Okkervil River - The Bleeding Heart of Black Sheep

She knows there’s no success like failure / And that failure’s no success at all (Bob Dylan)

Mysterious waters, the waters of the Okkervil river. Its waves hold the secrets of a trembling heart. Cursed waters, the waters of the Okkervil river. Its dark bends carry unconfessable sins. Redeeming waters, the waters of the Okkervil river. Whoever dives into its currents is chasing a liberating catharsis. Along the bank, the roots seem to reach up and join the sky. The notes that rise from them are like scraps of the soul. All you have to do is stop at the edge of the shore and listen. This is the story of the musicians of the Okkervil river. Will Robinson Sheff was in college when he made the most important decision of his life: to be a complete failure. A professional failure. When you're afraid of failing, you stay trapped in the cage of other people's expectations. Better a spectacular failure than resigning yourself to a prefabricated life. Will Sheff had stumbled upon his calling by chance, the day he found himself holding a sheet of paper on which his brother had scribbled, just for fun, the titles of a series of imaginary songs. Just the titles. But those mysterious words were enough to exert an irresistible pull on him: the pull of the infinite worlds that opened up before his eyes through those unknown doors. So Will started inventing the songs hidden behind those titles. And suddenly all those secret universes became, just like that, within his reach. The cramped boundaries of Meriden, New Hampshire no longer mattered: music had handed him the chance to possess everything. He could bet it all without fear of losing. Sheff's travel companions inevitably turned out to be fellow black sheep like him. A word exchanged on the school bus, a knowing look on a soccer field: together with Seth Warren and Zachary Thomas, Will started making music, inventing a new name for the band every day. The False Dmitri, Nine Men's Morris, My Wet. Seth on drums, Zach on bass, and Will on vocals and guitar. Nothing is more compelling than the strength of friendship to convince you that you're ready to take on the world. Until Will came up with that crazy, absurd name. Okkervil River. That was the title of a short story by Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya (a descendant, no less, of a certain Tolstoy…), which Will had just finished reading, inspired by a river that flows near Saint Petersburg. It certainly wasn't a name for a band: and that's exactly why the enthusiasm was instantly unanimous. Will tried in vain to convince the others not to listen to his reckless suggestion: no one would ever be able to remember such an outlandish name. Too late: the decision had already been made. The failure had begun. A wonderful failure.  

This whole wide world isn’t wide enough

It's 1998, and Okkervil River has existed for barely a few weeks when a four-track recorder is set up in Will Sheff's bedroom to record the band's first demos Full of the naive enthusiasm that comes with starting out, Okkervil River are eager to try to capture their sound, without worrying too much about the details. The result is nothing more than a homemade experiment, tellingly titled Bedroom, which captures an energy and inspiration that are still raw and embryonic, where the lilting, sing-song feel of "Dreadful Wind And Rain" alternates with the dissonances of "This House Is Not A Home". Sheff will later admit, bluntly, that listening back to those early recordings today is agonizing for him. But these were just the dress rehearsals for Okkervil River's real debut. Having relocated to Austin, Texas, which from that point on would become their home base, in the summer of 1999 Okkervil River rented a recording room at Jeff Hoskin's studio and, in just three days, recorded the six tracks that would make up the Ep Stars Too Small To Use, released in March 2000. The sound is bare as cliff rock and abrasive as sandpaper, with acoustic guitar strings mercilessly roughed up, dry, forceful drums, and a spare counterpoint of bass, banjo and accordion. The folk gait of Sheff's songs sways between melodic openings indebted to Neutral Milk Hotel and traditionalist swerves worthy of storyteller of the frontier. But what becomes evident right away is that the heart of Okkervil River's music lies in Sheff's voice, always taut and feverish, whether it's holding back anguish or letting rage take over. A voice so raw it borders on grating, yet irresistibly magnetic in the way it delivers every syllable as if the fate of an entire existence depended on it, and perhaps the fate of the world itself. It's precisely this unstoppable expressive urgency that represents the true stylistic signature of Okkervil River: a cathartic vision of music in which there's no room for entertainment for its own sake. "I can't understand how it's possible to love music enough to devote your life to it and never have been moved to tears by a song," Sheff states with conviction. "When my parents bought me the cassette of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the first time I listened to 'With A Little Help From My Friends' I burst into tears: that song had killed me. Stars Too Small To Use faithfully mirrors all the drive that Okkervil River are capable of unleashing on stage, starting from the dry rhythm of "Kathy Keller", which opens the record with its tarantella-like folk in the style of Violent Femmes. But it's precisely this inclination toward a live direct, unsubtle approach that also represents the EP's biggest limitation: it's no coincidence that several of the record's songs would later be revisited by the band on subsequent releases, given a more fully realized reinterpretation. With "The Velocity Of Saul At The Time Of His Conversion" we're immediately faced with the first classic of the Okkervil River catalog: out of a rustic chiaroscuro, reminiscent of the lesson learned from Lullaby For The Working Class, there rises forcefully the pathos of one of those visceral melodies that would become the band's unmistakable trademark, always balanced between an excess of lyricism and the intensity of confession. If the country flavors of "Oh, Precious" and "Auntie Alice" don't go beyond mere stylistic exercise, it's in the imperfections that the essence of Stars Too Small To Use should be sought, from the ragged screams with which Sheff seems to want to tear his own vocal cords apart in the suite in two movements of "For The Captain" to the drunken choruses of "He Passes Number Thirty-Three". The story told by Sheff in the opening "Kathy Keller" seems to introduce the songbook of a modern-day Johnny Cash, with the image of a man fleeing the shadows of crimes committed in the past and searching for someone capable of believing in the truth of a change that even he isn't truly certain of. But what dominates the rest of the songs is not so much the storyteller's vein as it is the voice of an insatiable hunger that torments the soul without ever granting it peace: it's a seed grown in the water of tears, Sheff sings in "For The Captain", a seed that never stops growing and becoming ever more tenacious, like an infection one cannot escape. All plans crumble between one's fingers, warns "The Velocity Of Saul At The Time Of His Conversion", because not even the whole world is enough to satisfy the chasm of that hunger. Just as the album's title announces, even the stars are too small to contain the heart's desire. "This whole wide world isn't wide enough". The only prayer, in "Whole Wide World", is that the highway never ends, that the race along that ribbon of asphalt which seems to point straight toward the sky doesn't stop before reaching its unknown destination. The band gets personally involved in promoting Stars Too Small To Use, enlisting friends and acquaintances to help assemble the cd packaging. Despite the record's release, though, nothing seems to change for Okkervil River, who keep struggling to land gigs at venues in Austin. In an effort to get noticed, they come up with a kind of self-produced single, secretly burning the cds in the office where Zach works as a programmer. The single, distributed for free in the city's record stores, includes "The Velocity Of Saul At The Time Of His Conversion" and the traditional "Omie Wise", recorded on a Dat at the band's new house. Despite the small following, Okkervil River's shows are an experience that leaves no one indifferent. And it's right at the end of one such show that the band is approached by a geography and ornithology student named Jonathan Meiburg, a skilled multi-instrumentalist with a soft, intense choirboy-like timbre, whom Sheff recalls as something between Prince Myshkin and Pete Townshend. Jonathan quickly becomes friends with Sheff and soon joins the band as a permanent keyboardist: his contribution will prove decisive to the evolution of Okkervil River's sound. Again alongside Sheff, Meiburg will also give life to Shearwater, a parallel project destined to take on an importance far from secondary in both their careers. Again after a show, another strange character shows up to meet the group: it's producer Brian Beattie, already at work with Daniel Johnston and owner of the Yacht Club Fantasy Studios in Austin, who decided to go hear Okkervil River after reading in the Austin Chronicle that they came from his beloved New Hampshire… Will Sheff's face and guitar are bloodied, after cutting himself breaking the strings on his guitar in the fury of the performance. Beattie, without hesitation, offers to record the band's first album.  

