fast or too slow, and that's what I find both appealing and reassuring about music at the same time. And besides, no one ever said rock 'n' roll had to be technically perfect: that's exactly the idea the punk revolution put back at the center of things.

As for shows, I don't think they have much to do with perfection - it's more of a shared moment between the audience and the band, a moment where both take part together in what's happening in that same space. The focus is on something emotional and has nothing to do with technical perfection. I've often seen terrible bands that, despite playing really badly, were truly great live, and I was glad they played badly. And I've seen incredibly boring shows where I thought to myself, "this is a great musician, but I'm bored to death"... (laughs) That's not to say good musicians are always boring, but it certainly can happen.

In one of the photos in the new album's booklet, you can glimpse a copy of the novel "A Night Of Serious Drinking" by French writer René Daumal: was this a reading that in some way influenced "The Stage Names"?

It's a photo I took from the window of the apartment I was living in in Brooklyn, where I wrote almost all the songs on the record. I was just trying to take a photo of what could be seen from my window, so it wasn't meant to end up in the album. But I ended up using it because we were trying to put our favorite photos into the album. "A Night Of Serious Drinking" wasn't placed there on purpose, but part of the reason I chose that photo is that I liked the idea, the play on words: to me it says something about the fact that "The Stage Names" is a party record, but a serious party record... like a night of drinking, but of serious drinking. The idea behind "The Stage Names" is that we're having fun, but it's serious fun...

In your view, when does the pursuit of melody, which has always played a fundamental role in Okkervil River's music, end up tipping over into preciousness?

Like everyone, I work on melodies that I like, and usually the melodies I like have variations, they're not monotonous, they have a certain elegance... I usually like melodies where you get the impression that the words are melodic and that the melody matches the words, that both have something to do with each other. I'm not skilled enough to say "I'd like it an octave higher" or "a counterpoint would sound good here", I really don't know what that would even mean... I just work by looking for something I genuinely like, and often it's really about some kind of nuance. People know when they like a melody, so I try as hard as I can to write melodies I think are pleasing, but I don't approach it intellectually - usually it's more something that just comes to me.

On "Sleep And Wake-Up Songs" you expressed your more singer-songwriter side. Lately you've played a number of solo shows. Do you ever feel the need for a personal artistic dimension, outside the band?

Yes, I think that's true... To me it's just a different way of doing things. I was actually thinking about this because... You see, I love "Sleep And Wake-Up Songs" and I'm really happy with it. Even across Okkervil River's four albums there are plenty of intimate songs, but there's always so much pressure around making a new record with the band... It's stimulating to deal with that pressure, but sometimes it's also frustrating, and you ask yourself: "What would happen if I did something deliberately unambitious?" It's a bit like saying: "lower your ambition to conquer the world", or something like that...

To answer the question, I like playing solo, but I don't have plans to make a solo album. It could happen, but I'm not thinking about it right now.

Given your experience as a music critic, what prospects do you think the Pitchfork era holds? Today music criticism seems torn between, on one hand, an increasing retreat into niche audiences, and on the other, a drift toward disposable, "throwaway" coverage that often neglects real critical judgment...

I love Lester Bangs a lot, I've been reading quite a bit of his criticism recently and it's been great fun. What I love about Lester Bangs is that he takes things so seriously, even far more seriously than the artist himself does... He wrote something like twenty pages on Black Sabbath, really trying to get at the deeper meaning of their music: it's genuinely fascinating and touching that he cared so much about Black Sabbath's music that he'd write that many pages about it... No, I mean, I like Black Sabbath, don't get me wrong, but most people think they probably don't deserve to be written about with that kind of intellectual rigor.

Anyway, as I was reading, I found myself thinking that this is exactly what's missing from music criticism today: a lot of people just scratch the surface, and when so many people keep scratching the surface all the time, in the end nothing is left... It's as if none of the underlying meanings ever get explored in depth. Obviously nobody wants a bad, long, self-indulgent piece of journalism, but it really is a huge challenge to write a long piece of music criticism that actually digs deep and pulls something out of it. Good music criticism is almost as valuable as the music itself, in the sense that it deals with the same things music deals with: talking about why we love something, and what our emotional reactions to certain things should or shouldn't be. It's really fascinating, and sometimes I feel a bit frustrated, because I don't see much great music criticism these days. I really don't know why, but it seems like the art of rock criticism has drifted pretty far from the golden age of Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus or Richard Meltzer...

Jonathan Meiburg, the band's longtime keyboardist, also took part in recording the new album: does his involvement with Okkervil River still fit alongside his growing commitments as the leader of Shearwater? In my opinion "Palo Santo" was one of the best albums of last year...

Yes, I love "Palo Santo"! And I can say that because I wasn't very involved in that record, it was mostly Jonathan and Shearwater's work. Jonathan still comes on tour with us when he can, though his first commitment is to Shearwater.

Among others, the acknowledgments for “The Stage Names” include the name of Elvis Perkins: did you collaborate with him in some way?

We went on tour with him, he opened our shows in America. I think he's really great, I love his music…

In my opinion, his debut album, “Ash Wednesday”, has been one of the most interesting American songwriting records of the year so far…

Yes, he writes wonderful songs and his band is fantastic. My only regret about his record is that I wish the touring band had been more present on it, because they're really excellent. But I think when he recorded the album he hadn't put the group together yet…

(Milan, 28/06/2007)