WILL SHEFF - Extra Mile

A summer wind blows at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. On one side, Los Angeles; on the other, the Mojave Desert. Up on Mount Baldy, Leonard Cohen withdrew into his Zen hermitage. In a cabin at the base of the mountains, Will Sheff lived out his own personal musical hermitage, dreaming up the sound of “Extra Mile”. It's the second time he's signed an album under his own full name, four years after “Nothing Special”. But it's the first time he's decided to venture into open water, far from more familiar shores, without the shelter of Okkervil River.

"Nothing Special" had been conceived without yet knowing whether it would be credited to the old band or to Sheff alone, and it still bore the imprint of Okkervil River. "Extra Mile" is a different matter: "It was like a blank canvas," Sheff explains. "I asked myself who actually 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 contours of the title track come into sharper focus, the orchestrations grow 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, picking up one of his recurring themes: the sense of defeat. By his side once again are his partners in crime from "Nothing Special": Will Graefe on guitar, who co-writes several tracks on the album, and Benjamin Lazar Davis on bass. But the list of collaborators keeps growing, from Christian Lee Hutson to Peter Silberman of Antlers, taking in A.C. Newman and Thor Harris. In the closing track, "Ancient Tourist", there's even a choir made up of Sheff's Patreon supporters…

Everything on the album seems to float in space, suspended in an atmospheric and evocative dimension: compared to the rest of Okkervil River's discography, it's the landscapes of "Away" that come to mind, though with a more impalpable soul, a more ethereal substance.
Over the menacing visions of "Devastation", the interplay with Saundra Williams's voice coils around itself like a kind of spell or invocation, while the trajectory of "Funny Feeling" heads off toward psychedelic constellations, "a sort of space rollercoaster ride" - in 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 is always the case when Sheff decides to indulge his more oblique instincts. Only the melodic fragments of "Always Everything" seem to hark back to the choruses of old, with Jenn Wasner aka Flock Of Dimes along for the ride, before spilling into an abrasive guitar coda.
For the album's more singer-songwriter-leaning side, look to the bitterness-streaked textures of "Friends" or - even more so - the soft arpeggios of "Lapsed Catholic", where the flow of things seems to sweep everything along with it ("Nothing going to stay the same, it's writ/ Everything will take you down with it"). And yet, amid the sense of disproportion in the face of the vastness of the world that runs through the whole record, something still seems to resist entropy: "Fumbling our way past shame toward grace," Sheff repeats at the heart of the song. The path of grace is the most hidden one of all.

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15/08/2026