I've got dreams to remember (Otis Redding)

Before long, Brian Beattie's inbox is flooded with emails in which an exhilarated Sheff imagines an Al Green-style sound for Okkervil River: by now the band has clearly outgrown the bare-bones, live-take essentiality of Stars Too Small To Use , as they aspire to a richer, more colorful sound, capable of giving voice to every shade of their own visions. With Beattie's crucial help, Okkervil River embark on a search for identity from which their music emerges radically transformed. For over a year, from July 2000 to August 2001, the band devotes itself body and soul to its debut album, dressing the skeleton of the new songs with unprecedented inlays of horns, strings, Wurlitzer, mellotron and pedal steel. "We called up our friends to play whatever instrument came to mind, including the bathroom air conditioner…", Sheff recalls. In the end, the jagged edges and roughness give way to a new depth of color, suggesting the richly evocative image of a version indie from Band. The demos are sent out to dozens and dozens of record labels, but the responses are, at best, polite rejections. The only one to show interest in Okkervil River is the Indiana-based independent label Jagjaguwar, though it's only willing to release the record at the start of the following year. The band agrees, and to pass the time decides to put out another homemade single to circulate around Austin, with a few previews of the new songs: an early version of "Kansas City", a recording live of "My Bad Days" and a cover of the folk classic "Moonshiner". Meanwhile, the first release under the Shearwater name also sees the light of day, "The Dissolving Room", which reflects the gentler, more nocturnal inflections of Meiburg and Sheff. Okkervil River's debut album, Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See, finally sees the light of day in January 2002. The band's growing maturity announces itself immediately through the discovery of a balance capable of lending weight to every breath: even Sheff's impetuous voice relaxes with a newfound sense of measure over the textures woven with such passionate care by his bandmates. The bursts of fury haven't vanished, but they've gained a vanishing point that keeps them from being an end in themselves, opening onto a dimension with less confined horizons. The parallel that spontaneously comes to mind is with the Bright Eyes of "Fevers And Mirrors", who seem to share with Okkervil River that same burning intensity, that same love for heartfelt melodies and that same guise of modern Americana. But Sheff dismisses the cumbersome comparison with Conor Oberst with a testy quip: "The only thing we have in common is that neither of us can really sing…". Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See opens with a mother's eyes red from crying. "Red is my favorite color", Sheff sings almost bashfully over the hushed sway of brushes and keyboards on "Red". Then the harmonica in the style of Neil Young of "Kansas City", sung as a duet with Alice Spencer, brings things back toward western ballad territory, with its dancing fiddle, its sweetness of pedal steel and its desert-wind drums. Along with the restless, galloping ride in the style of Giant Sand of “Dead Dog Song,” an old track already featured on the band's first EP, these are the album's most classically folk moments. But it's when Okkervil River aren't afraid to stray from the canon of Counting Crows and Grant Lee Buffalo that Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See manages to find its way to leaving a mark. The horns of “Lady Liberty” tell of betrayal, bitterness and anger with a loose, small-town-band tone, while the funeral march of “My Bad Days” unfolds between a fateful bass and the dramatic underscoring of the Hammond organ, letting itself be wounded by an anguished violin. Okkervil River invite us to follow them into the dusk of a winter evening, while from the stereo the warmth of Otis Redding's voice wraps nostalgia in its embrace, to the notes of “I’ve Got Dreams To Remember.” Will Sheff takes a cue from that melody and lets a bewitched arpeggio flow from it, the kind that Mark Kozelek would have chosen to paint his red house. It's “Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas,” and for over six minutes it's a pulsing of discreet orchestration and organ breaths that cradle dreams until nightfall. And then in “Happy Hearts” there unexpectedly surfaces, alongside Sheff, the shaky, unsteady voice of the mad genius of Daniel Johnston: it's their shared producer, Beattie, who makes possible the meeting with the man Sheff considers one of his greatest musical idols. The band picks him up at his home in Texas and, after recording the heart-on-sleeve duet “Happy Hearts” together, they take him out for burgers and to buy comic books. Yet in the end, Sheff recounts feeling overcome by a sense of bitter inadequacy, thinking that he should have been the one singing a Daniel Johnston song, not the other way around. Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See is an album cloaked in a romanticism Springsteen-esque, dedicated, as its title suggests, to those who can't help but look at the world while letting themselves be wounded by everything they encounter. From the mother-daughter relationship of “Red” to the aching loneliness of “Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas,” the album is a diary that recounts, with disarming sincerity, the need for an unconditional, freely given love, that “unconditional love” that Daniel Johnston longs for in “Happy Hearts.” Sheff's literary sensibility follows in the footsteps of Flannery O’Connor along the razor's edge between sin and redemption, sketching in “Westfall” a murder ballad as tense and stark as a scene from Terence Malick's “Badlands,” arriving at the realization that the shadow of evil is more elusive than one might imagine: “They’re look for evil, thinking they can trace it, but evil don’t look like anything.” In the end, the circle leads back to the river where it all began: “Okkervil River Song” is a restless lullaby around the campfire, warmed by flickers of banjo and accordion beside an abandoned bed. Meanwhile, Seth Warren decides to move to California with his girlfriend and to stop taking a direct part in Okkervil River's life, though he remains within the band's orbit and continues to appear on their albums. To make up for this, the group recruits bearded drummer Mark Pedini, who however doesn't make it in time to take part in the recording of Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See. It's precisely at Pedini's wedding that Sheff meets William Schaff, a visionary artist already known for his evocative illustrations for Godspeed You! Black Emperor e Songs: Ohia. Schaff, whom the Okkervil River singer calls “my doppelgänger”, handles theartwork of Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See, and from that moment on his presence becomes essential in giving shape to Sheff's nightmares with the retro flavor of his grotesque, fable-like style. With the release of Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See, Okkervil River's fame begins to spread beyond the boundaries of the Austin music scene. In 2002 the British music magazine “Comes with a smile” includes a previously unreleased track by the band, titled “Disfigured Cowboy,” on a compilations included with the magazine. Another outtake of the album, "Satisfy You", comes out on a 7" shared with South San Gabriel. Around the same time, Okkervil River also record an energetic cover of "Riot Act" by Elvis Costello for another compilations, while Shearwater release their second record, titled "Everybody Makes Mistakes". The band's feverish burst of activity culminates in early 2003 in the making of a split with Canadian musician Julie Doiron, former bassist of Eric's Trip. Okkervil River record their side of the album at the Adult Audio Megaplex studio in Austin with the gruff assistance of Michael Crow, whose violin lends the songs a sense of drama. For the cover of Julie Doiron/Okkervil River, released by the Spanish label Acuarela, the band chooses a drawing by their new drummer, Mark Pedini. While Julie Doiron's ethereal voice, with its understated acoustic backing, recalls the atmospheres dearest to Cat Powerthe tracks featuring Okkervil River return to showcase the band's folk soul. Alongside a new version of "He Passes Number Thirty-Three", beefed up by Jonathan Meiburg's keyboards, the rural inflections of the Willard Grant Conspiracy version of "Omie Wise" and the light madrigal of "A Leaf" stand out. But it's only a transitional moment ahead of Will Sheff and co.'s new long-distance challenge.  

