This is our party, and you’re invited: In conversation with Okkervil River

25 April 2011, 11:00

In a short leisure period ahead of the heavy touring scheduled in support of his band’s sixth album, I Am Very Far, Okkervil River frontman Will Sheff was in London for a rare solo show. A few hours before he was due on stage at St Pancras Old Church, I met him at the London offices of Secretly Canadian, and over the kindly-provided cups of coffee and biscuits, we discussed his band, self-censorship, folk mythologies, and 1970’s Hanna-Barbera cartoons.

How are you enjoying London so far? Done any great English things, like joining in a protest?

Haha. Yeah, the protests were going on right outside a pub we were in, it was kinda crazy. We hid out at the Tate Modern yesterday.

Perhaps not the best weekend for you to be in town.

I guess I should have joined in, I mean, those guys are marching for a good cause. I didn’t want to seem insincere though. Seriously though, I love London, I always have a great time here. A lot of American bands I think don’t like it so much, because where in America the worst you’ll get is apathy, here there can be a lot more hostility…

You seem to get a lot of love from the fans over here though. I saw you play at the Scala in 2007, and the atmosphere was incredible. And you seem to love performing. What I really loved about your show was how much you put into it, you really seem to enjoy being on stage.

Totally! I love performing. What’s strange is that I never really wanted to be a “performer”, and it took me a while to get used to the fact that it’s what I was. It didn’t happen gradually either, it happened literally in the space of two days. We did one gig one night and the crowd were great and they loved the show, and the next night we had a really shitty audience, one of the worst we’ve ever had. Something about the contrast between the two is what really made me accept being a performer, it just clicked for me after that and I was able to just get up there and enjoy it.

Maybe it helped you understand that the fault wasn’t with you or your music, but just with the attitude of an audience?

No, I don’t think so, for me I think I just block out the audience entirely when I’m preparing for a show. We have a great job, and I’m on stage playing music with my friends, and if we’re having a good time up there then I think the fans will. When we’re on stage and you’re in the audience, it’s like, this is our party, and you’re invited, but it’s not going to be your party.

I’ve had your new record, I Am Very Far, for a few days now, and I’ve not really listened to much else. I remember that when The Stage Names was released, something on the Jagjaguwar press release compared it to Arcade Fire, and I didn’t really get that at all. I think the comparison is a lot fairer here.

No way did The Stage Names get compared to Arcade Fire on a Jagjaguwar press release!

Yeah! They were quoting someone else, it wasn’t their own words… I don’t really remember more than that.

Haha, that one must have slipped by me. Anyway, we’ve been going for five or six years longer than the Arcade Fire have, so if anything they’re probably stealing from us. I’m just kidding. I love their stuff, I saw their performance at the Grammys this year and thought it was incredible, but while I think maybe we’re trying to do similar things — we’re both bands who really believe in the power of music to do something, to say something — I think there are also big, important differences between us.

But would you agree that there is an attempt to change your sound, to redirect things a bit here? In recent months Iron & Wine and Destroyer have both released records that could comfortably be described as adult-oriented rock, they have a lot of that 70’s soft-rock about them, and I think there’s some of that on here.

Sure. I mean, I know Dan , and we’re both influenced by very similar things. Last time I was talking to Dan, we discussed this cartoon that was on when we were kids, in the 70s, called Thundarr the Barbarian, and it was this really crappy Hanna Barbera Saturday-morning cartoon. It was silly, really, but I remember that this post-apocalyptic version of New York, with these plants growing everywhere, consuming the city, really did something to me as a kid, it was a pretty dark show in some ways and it had this bizarre, really dark soundtrack. I think a lot of what this album is about, just like what Dan was trying to do, is assimilating those, things, like Thundarr the Barbarian, that had a huge influence on you in childhood but then you almost forget about as you grow older. I mean, I didn’t sit there watching Thundarr the Barbarian and thinking “I’m gonna write a song about this”, but its influence comes back around.

I think this is certainly your most nostalgic record.

Definitely, definitely our most nostalgic record. I’m really interested in looking into what really influences people, because I think when you look beyond the stuff that people consciously are influenced by, you can be surprised. I’m definitely influenced by stuff that I heard on the radio all the time when I was a kid, some crappy top forty song that I heard way more than anything else when I was growing up. I’m a massive Hall & Oates fan, and while they might not be hugely credible, they definitely influenced what I do, they were a great pop band. Then there’s bands like Steely Dan who I heard recently again, after hearing them all the time when I was a kid, and you just go, fuck, this is a great band.

