Will Sheff tests the waters of Okkervil River
With the first song on his new album, Will Sheff buries his band.
He formed Okkervil River, a lyrics-first rock band with some tastefully folksy and rough punky underpinnings, about 18 years ago. Players have come and gone since, more than a dozen of them, and after the release of “The Silver Gymnasium” three years ago, Okkervil River was, once again, just Sheff.
He continued to write songs, and found a new set of players to record them, and came out with “Away.” That new album, which will be released Sept. 9, opens with the song “Okkervil River R.I.P.”
So Okkervil River is dead, long live Okkervil River.
Not surprisingly, Sheff — a sensitive and thoughtful writer who named his band after a Russian short story — spent a lot of time thinking about the group’s demise and its rebirth.
“I went back and forth wondering, ‘Is this album even an Okkervil River album?’ ” he says. “It wasn’t intended to be. But it’s mine. And I guess I’ve gone through my life working with musicians, a style of writing and an audience, and it started to calcify. And I didn’t want it to. So I thought I’d crack everything apart.
“In doing so, this one reminds me some of the first Okkervil River record. So I didn’t see any point in calling it something else. Because it is Okkervil River. And at the same time, it’s not. It’s a paradox. Not a negative thing or a positive thing. It’s both; death and life together.”
Fittingly, Sheff tagged the album with the shortest title among the nine he’s made as Okkervil River, and also the one most open to interpretation. “Away” could be an exile or a journey, a dismissal or a longing, or parts of all those things.
“I knew I wanted a homely word that was very pretty and that was hiding in plain sight,” he says.
“Away” appears in a couple of the album’s choruses. But it also, in a way, unites Sheff ’s work.
He’s a New Hampshire native who went to college in Minnesota before settling in Austin, where he started the band. The time there explains Okkervil’s place in the Texas Heritage Festival this weekend at the White Oak Music Hall. (Okkervil should be back later this year for a show on its own.)
Sheff has since moved back to the northeast, settling in New York, where he’s a short walk from “a little park near my apartment by the East River. It’s like a little beach, but it’s dirty and gross. But when I really need to really think about music, to
feel it, I need to be moving.”
His art imitates his life. Whether he’s writing from a fictional perspective or a personal one, Sheff is drawn to characters in motion, either physically or emotionally. Sometimes he would create a grotesque fairy-talelike character, like the titular “Black Sheep Boy” from a standout 2005 album, to voice his love and anguish. Other times he’d step into the shoes of someone real, like the brilliant and doomed poet John Berryman. Parallels to the work of Lou Reed aren’t necessarily obvious, but the new song “Mary on a Wave” underscores commonalities.
Regardless of the point of view, Okkervil River records often simmer with unease, sporadically reaching boiling points — his voice rising from murmur to that of a tormented librarian.
The path to writing “Away” was a crooked one for Sheff, who was dealing with a dissipated band, severed long-term business relationships and the death of a beloved
family elder. But he came away from the experience with a cathartic sense of relief. Three years ago, he charted his childhood with “The Silver Gymnasium,” an album that simmered with the urgency of youth. “Away” almost plays like a film negative of that record, positive and negative spaces swapped. It’s informed more with weary wisdom.
“Often, making records is my attempt to sweat out the poison,” Sheff says. “I think of ‘The Silver Gymnasium’ as the work of an unhappy person. I love that record, but I felt like I was stealing this level of nostalgia that was morbid and painful. But with this one, I feel like nostalgia doesn’t hurt me any more. It’s like there was this giant terrifying Easter Island head with a Groucho Marx nose and glasses. But it’s assumed its proper form again. There’s no more (expletive) around. I can’t put on a face. I just have to make the most beautiful art I possibly can. I don’t want to mess with it, nothing diluted will do.”
Sheff speaks about both the lyrics and the album’s sound. Of the nine songs, none are under four minutes, and four exceed seven minutes. They’re long, but naturally so. Without seeming meandering, they feel like musical short stories. Still, he had to convince himself they worked.
So he loaded them onto his “clunky old iPod classic,” and walked to his dingy New York park along the river, listening to the sound of a band he buried and reinvented.
“The sun was going down, and they made me happy,” he says. “They made me feel happier than anything I had made in so long. It’s very different for me. But I realized I hadn’t (messed) it up, basically. And that was a good feeling.”