Please stop ignoring the heart inside, oh you readers at home

For their second album, Okkervil River decide to take an approach opposite to the long, laborious process behind Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See: they load all their gear onto a van and in spring 2003 head to California to visit Seth Warren. Waiting for them in San Francisco is Tiny Telephone studio, run by John Vanderslice, songwriter a studio wizard who loves keyboards with analog textures. Sheff's own description says it all: "We wanted something quick and dirty, and when you say dirty you immediately think of San Francisco." Far from the familiar surroundings of Austin, Okkervil River throw themselves completely into the new songs for a couple of weeks, pouring all their resources into work made even more intense by the tight schedule. But there's nothing improvised or rushed about Okkervil River's California sessions: what stands out instead is the overall cohesion of the work and the bold, bright tone of the arrangements. John Vanderslice himself insists on appearing on the record, and settles for playing some unspecified bells on one track. The album takes its title from the crooked piano intro contributed by Seth's eighty-year-old great-aunt (!), titled "Down The River Of Golden Dreams". "Swimming, sinking, setting sail never to return...": these are the images Sheff says he instinctively associated with the new songs. But if, as Okkervil River claim, their second album really should be considered a "water" record, it's certainly not the gentle waves lapping at the shore one should picture, but rather the depths of oceans populated by the mysterious creatures of some old sailor's tale, like the anthropomorphic octopus that appears on the album cover, once again the work of William Schaff. In Down The River Of Golden Dreams the alternation between whispers and screams that has by now become the band's trademark finally rises to become the perfect emotional distillation, growing more incisive and assured with every passage. The first part of the album is striking in its force, from the passionate crescendos of "It Ends With A Fall", "For The Enemy" and "The War Criminal Rises And Speaks", to the overwhelming waves of "Blanket And Crib". The sharp outlines of the wurlitzer trace the shapes of restless figures, over which the hammond organ spreads thick brushstrokes of impressionist color. The horns cast a vivid, blood-red light, while Sheff's voice rises until it sets the horizon ablaze. Then the acoustic guitars and piano return to weave finer threads, letting discreet petals of violin and accordion and blossoms of drums and brushes bloom. A rarefaction that in tracks like "Maine Island Lovers" and "Yellow" thins out into an impalpable grace worthy of the Mojave 3, only in the closing "Seas Too Far To Reach" falling back on the band's more predictable style. Bridging the two souls of the album is the new version of "The Velocity Of Saul At The Time Of His Conversion", which reveals how, on Down The River Of Golden Dreams, the sound Okkervil River had been chasing since their earliest days has now finally come to fruition. The way the roots of American tradition soak up pop influences follows the path traced by Wilco starting with "Summerteeth". But the aching melodies of "It Ends With A Fall" and "The War Criminal Rises And Speaks" unmistakably assert their own personality, relentlessly raising questions about the meaning of time, the link between crime and punishment, and the radical nature of love and hate. Then again, don't you dare mention to Will Sheff alt.country on the subject of Okkervil River's music: "It's a label that only comes from critics' laziness," he states, irritated. "As soon as they hear a pedal steel and a mandolin, they forget everything else. We don't have cowboy hats or Gram Parsons CDs and we've never done the line-dance…". And Sheff knows the subject well, having spent a long time dabbling as a music critic, writing reviews for the Austin Chronicle and for the website Audiogalaxy. But no one can serve two masters: "Cultivating a kind of musical ignorance is valuable for my songwriting", while being a critic requires a much more analytical reflection on music," says Sheff, explaining the reasons that led him to set aside his journalism career. Down The River Of Golden Dreams shows off a far more complex style of writing than in the past, much denser with literary influences. Along the river of golden dreams there are ghosts peering deep into your eyes through a window pane: the heart of a war criminal and a brother seeking comfort in the night, Saul fallen from his own horse, and the light of a star already dead for millennia… But the key to it all, for Sheff, remains as simple as a mother's warning: ⟦Q1⟧, is the exhortation of "Blanket And Crib". And if the call of the waves still speaks of "seas too far away to reach", from the riverbank rises an echo that never tires of pointing the way to the ocean. From "It Ends With A Fall" comes a video in which the band, cast as a sort of theatrical little orchestra, tells the story of its own odyssey among the waves, right up to the final shipwreck, in a papier-mâché setting. Between 2003 and 2004 the band throws itself into a long tour, bringing in Travis Nelsen on drums in place of Mark Pedini. Okkervil River's live shows are a furious tour de force in which the band gives free rein to its rawer, more biting side. At their shows, Okkervil River put on sale a split made together with Shearwater, titled "Sham Wedding/Hoax Funeral". The record, recorded in the freezing house of Shearwater's Thor Harris during the winter of 2003, has a low-fidelity, improvisational spirit that harks straight back to the acoustic, alcohol-soaked atmosphere of the band's earliest days. The five tracks credited to Okkervil River are largely cover covers of folk classics, including "Moonshiner", "See See Rider", rendered by the band like one of the skeletal ballads of Vic Chesnuttand "Willow Tree", whose ancestral arpeggio summons the ghost of Devendra BanhartStill, despite everything, the record remains essentially an item for fans. Also in 2004 comes Shearwater's third album, "Winged Life", which further cements the reputation of Meiburg and Sheff's group, making it ever clearer that this is not simply an Okkervil River side project. Even more significant, however, is the release, in November 2004, of the EP Sleep And Wake Up Songswhich gathers up the threads the band had left hanging after the release of Down The River Of Golden DreamsOnce the tour was over, in fact, Sheff decided to spend some time in Bloomington, Indiana, home to Jagjaguwar, and began working on some ideas he'd kept in a drawer: starting from "And I Have Seen The World Of Dreams" and "No Hidden Track", outtake respectively of Julie Doiron/Okkervil River and of Down The River Of Golden Dreams, giving rise to a handful of new compositions, to which Sheff devotes himself tirelessly day after day, from dawn to dusk. Songs of sleep and waking, indeed. Recorded at Dan Burton's studio in the Early Day MinersSleep And Wake Up Songs offers a fascinating glimpse of the more reflective side of Okkervil River, documenting the transitional phase of a band ready to claim new musical territory. The opening of "A Favor" announces itself with the aching quality of a landscape painted by Will Oldhamuntil Jordan Geiger of Minus Story's celestial countermelody ushers in a dimension of ecstatic drama, cleared by a sharp electric guitar and a burst of trumpet. Sheff's voice is joined by Nicole Evans's on the hushed, floating "And I Have Seen The World Of Dreams" and on "You're Untied Again", which sounds like a melancholy homage to the songwriting of Elliott SmithA model that the delicate arpeggios of "Just Give Me Time" also seem to echo. At the heart of Sleep And Wake Up Songs, then, lies more the songwriter Sheff than the band Okkervil River, even if the closing "No Hidden Track" seems to recover a sense of collective spirit. And yet the enchantment of Down The River Of Golden Dreams manages to renew itself in all its fullness, adding a new, pensive lightness to Okkervil River's chromatic spectrum.  

I’m the family’s unowned boy (Tim Hardin)