You’ve been playing ‘Wake and Be Fine’ in promos, and it’s going to be the lead single. There are tracks on here that have much more in common with your older sound, I’m thinking of stuff like ‘Lay of the Last Survivor’, which could easily be a cut from either of the last two records. Was this a conscious decision to put the record forward as something of a departure?

In a way, I think so. I think what no-one wants to hear is a band just finding a sound and playing it out for four albums in a row, each one getting less and less interesting. There are bands I know that do that and it’s just not interesting and certainly not something I’m interested in doing. You need to keep pushing your own boundaries, to make it interesting for yourself as much as anything.

I think there’s a danger that if you don’t evolve your sound, you’re only ever going to appeal to the cult audience who enjoyed your sound to begin with.

Maybe, but I don’t really worry about that. I think if you’re doing something you feel comfortable doing, that’s fine, but you shouldn’t ever do something because you think it’ll win a certain set of fans or whatever.

And what about the title? The titles of your records often establish a theme or a concept; so far I don’t get the sense that this one does.

No, it doesn’t, really. I mean, with Black Sheep Boy, that title really tells you everything about that record, and to some extent with The Stage Names too. But here, I guess I didn’t want people going, “oh, it’s another concept record from Okkervil River”. I actually don’t think we’ve ever really done a ‘concept album’, but like you say, when the title provides you with such a strong theme it’s an easy assumption to make. These songs all have something in common, they’re definitely of a set, but I don’t think there are the same recurring elements as there were certainly on the last three records. The title isn’t a “skeleton key” to the meaning of the album.

There’s a balance between the personal and the fictional, story-telling element to your music. You’ve sung songs about fellow musicians — Tim Hardin and Jobriath — and you’ve sung as a murderer, a porn-star, as a porn-star’s father…

Ha, yeah. The problem I’ve always had with the personal aspect is that if you’re just bitching about your break-up or whining about your problems, that’s all your doing. No-one is really interested and you’re not taking the listener on a journey. But I think, as a songwriter, you have to be in there somewhere. That advice, “write about what you know”, well, it’s pretty much impossible not to, actually. And I think sometimes there’s more of me than you might think… there’s probably more personal stuff, more of me, in something like ‘Starry Stairs’ than in an autobiographical song I wrote.

You write frequently about song-writing and about story-telling. ‘Pop Lie’, from The Stand-Ins, and ‘We Need a Myth,’ from the new record, probably occupy totally different sides of that spectrum of the dangers and the benefits of story-telling.

Yeah, it comes from that folk tradition and, y’know, I think that pop culture has a lot in common with mythology. Before, you had this high-culture, starched-white-collar thing, going to the opera or whatever, and underneath that you had the popular songs that got passed around, and they were passing around myths and legends. We do need mythology and story-telling, it provides us with morals and all kinds of things. The story of 20th century music is the story of how that kind of music — folk, the blues — went from being underground to being the popular culture of the day. Someone like Bob Dylan or Woody Guthrie, right at the centre of that transition, they were taking folk melodies and folk songs that had been around for hundreds of years, and interpolating their own lyrics into that. In a way, hip-hop is the real inheritor of that now, so much of hip-hop is about borrowing and sampling, and re-interpreting. And some people don’t like that, but to me, I’ve always seen it as a sign of a healthy culture. So that’s kinda what ‘We Need a Myth’ is about.

I was reading yesterday about this culture of ‘misery memoirs’, about a new memoir, Tiger Tiger, by someone who was abused as a child and her account of that, and one of the most popular books of last year was Emma Donoghue’s Room, based on the Josef Fritzl case. To me, there is something slightly exploitative about these things. I was wondering if you felt there were any boundaries you wouldn’t cross, if there is any responsibility on your part to censor what you sing about? Or do you feel that anything is acceptable if it’s done in the right way?

Um… I don’t think so. I mean recently I’ve been reading a lot about this genre of ‘female revenge’ in films, like this new film Sucker Punch, where the female characters get degraded in the film itself and depicted so horribly by the film-maker, but it’s okay because the woman gets to kick some ass at the end, and to me that’s just disgusting. But I don’t want to get all holier-than-thou, telling people what they can and can’t create art about. I think if you deal with something sensitively and do it well, there shouldn’t have to be any boundaries. I mean, look… people are not good, I am not a good person. I try and do things better, all the time, but I know that often people are hurt because of me or I do things wrong, sometimes just by me being alive. And sometimes you have to depict that, that there is something about the human condition that is fundamentally not good. It’s like, there’s this Randy Newman song… well, the basis for a lot of Randy Newman songs actually is like “the world sucks, people suck… And I’m pretty crappy too.” I think sometimes to be real you have to write like that.