Sometimes all it takes is a single line of a song to untangle the knot of thoughts churning in the mind and condense everything into a single note. Will Sheff must have had an experience like that the first time he heard "Black Sheep Boy", a tiny gem embedded in the folds of Tim Hardin's second album. "If you love me, let me live in peace, please understand me," sang the songwriter from Oregon in that brief acoustic elegy. And the image of that tormented black sheep sung about by Hardin must have been seared into Sheff's memory like a burning vision. For years Sheff nursed the idea of following up on Tim Hardin's insight. But it was only in 2004 that he began writing a series of songs centered on the image of the "black sheep boy": during his retreat of frenzied compositional immersion in Bloomington, Sheff not only wrote the tracks for the Ep Sleep And Wake Up Songs, but also laid the foundations for the new Okkervil River album. The title, it's hardly worth saying, is Black Sheep Boy. The band hits the road again for a new tour, even though Zach Thomas has to stay home for the birth of his first child. But Sheff's mind remains obsessed with the new project, which completely absorbs his energies. "I'd become so melodramatic that I actually hoped I wouldn't die in a car accident on tour, just so I could finish the album," Sheff recalls, with a touch of self-irony. When Okkervil River finally return to Austin, they suddenly feel like strangers: "It felt like America was slipping into madness, or maybe it was us who were going crazy… or more likely both," Sheff observes. With the addition of multi-instrumentalist Howard Draper, the band begins rehearsing the new songs in the sweltering heat of an un-air-conditioned shed rented near Austin's airport. For the album's recording, though, Okkervil River opt for the more comfortable setting of trusted collaborator Brian Beattie's home studio. This time the band wants to prove to everyone that they can't simply be filed away under the umbrella of more or less alternative country, and wants to scale back the centrality of keyboards that had defined the sound of Down The River Of Golden Dreams. William Schaff's drawings also directly feed into the creative process, giving the "black sheep boy" imagined by Sheff a much darker, more menacing shape during the record's making than in the past. In the end, Sheff seems unable to let go of his creature, nurtured for so long in a corner of his imagination, and continues to obsessively oversee every last detail of the record. But the new work is finally ready to come out into the open, and the band immediately plans an alternative home for the tracks reluctantly left off the final tracklist version. The album's release is preceded in March 2005 by the mini Ep For Real (There’s Nothing Quite Like The Blinding Light). The opening track, "For Real", is the only song taken from the new album and sounds like a genuine statement of intent: "Some nights I thirst for real blood, for real knives, for real cries", sings Sheff. And to make his words resonate, raw lashes of electric guitar arrive, creating a breathtaking alternation of fullness and emptiness. "We're so alienated from reality that we believe real life is what we see on TV," Sheff observes. "We no longer know what a real experience actually is." It's precisely this unquenchable thirst for reality that animates "For Real", accompanied by a video with the feel of Radiohead-esquecentered on a bleak and chilling cartoon. Completing the Ep is a magnetic version live of “For The Enemy” and the unreleased “The Next Four Months,” a wonderful and desperate invocation in the dead of night. Black Sheep Boy hits record stores the following month, and for Okkervil River it marks their consecration in the eyes of critics and audiences alike indie. Steeped in a dark atmosphere worthy of the finest pages of 16 Horsepower, the third Okkervil River album moves with mesmerizing energy between acoustic shadows and sudden electric jolts. A bass with veins of wave attests to the band's desire to immerse itself in a deeper, more fleshed-out dimension, while the electronic touches lurking beneath the songs' skin pave the way for contaminations that are, for now, only hinted at. “Black” has the devastating power of an anthem, with its squared-off drums, its driving Wurlitzer and its keyboard progressions, over which Sheff spits out all the rage and the yearning for redemption of a brutal story of family violence. “The Latest Toughs,” meanwhile, shows off Okkervil River's poppier side, between handclapping and countermelodies that bring together the Eels with the Arcade Fire, while the band invites the listener to fill in the blank space provided with whatever they'd like to hear in a song… The rest of the record settles into more shadowy tones, in a scenario that reflects the silhouettes of Mark Lanegan and by Sophia, from the anguished urban of “In A Radio Song” and “So Come Back, I Am Waiting” to the trumpet-and-mandolin waltz of “A King And A Queen,” all the way to the duet with Amy Annelle on the sigh heavy with the weight of betrayal that is “Get Big.” Among the lyrics, a fairy-tale imagery of knights and princesses makes its way through: “That's our Dungeons & Dragons side,” Sheff jokes. And it's also the part of the record that suffers most from an excessive sameness of tone. But the farewell of “A Glow,” with its sweeping cinematic breath, leaves you motionless, staring at the vastness of the starry sky. Serving as the opening to the record is the devoted tribute to Tim Hardin's “Black Sheep Boy.” Okkervil River's black sheep is a prodigal son with no forgiveness: even his homecoming, in “So Come Back, I Am Waiting,” feels more like a sentence than an embrace. “We live in a time when everyone claims the right to judge others: our culture seems obsessed with the need to do what's expected of us,” Sheff reflects. “But the decision is ours to make, and it can also be the decision to do the wrong thing.” The black sheep is the one who refuses to resign himself to the role imposed on him: but, chasing the mirage of his own dreams, he ends up destroying everything he was searching for, just like the protagonist of “In A Radio Song.” The fact is that the short blade of freedom is something more than that fatal option that ends up consuming all hope. It's an attraction that lets you hold on to reality. And only reality matters, even when it tastes of the blood of “For Real.” That's why, according to Sheff, Black Sheep Boy is “a record about our distance from the truth, understood as art or beauty or emotion or honesty or reality.” After taking part in the tribute to Jandek released in 2005 with a cover of “Your Other Man,” Okkervil River put out that same year a further batch of material left out of Black Sheep Boy, in the form of a new EP with the programmatic title Black Sheep Boy Appendix. It's not, however, some dispensable outtake, but rather a precious companion piece to the main record, following the same narrative and musical thread. Theouverture of "Missing Children" floats on a soft cloud of pump organ and strings, while "No Key, No Plan" confirms that extroverted spirit already shown by Okkervil River on "The Latest Toughs". On "Another Radio Song" the band rewrites the old "For The Captain" with vigorous conviction, swapping the captain for the black sheep. Amy Annelle returns to accompany Sheff on the enveloping "Black Sheep Boy #4" (chapters two and three being "So Come Back, I Am Waiting" and "In A Radio Song" respectively), which in turn picks up and transforms "Disfigured Cowboy". And the EP's closer, "Last Love Song For Now", seems intent on summing up the whole journey travelled by Okkervil River.  

You can’t hold the hand of a rock and roll man

It's easy to find yourself trapped within the confines of a stereotype after a record as weighty as Black Sheep Boy: especially when you have a voice as unmistakable as Sheff's. Okkervil River, however, choose to chart a new course. In 2006, during a break in the long tour that followed the release of Black Sheep Boy (which was reissued in a special edition also including the tracks from Black Sheep Boy Appendix), the band quickly recorded a handful of new songs, not really thinking about the possibility of eventually releasing them, but rather chasing the spontaneity of a snapshot taken with no production pressures looming. When the time came to land on the other side of the world for the continuation of the tour, though, the group decided to include some of the new compositions on an EP intended solely for the Australian market. The title, Overboard & Down, is taken from a line in "O, Dana" by Big Star, of which Sheff and co. offer a dazzling interpretation full of brass and brash sunniness. The EP's main track, however, is "The President's Dead", also released as a limited-edition vinyl single, which in its surging crescendo sets the infinite value of the seemingly most trivial instant against the weight of history. Rounding out the picture, alongside a blazing live version of the now-classic "Westfall", are "The Room I'm Hiding In" and "Love To A Monster", intense folk ballads bearing the most genuine Okkervil River stamp, which help make Overboard & Down one of the group's most immediately communicative works. 2006 also saw the release of the new Shearwater chapter, Palo Santo, in which Jonathan Meiburg takes centre stage, handling for the first time the writing and performance of every track on the record. At the MTV Video Music Awards, Okkervil River were named by Lou Reed as one of his favourite bands, and the group was invited by the former Velvet to open the inaugural concert at the Highline Ballroom in New York. "It's the thing I'm proudest of," Sheff enthused, "Lou Reed is one of my biggest influences, if not the biggest, when it comes to my songwriting. It was an incredible honour." Okkervil River's fourth album, The Stage Namescame out in the summer of 2007, and for the first time the album's credits don't list Seth Warren's presence. Howard Draper also sat out the recording, choosing to devote himself entirely to his work with Shearwater. For a while Sheff toyed with the idea of releasing a double album: "I've always thought double albums are super-pretentious and really terrible to make, but sooner or later you get a perverse urge to do it. In the end, though, sanity prevailed." So once again, plenty of songs were left off the tracklist final version of the album. There are no more gothic-tinged parables in The Stage Names, only illusions burned up between a hotel room's TV channels and the railing of a bridge over river waters. There's no more folk-wave darkness in Will Sheff and co.'s music, only a brightly lit stage onto which the American band strides with real conviction, offsetting the previous album's shadowy depths with an unprecedented dose of levity and irony. "I would feel like I'd failed on some level if our music wasn't good rock and roll," Sheff states without hesitation. And judging by the punchy riffs loureediani of "Unless It's Kicks", you'd say the target was hit dead center. The songs on The Stage Names, some of which had already turned up on stage for a while, reveal a band with growing confidence and assurance: credit goes to the now-familiar presence of Brian Beattie as producer, but above all to the cohesion of a lineup made ever tighter by stage experience, with the arrival of guitarist Brian Cassidy, bassist Patrick Pestorius and multi-instrumentalist Scott Brackett. Sheff's fiery voice dominates the scene amid restless guitars, crisp piano chords and sturdy drum accents, while orchestration and keyboards for once stay in the background. Okkervil River chase pop sparks only hinted at before in the most exuberant moments of their past, from "The Latest Toughs" to "No Key, No Plan": even William Schaff's cover art, for once, dresses itself in gaudy colors. The shimmer of the horns gives "A Hand To Take Hold Of The Scene" a sprightly gait straight out of Decemberists, while "You Can't Hold The Hand Of A Rock And Roll Man" runs light over the stardust of Ziggy the alien, amid vocal harmonies and handclaps with echoes of Sixties. Even the episodes closest to the atmospheres of Black Sheep Boy, like "A Girl In Port", are dressed on the new album in fragrances reminiscent of Wilco, which make the nuances of every sigh more vivid. And when the disarming sweetness of the music box of "Savannah Smiles" makes its way through, suspended among the diary pages of a daughter you suddenly discover you never knew, for a moment it feels like being wrapped in the softest folds of “The River”. One-night lovers clinging to their own loneliness, mediocre rocker forever chasing a dream, lost actresses left with nothing but the name of a porn star: the characters of The Stage Names are people fleeing reality, hiding behind their own mask for fear of being hurt by the unexpected. "What gives this mess some grace unless it's fiction?" is the question pulsing at the heart of "Unless It's Kicks". But life refuses to be framed like a screenplay: "it's just a life story, so there's no climax," Sheff proclaims in "Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe", which opens the album with a vigorous emphasis worthy of the Arcade Fire of “Neon Bible”. Stage names vanish into thin air at the solemn pace of "Title Track" (and in case anyone still had doubts, a title like that alone should be enough to convince them of Sheff's self-mocking streak...). When the reckoning comes, only one face remains behind the masks. American poet John Berryman must have known this too — the inspiration behind the album's epilogue — when he stared at the waters of the Mississippi before throwing himself into the void: of all his characters, of all his alter ego, in that moment there was only one gaze left to face death. And while the vision of his suicide unfolds like a slow-motion image, in the swelling acoustic elegy of "John Allyn Smith Sails" the melody of "Sloop John B" suddenly bursts in, not with the sunny smile given to it by Brian Wilson, but with that final sense of abandonment inherited from folk tradition. The album was also released in a limited edition, accompanied by a second CD containing acoustic versions of all the tracks: a precious opportunity to admire the strength of the songs on The Stage Names stripped completely bare, from a slowed-down version of “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe” to an unexpectedly western. At the end of 2007, Okkervil River gave fans an unexpected Christmas present, offering a free download on their official website of Golden Opportunities, an EP of cover recorded live between 2006 and 2007, topped off with a “Listening To Otis Redding At Home During Christmas” more fitting than ever for the holiday season. Between the cabaret lightness of Randy Newman's “Simon Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear,” the classic folk of “April Anne,” and the horns of “I Want To Know,” Sheff takes on the role of the chansonnier for “I Came Here To Say I’m Going Away” by Serge Gainsbourg and puts himself in the shoes of John Cale for a captivating rendition of “Antarctica Starts Here.”  

The liar who lied in this song

And so the hour of farewell arrived: 2008 brought with it the announcement of Jonathan Meiburg's departure from Okkervil River, having decided to focus exclusively on leading Shearwater. The final chapter of the partnership is the twin of The Stage Names, The Stand Ins, the conclusion of what was originally meant to be a double album. “From the start we wanted The Stage Names to be a shorter record than our previous ones, so we set aside a lot of songs, not because we didn't like them, but because we wanted to try to bring them together coherently,” explains Will Sheff. “I couldn't wait to find a home for these orphans, a small, welcoming place for the losers, somewhere off-off-off Broadway.” From stage names to stand-ins, the initial brilliance seems to lose some of its shine. Perhaps the EP format would have been better suited to gathering the material left out of the first part of the project, following the model the band had used in the past with Black Sheep Boy Appendix. The Stand Ins is certainly not a collection of leftovers, but the choice to present it as a standalone album ends up placing too much emphasis on what, in Sheff and co.'s intentions, was meant to be nothing more than a deeper exploration of the moods and themes of The Stage Names. The rock tones of The Stage Names fade into gentler contours, where the keyboards regain an essential role, alternating proper songs with a triptych of brief instrumental fragments. The band brings in Charles Bissel of the Wrens on guitar for “Singer Songwriter,” written during the tour shared with the New Pornographers. Sheff's songwriting once again reveals an unmatched subtlety, but compared to its predecessor the meta-musical keys to interpretation take on a more dominant role, which at times results in losing the songs' intrinsic effectiveness. Thus, "Singer Songwriter" risks sounding like a mere alt-country exercise unless one grasps the (self-deprecating) satire aimed at the intellectual smugness of singer-songwriters who display their Poe and Artaud volumes and Murnau films on the shelf: “You’ve got taste. What a waste that that’s all that you have”. And the glam-tinged keyboards driving the sparkling "Pop Lie" may seem gratuitously brash, if one forgets that it's a parody of songs "calculated to make you sing along with the stereo on". There's a beggarly skeleton beneath the castaway's outstretched hand: starting with the cover image, The Stand Ins it explicitly declares its parallel with The Stage Names. A symmetry that recurs both in the album's structure and in the return of characters and situations already present in the first chapter of the work. "Starry Stairs", previously offered on iTunes as bonus tracks of The Stage Names, revisits with its seductive Motown flavors the dramatic story of porn actress Savannah, seen in "Savannah Smiles" from her parents' point of view and now retold through the protagonist's own eyes. In the same way, the fleeting encounter recounted in "Girl In Port" through the bitter voice of the rock star, in "Blue Tulip" takes on a new perspective through the eyes of the groupie. The relationship between the fan and the object of his obsession is one of the central themes of The Stand Ins: in Sheff's words, the new Okkervil River album aims to explore "what it means to be a fan, what it means to be an artist, what it means to think you know someone based on your love for something they've created". On the bright, lively blossoming of "Lost Coastlines", Okkervil River deliver the final duet between Sheff and Jonathan Meiburg, while the soft ballad "On Tour With Zykos" evokes more than ever the echoes of Down The River Of Golden Dreams. The last mask is that of Bruce Wayne Campbell, who under the stage name Jobriath dreamed of becoming the new David Bowie, before being forever relegated to the limbo of one-hit wonders: another stage name, another of those wonderful failures that populate Okkervil River's imagination. The ideal counterpart to the figure of poet John Berryman, with whom The Stage Namesclosed, "Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof Of The Chelsea Hotel, 1979" begins with the hidden intimacy of a confession, before gaining emphasis and vigor in an epic finale ablaze with horns, marking the return of Zachary Thomas on mandolin. "Take me, I'm yours, morning star ship", invokes Sheff, paraphrasing the titles of Jobriath's songs. A shining spaceship to carry us far away, away from earth and its lies, until we forget the meanness of human nature, immersed in the mysterious glow of the stars. To crown the project, on the occasion of the release of The Stand Ins, in September 2008, the band released on YouTube a series of cover of the album's songs, made by various artist friends: a gallery of exceptional stand-ins, among which stand out the names of A.C. Newman of the New Pornographers and by Bon Iver. The single “Pop Lie”, the following year, offers as b-sides the previously unreleased “Millionaire”, which continues the album's underlying themes (albeit without adding any significant new ideas).  