So in a song like ‘Black’, for example, which deals with some pretty dark themes…

‘Black’ is a perfect example. Where that comes from is that… basically, any guy who’s ever dated a girl has dated someone who has had something horrible happen to them. I can pretty much guarantee that. The world shits on women all the time, it’s pretty much a shitty place to be for half the population. ‘Black’ is about a guy trying to come to terms with this horrible thing that happened to someone he loves, and realising that he’s just a footnote — that he’s not even a footnote — in this awful thing, and he can’t do anything to help this person he cares about. I don’t think it’s controversial, but I do think that music, and all art, really, should scare you, it should hit these exposed nerves that maybe we are scared to talk about.

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There is something very cinematic about I Am Very Far, the songs are much more dynamic and “sweeping” than anything you’ve written before.. In contrast, I see Black Sheep Boy as a very novelistic record, it’s all about subtlety and I think it moves more organically than I Am Very Far, which is more of a rollercoaster from song to song.

Yeah. I tend not to draw a distinction between the arts like that. I mean, when I’m talking about it I do, obviously, but in my head it’s like… there’s no difference between a novel and a film and a record, really. They’re all just a part of a wider thing we term “culture” I guess.

When I was growing up I didn’t explicitly want to be a musician, I had no idea what I wanted to do, I just knew I wanted to be an artist. I knew I wanted to create something but I didn’t really know what. In the end I chose music because for me it was the easiest. Sometimes an interviewer will ask me “what’s your favourite record” and I’ll just be like “Doctor Zhivago!” Everything’s confused like that in my head. Obviously Black Sheep Boy has a through-line and there these are recurring characters and elements, so inevitably it feels more like a continuous story.

As for I Am Very Far being cinematic, I guess part of that is the Scott Walker influence. He was really into Michel Legrand and all that stuff and that’s what influenced him, and he was definitely a big influence on this record. It’s definitely a “bigger” album than we’ve ever done before. It’s the first album of ours that I’ve produced completely by myself, so I guess I was more willing to play around with some of the sounds in that respect, take a few more risks than I might have wanted to in the past.

So this is the first record of yours that doesn’t feature Jonathan Meiburg , and yet, I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but this is probably the closest that an Okkervil River album has come to sounding like a Shearwater record.

Oh, Jonathan is on there… not much, and he doesn’t tour with us anymore, but I tend to get him in when I need someone to do a very high close-harmony. He’s good at that. Haha. But yeah, I guess that’s fair, me and Jonathan have very similar tastes in many ways, and even if he’s not ‘officially’ a member of Okkervil River, he’s still a big influence on what we do. I mean, the reason for the split wasn’t any kind of acrimony, it was entirely due to it being too much to handle being in two bands at once, for him and me. And also, we didn’t want people talking about Okkervil every time they talked about Shearwater, we wanted them to have distinct identities. But I still like to think that he has a little Will in his head that he talks to, asking “is this any good?”, because I know I’ve got a little Jonathan in mine.

You’re someone who does seem to enjoy collaborating with other artists — recently you’ve worked with Carl Newman, Charles Bissell and obviously Roky Erikson last year. Is there less pressure in collaboration for you?

Yeah, I do enjoy it. Obviously working with other people helps you get out of your own limited set of ideas in a way, but also I find, yeah, there’s less pressure involved. The Roky project in particular, I was just like, you know what, I’m not going to stress or worry about every little detail on this record, like I tend to with Okkervil, I’m just going to do what sounds good, go with instinct. It was the way Roky wanted it, he has this incredible energy when you’re doing anything with him, and it wouldn’t have worked so well if I’d approached it like an Okkervil record. And I’m really proud of that record, plus it gave me the confidence and the desire to produce I Am Very Far myself. So this album wouldn’t have been what it is without the experience of working with Roky.

And I guess tonight’s show is something different again for you — a rare solo appearance. How is that different for you?

I tend to view solo shows more like a recitation than a performance, like I’ll elaborate a song, I’ll take things in a different direction, probably fuck up a lot more… haha. You’re not relying on other people and they’re not relying on you. I would love to do a whole solo album, in many ways, but then… I get to play with Okkervil River every day. Why would I want to do something without them?