Won’t you be and bring me home (Roky Erickson)

There are albums that come from far away. Albums in which, even before the music, comes the story they have to tell. Albums that demand you immerse yourself fully in their pages if you really want to capture their essence. In 2010, Okkervil River decided to tell the story of Roky Erickson, the legendary voice of the 13th Floor Elevators, backing him on his first album after fifteen years of silence. True Love Cast Out All Evil is a kind of musical autobiography, the diary of a tormented life forever suspended over the void. More than that, it's a journey to the end of the night, where the darkness of madness ultimately opens onto a search for revelation. The crackle of an old recording seems to emerge out of nowhere, carrying us far away in time and space, within the oppressive walls of a criminal asylum. There's nothing affected lo-fi, about the opening “Devotional Number One”: it's a fragment of lived experience, a direct testimony of the bare-bones sketches recorded with a guitar and a makeshift microphone by Roky Erickson over the years, starting from the day he was first locked up in a psychiatric hospital, in the late Sixties. He would spout disconnected phrases while tripping on acid, and the electroshock and psychotropic drug therapy forced on him at Rusk State Hospital only made things worse: his songs remained the only thing he could keep holding on to. The tracks on True Love Cast Out All Evil come precisely from that archive of forgotten recordings, which a few years earlier had also been drawn on for the acclaimed “Never Say Goodbye”. Will Sheff had around sixty demos to choose from in picking the songs to reinterpret alongside Erickson: he sought out the ones he felt were most emblematic of the life journey of the now sixty-three-year-old icon of American psychedelia, offering the services of Okkervil River as backing band backing band for the occasion. More than an album of new songs, True Love Cast Out All Evil thus comes across as a summa of Erickson's life rendered in the present tense, from the torments of schizophrenia through to the path of a slow rebirth. The album's prologue and epilogue, however, were left by Sheff entirely bare, with the sole addition of a sudden cascade of strings weaving through the voices and background noise. Thus, the invocation of “Devotional Number One” sounds like the cry of a lost soul yearning for the chance to rise again: “Don't wait to Christ to come / He has already risen”. Okkervil River step in almost discreetly, sketching a Kris Kristofferson-style country-folk around the terrible memories evoked in “Ain't Blues Too Sad” by Erickson's gravelly voice: “Electricity hammered me through my head / Till nothing at all was backwards instead”. The collaboration with Okkervil River, bound to Erickson by shared Texan roots, began in 2008, when the band backed him at the Austin Music Awards. Sheff and co. show a willingness to adapt to the personality of each song, from the lively byrdsian flavor of “Bring Back The Past” to the riffs granite-like weight of “John Lawman”, which recalls the hard rock of the albums about aliens and vampires Erickson made in the Eighties. But it's when the band isn't afraid to leave its own mark that the results feel most complete, from the folk tones of “Birds'd Crash” and “Forever” to “Think Of As One”, with a guitar that sounds like it stepped straight out of “The Stage Names” and a horn-and-percussion arrangement that makes it one of the album's most captivating moments. Roky Erickson's previous record, 1995's “All That May Do My Rhyme”, suffered from being overly polished and far too conventional in its execution. Okkervil River, by contrast, approach Erickson's songs with the respect of people who don't want to distort the music of one of their own heroes, but also with the desire to set free every oblique spark of genius, making it sound more relevant than ever. One can't help but think of the care that Mark Linkous devoted to the compositions of another eccentric songwriter, Daniel Johnston, in “Fear Yourself”: an approach closely reminiscent of the one Will Sheff followed in producing “True Love Cast Out All Evil”. The story of True Love Cast Out All Evil is not one of despair: on the contrary, it's a hard-won celebration of hope. That much is suggested by the track that gives the album its title: the demons of the soul can be defeated, evil is not destined to prevail. “I don't usually believe in stories about miracles”, Sheff states in the extensive liner notes from the record (which even earned him a nomination nomination at the 2011 Grammys). “Still, having seen with my own eyes what happened in Roky’s life, I’m surprised to find myself the one vouching for the fact that his redemption is real. It makes me feel small and humble, which is a nice way to feel”. The word thus returns to that unsteady guitar, which stayed faithful even through the most troubled moments of his life. It announces the attainment of a new awareness, which in the grainy echo of Erickson’s voice sheds all rhetoric, to penetrate straight to the fabric of reality: “God is everywhere / Everywhere is where / And everywhere as all positivity”. A splendid madness, the kind that leads you to look at the world through these eyes. The collaborations involving Will Sheff don’t end with his work alongside Roky Erickson: in 2009 the songwriter American writes the subdued ballad “Stuck” for Norah Jones, included on the album “The Fall”. The following year, Sheff lends his voice to the New Pornographers to back the choruses of “Moves”, the opening track of their “Together”record. And his production experience is renewed with the debut album by Bird Of Youth, “Defender”, released in 2011. Everything is ready for a new chapter in the Okkervil River saga.  

A loud crowd crush

There's a time to try to master the waves, and a time to let yourself be swept away by the current. Losing control, surrendering to the flood: the waters of the Okkervil river break their banks, flooding lands, souls and bodies. I Am Very Far it's a flood that pushes you far away, dragging everything along with it: so far that, this time, Will Sheff and his crew seem to lose their way home. Density prevails over restraint, evocation prevails over narrative. “The goal”, to use Sheff’s words, “was to push my mind into places I didn’t want to go”. Places hidden deep within himself, beyond the threshold watched over by the dark figures depicted by Will Schaff on the cover. Like Orpheus beyond the gates of the underworld, never looking back. A certain grandeur has always been part of Okkervil River’s nature: just think of the ambitious concept di Black Sheep Boy and of the pair The Stage Names / The Stand Ins. But I Am Very Far, released in May 2011, wants to go further: to stretch the boundaries, to widen the spaces. “After the last few records I was tired of my own personal version of accessible music”, Sheff explains. “I wanted something that was just for myself and not for other people”. The imperative is to set no limits, even when it means gathering in a studio a “giant band” made up of two drum kits, two pianos, two basses and seven guitars, all playing together within the same walls. The martial stride of “The Valley” strikes immediately with the roar of its accents, swollen by thunderous rhythms and orchestral markings. Then, Sheff’s voice slides over the groove sinuous groove of “Piratess”, giving in to unexpected soul temptations. Where urgency once dominated, now emphasis takes over: the classic crescendo of “We Need A Myth” remains weighed down by cumbersome baroque scaffolding, while the New Pornographers -style gallop of “Rider” sounds like an “Our Life Is Not A Movie Or Maybe” overloaded with choirs, guitars, strings, keyboards and percussion. The break from producer Brian Beattie’s guiding hand (present this time in only a couple of tracks) seems to leave Sheff and co. with a freedom that’s hard to handle. And yet, it’s precisely alongside Beattie that I Am Very Far finds its sharpest moment, when the horns once again trace in backlight the interplay of betrayal and loyalty in “Hanging From A Hit”, framed by choruses of romanticism Cohen-esque. The band’s lineup has also changed compared to a few years earlier, with the permanent addition of Lauren Gurgiolo’s guitar, Justin Sherburn’s keyboards and Cully Symington’s drums. Despite everything, though, Okkervil River’s points of reference remain the same: there’s still the same urgency of Arcade Fire in the sinuous pop of “Your Past Life As A Blast” or in the blend of urgent keyboards and piling percussion of “White Shadow Waltz”; and there's always the grandiloquence of the Bright Eyes (it was “Cassadaga”) in the stentorian declamation of the single “Wake And Be Fine” or in the vehement attack of “The Valley”. “I wanted to go home and start writing again from scratch, as if I'd never written a song before,” Sheff recounts. “The attempt was to reject the idea of writing in a cerebral way, to try to write in an intuitive or emotional way instead”. So, to work on the songs for the new album, Sheff retreats to the depths of the New Hampshire countryside, among the old rooms of his grandparents' house. A place populated by the ghosts of childhood, who surface between the folds of the songs like impalpable presences. It's the red of blood that colors the lyrics of I Am Very Far: blood on murderous blades, blood as the voice of destiny. Violence and passion, forces that override any illusion of control. “Press your ear up to my wrist,” Sheff invokes in “Your Past Life As A Blast”, “The blood is racing someway, going wherever”. In which direction does our blood flow? In which direction do our steps move? What we need is a road, proclaims the manifesto of “We Need A Myth”, not the shadow of a myth destined to vanish on the banks of the Lethe: “We need a path through the mist / Like in our beds we were just kids / Like what was said by our parents”. It would be like rediscovering a steady voice, a voice one could trust without reservation. Two singles serve as a preview of the proper album: “Mermaid” presents a pair of previously unreleased tracks left off the record (the slow, passionate waltz that gives the album its title, and a less incisive “Walked Out A Line”), while “Wake And Be Fine” offers as b-sides the gentle “Weave Room Blues”. At the end of 2011, the band offers up a download free new collection of covers, Golden Opportunities 2. An interlude that reconnects Okkervil River to their most authentic essence, from the ethereal tribute to Ted Lucas on “It Is So Nice To Get Stoned” to the bare-bones rendition of the classic “Dry Bones”, by way of the sturdy take on “Plan D” by Bill Fay. Will Sheff also dusts off his passion for music criticism with a new site personal, one that also makes room for the synth-pop digressions of the project “Lovestreams”. For the return of Okkervil River, we'd have to wait until 2013, and it would head in a decidedly different direction.  

We can never go back, we can only remember

Meriden, New Hampshire, 1986. A remote corner of America, where a fragile, bespectacled, slightly odd-looking boy wanders around. On the town's Main Street, his dog can happily lie around sleeping in the middle of the road all day: cars almost never pass through that sleepy little town buried in the woods. His name is Will, and he's not particularly good at sports, hunting, or relationships in general. For him, the world is a horizon loaded with mystery: and, with the same mix of curiosity and longing as the gang of friends in "Stand By Me", all he wants is to go out and discover it. The concept are certainly nothing new for Okkervil River. But never before had they sounded so personal and autobiographical as on The Silver Gymnasium: a journey to the heart of the 1980s, in which Will Sheff climbs aboard his DeLorean to revisit the places and faces of the town where he grew up. Until he ends up seeing himself reflected in that boy with the thick glasses and the gaze fixed on faraway places. Videotapes, Ataris, Walkmans… The relics of a bygone modernity that surface among the lyrics of The Silver Gymnasium instantly evoke the memories of a generation. But even before the setting, it's the music that guides this search for lost time: giving the songs on The Silver Gymnasium a shimmering patina Eighties, without betraying the personality of Okkervil River's music. Behind the mixer, it's no coincidence, is producer John Agnello, working with the band for the first time, the man behind the success of "Your Love" by the Outfield, which in 1986 broke into the top ten charts in America. And it's a bit like Sheff is taking us on board the old family station wagon of the family, on Sunday mornings on the way to church, when his father would tune in to hit of one of the very few radio stations that could reach all the way to Meriden. The keyboards of "Down Down The Deep River" immediately evoke the Springsteen era “Born In The U.S.A.”, in a triumphant carousel of lyrical flourishes and choral nods. It's the start of a kaleidoscope of Polaroids pulled from the box of memory, in which Sheff proudly brings back to life the golden dreams of the Simple Minds with the contagious emphasis of "Stay Young", before casually slipping into the guise of crooner pop, paying homage to the Jim Reid of "Darklands" over the martial stride of "White". The overloaded tones of I Am Very Far thus give way to a renewed lightness, which seems to want to reconnect with the atmospheres of The Stage Names e The Stand Ins. This time, though, it's the keyboards that are the true protagonists of the album: now with hymn-like solemnity, now with an impalpable creeping presence, as in the tremolos of synth that introduce “Lido Pier Suicide Car.” To find an echo of the old Okkervil River, you have to turn to the familiar flow of “All The Time Every Day”: but the feeling is that times have definitively changed for Sheff and co., and it would be wishful thinking not to acknowledge it. A light piano phrase introduces the nostalgia of “It Was My Season,” recounting the confused back-and-forth of emotions on the ridge between a friendship and something else. The Silver Gymnasium is a collection of stories told through the eyes of a boy still suspended in the limbo between childhood and adolescence – “a little boy in a serious danger of getting old,” to use Sheff's own words in “Walking Without Frankie.” Without idealizing the past, but also capturing its full baggage of anger and uncertainty (“Show me my best memory, it's probably super crappy,” Sheff confesses in “Pink-Slips”). “We can never go back, we can only remember,” proclaims “Down Down The Deep River.” And yet, the longing of “It Was My Season” isn't made of regret: to say yours a season, to say that a moment truly belongs to you, all it takes is the simplicity of recognizing that connection which makes the heart vibrate at its sharpest point, the point of absence. “Open up your heart, show me the place where love is missing”: that's probably the whole secret to staying young forever, right there. “Stay young, stay strong.” Tomorrow can still be our season. For The Silver Gymnasium, Sheff creates an entire universe of imagery vintage: an audiobook, a cassette, a 8-bit video game to venture into among the secrets of the Meriden cemetery, and above all a short film inspired by the classics of 1980s kids' cinema, from “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” to “Navigator.” The vinyl version of the album also offers two unreleased tracks, “Do the Crawl (CBS October 22, 1988)” and “From a Cutlass Cruiser,” which continue the journey through Sheff's memory.  

I thought that it was us against the world  

Die. Be reborn. The eighth Okkervil River album begins with a funeral. A country cemetery, a funeral band with a subdued air, a preacher with his arms raised to the sky. And the body of Will Sheff singing his own passing. “Okkervil River R.I.P.,” announces the track chosen to open the record: an obituary for the past, a prologue for the future. The rites staged in the video are only the first chapter of a new story. Will Sheff is more alive than ever, and “Away” is the act of his own very personal refounding. Sometimes you have to lose everything in order to start over. Reality has to corner you, to convince you to abandon the cages you've built around yourself: “Maybe when things collapse on you, it's because they weren't meant to last,” Sheff reflects. After the release of The Silver Gymnasium, his life undergoes quite a few changes: from the diaspora of his old bandmates to his disillusionment with an increasingly directionless music industry, all the way to the death of his grandfather, T. Holmes “Bud” Moore, in his eyes the last true giant in a world of dwarfs. So Sheff decides to leave everything behind. In complete solitude, in a house in the woods of the Catskill Mountains, his thoughts begin once again to take the shape of songs. Songs written more for himself than for others, without even the certainty that Okkervil River, in the end, would still exist. The requiem carries all of this within it, all the awareness of someone looking in the mirror and trying to recognize their own reflection: an acoustic elegy in which the inexorable passing of time ("I was turning thirty-eight/ I was a horrible sight") is veiled by the shadow of mortality. The folk singer Judee Sill, the standard-bearers of Eighties r&b Force MDs: Sheff evokes the fate of their voices, all of which were lost before their time. And he thinks of death arriving unexpectedly, snapping the delicate thread of dreams and plans. The passing of a loved one, after a long and full life. The inner death that takes away a part of oneself. The crescendo slowly builds its way forward, between the punctuation of the piano and the drone of the bass. Once it would have flowed into the catharsis of an anthem; today it remains suspended in an aura of melancholy contemplation. Because Away, released in September 2016, is an album that reveals itself with restraint, avoiding the most obvious shortcuts: the songs stretch out, following the intuition of the moment, giving themselves over to improvisation, searching for a warmth capable of nourishing and healing. "I put together the best New York musicians I could think of," Sheff recalls, "people whose playing and personality I loved, who mostly had a jazz or avant-garde background." The new Okkervil River thus move away from the familiar coordinates of indie rock, pursuing instead the Van Morrison di “Astral Weeks” or the revival psych-folk of Jonathan Wilson (fittingly brought in to handle the album's mixing). Indeed, starting with the cover art, Away shows that it speaks a different language from the past: for the first time it's not William Schaff's angular style illustrating an Okkervil River album, but the soft naturalism of Wisconsin painter Tom Uttech. Only the delicate arpeggio of "Comes Indiana Through The Smoke" seems to bring memory back, drawing directly on the atmospheres of Down The River Of Golden Dreams, with the echo of a trumpet underlining the unfolding of one of the album's most crystalline melodies. It's the trumpet belonging to Sheff's grandfather, a World War II veteran, school principal and (not least) accomplished jazz musician. The song is dedicated to him, to his passing, and to the ghost of the battleship USS Indiana, the ship on which he served in the Pacific, which as if in a dream re-emerges from the fog to ferry him into the great mystery on the other side. The album's seemingly most lighthearted moment, "The Industry," is paradoxically also the bitterest and most personal of them all: "The cheaper that the music starts to get/ It's like they're trying to make us cheap along with it," Sheff confesses, observing the state of the music world with a mix of disillusionment and frustration. All that seems to remain of the old drive is the arithmetic of Pitchfork scores: “Do you remember, baby, back in ’96?/ When some record was enough to make you raise your fist?/ When some singer ’d make you sure that you exist?”. "Just let go" is the answer as the supple stride of "The Industry" fades out. Letting go of the past, letting go of who you've loved and who has deceived you, letting go of everything that imprisons life. Casting off fear. And, finally, finding your own place in the world. "I'm not scared to die as long as I know that the universe has something really to do with me."

Now I’m ready to withdraw

For their part, the lyrics, oozing fatalism, regret and fear, mostly come across as opaque, with few real flashes of insight, dominated by a weariness that at times tries to be self-deprecating. What (almost) always convinces, though, is the voice, which drops the usual asthmatic Robert Smith poses to wrap itself in a velvety falsetto that, in various doses, once belonged to Elvis Costello, Mark Hollis and even Antony, but with such a languor and fragility that it creates an almost pathetic contrast with the restless testosterone of the instrumental backing, as if the singer himself were the first to feel out of place in the middle of it all: the impression of a none-too-well-orchestrated self-parody often becomes so insistent that it's embarrassing. There's precious little magic in work so meticulously calculated, and closing it by declaring that he "believes in love" barely moves the needle on credibility.

It's no coincidence, then, that in 2022 Will Sheff's return arrives for the first time without the Okkervil River name on the cover. And the title of his debut solo album could only be Nothing Special. That is, the bonfire of egotism, of arrogance, and of all the resentment toward the world that follows from it. It all starts with a dialogue with a shadow. The shadow of an old friend, a fellow traveler: Travis Nelsen, Okkervil River's drummer during the band's golden years, who passed away in the spring of 2020. Their paths had parted long before, but whatever had bound them together had stayed alive, hidden away somewhere. The title track is dedicated to him, and to what Sheff learned from the past. It's a fable told through delicate arpeggios, narrated in the manner of Sufjan Stevens: “It’s once upon a time/ I rode with a friend of mine/ Side by side on the conquerors’ route”. It speaks of the desire that pulses through youth, of its defeat and its metamorphosis. Above all, it speaks of the freedom of knowing how to let things go: “It’s time to say it’s done/ I’m not getting what I want/ When I’ve lost it, I’m finally free/ To be nothing special”. "Dealing with the grief was very complicated for me," Sheff admits, "because it was also grief for the foolish dream we shared. It really was something sweet, naive, childish, beautiful and destructive. I needed it to be something I was no longer interested in." Tellingly, Jonathan Meiburg's voice also lends him support on the track. Across the eight tracks of Nothing Special, Sheff seems to want to trace the Okkervil river back to its source: "The Spiral Season," with its passionate, choral surges, could belong to The Stage Names or to The Silver Gymnasium; in the dreamy piano that cradles the melody of "In The Thick Of It" you can hear echoes of the ballads of Black Sheep Boy, with a pace Cohen-esque accompanied by the voice of Cassandra Jenkins; the atmospheric abstractions of tracks like "Estrangement Zone" and "Holy Man" bear the mark of the explorations of Away. After all, it's precisely Away (with its “Okkervil River R.I.P.”) was the preview of the solo choice that Nothing Special brings to fruition. Having put behind him the misstep of In The Rainbow Rain, Sheff returns to give voice to his more singer-songwriter soul, without sparing a few lashes at his own excesses (““You give me a dollar/ I’ll do some or all/ Of my perfectly middlebrow blues”, he jokes in “In The Thick Of It”). Alongside him is a fixed trio of collaborators (dubbed the Dirty Shitty Dirt Boys), who don't just act as backing band, but also co-write several songs on the album with Sheff: Christian Lee Hutson (perhaps the songwriter of the millennial generation who, more than anyone, has inherited the spirit of the indie artists of the early 2000s), Benjamin Lazar Davis and Will Graefe (both already part of the final incarnation of Okkervil River). The album's atmospheres reflect California, where Sheff relocated after leaving New York. Not the sun-drenched California of Instagram postcards, though, but a nostalgic, autumnal California, better suited to a Midwestern son like Sheff. Indeed, he recounts having conceived his new songs while wandering among the headstones of the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, as can also be seen in the video for “In The Thick Of It”. Between the abrasive twists of “Like The Last Time” and the ethereal drapery of “Marathon Girl”, the closer “Evidence” stretches out softly in search of some secret form of universal awareness: “Anything is full of everything/ No coincidence, enter it in evidence”. In the background is a reverb of horns, while the vocals turn hypnotic, almost like a litany. Every breath of the world reveals its own uniqueness, Sheff seems to suggest in his most mystical mode, once you let go of the conviction that you're the only special thing at the center of reality. “The world's holding you realer and realer/ Realer and realer, you sweet, sweet feeler”.   If Nothing Special had been conceived without yet knowing whether it would be credited to the old band or to Sheff alone, and still bore the Okkervil River stamp, its follow-up Extra Mile, released in 2026, is a different matter: “It was like a blank canvas,” Sheff explains. “I asked myself who really wanted to be ‘Will Sheff’, and that question led me to bigger questions: what does it mean to be something, a living being breathing under the starry sky, without knowing where it comes from or where it's going. It's one of the most musically adventurous things I've ever done”. A few piano notes, a defenseless falsetto. Then, slowly, the outlines of the title track come into sharper focus, the orchestration more elaborate. “I threw into a game that I'll never win/ And I blew it, so screw it, I'll start again”, sings Sheff, returning to one of his recurring themes, the meaning of defeat. By his side once again are Will Graefe and Benjamin Lazar Davis, but the list of collaborators grows longer (from Peter Silberman of the Antlers a A.C. Newman). On the closing track, “Ancient Tourist”, there's even a choir made up of Sheff's supporters on Patreon…   Everything on the album seems to float in space, suspended in an atmospheric, evocative dimension: compared to the rest of the Okkervil River discography, it's the landscapes of Away that come to mind, though with a more intangible soul, a more ethereal substance. Over the menacing visions of “Devastation”, the interplay with Saundra Williams's voice coils like a spell or an invocation, while the trajectory of “Funny Feeling” heads into psychedelic constellations, “a sort of space rollercoaster ride” – to use Sheff's words – “through what it means to be a soul born into a body”. The songs on “Extra Mile” don't give themselves up easily, as always when Sheff decides to explore his more oblique calling. Only the scraps of melody in “Always Everything” seem to evoke choruses of times past, with Jenn Wasner's company aka Flock Of Dimes, before flowing into an abrasive guitar coda. To find the album's more singer-songwriter side, you have to turn to the bitterness-streaked textures of “Friends” or – even more so – to the soft arpeggios of “Lapsed Catholic”, where the flow of things seems to drag everything along with it (“Nothing going to stay the same, it's writ/ Everything will take you down with it”). And yet, within the sense of disproportion in the face of the vastness of the world that runs through the whole record, something seems to keep resisting entropy: “Fumbling our way past shame toward grace”, Sheff repeats at the song's core. The path of grace is the most hidden path.   The emotional tension of Will Sheff and Okkervil River continues to speak an unmistakable language: dense with literary allusions, aware of the tradition it belongs to, open to indie, it has inserted itself with all the force of its personality into the track of Bright Eyes, Decemberists e Arcade Fire, blending intimacy and aggression into something stream of consciousness pulsing and visceral. Having escaped the trap of compositional bulimia that snared many songwriter of their generation, Okkervil River have preferred to focus on the nuances of an increasingly complex musical fabric. Even today, every note in their songbook carries a promise that echoes the one whispered in the closing lines of “Get Big”: “Once we get to the end of this song, then another will begin”. Contributions by Ossydiana Speri (“In The Rainbow Rain”)