Will Sheff Talks Okkervil River's Stage Names
"I happen to like troglodyte rock and rollers better than I like highbrow artistes. I would feel like I failed on some level if our music wasn't just good rock and roll that you could enjoy."

Photo by Jean-Marc Luneau

With new LP The Stage Names set for August 7 release on Jagjaguwar, Okkervil River frontman Will Sheff took some time out of his busy schedule for a lengthy telephone chat. Topics touched upon included experimental film, self-fulfilling song prophecies, adopting an "asshole" persona, so-called "lit rock", and the unlikely point where professional basketball and indie rock collide.

Before we dive in, a few news-bytes: Okkervil rock a Noise for the Needy benefit in Seattle on June 10, while Will (with band) plays his first gig ever in his home state of New Hampshire on July 14. A full-fledged tour will likely follow the album's release.

Pitchfork: There seems to be a running obsession with different kinds of performance on The Stage Names, with repeated references to film, theater, and live music throughout. How did you come upon that theme?

Will Sheff: I think one of the things that Okkervil River has always had is this weird kind of antiquated feeling to it, and I really wanted to make this record feel modern. I think that was actually the number one thing I started with: the idea that I wanted the people in this album to be living right now. I wanted this album to be born in the late 20th century; I wanted this album to take place in the contemporary world. And certain things that have to do with entertainers and entertainment kind of just came along with that. That was kind of like my key into a lot of those themes.

Pitchfork: So once you had that key, where did you go from there?

WS: There's this weird little thing about writing, to me, that I almost think about as-- let's say you're loading film into a film movie camera, and you have to do it in the dark, so you have these little tents that you put your hands inside and you can't see what you're doing. And so, at a certain point, what are you going to look at? You can't look at anything, so you just stare into space while your hands are feeling around, trying to figure out a way to thread this film into the mechanism. And I think about that when I figure out how to write a song and assemble a record. There's this weird thing that I do where my hands, so to speak, know what to do, but I can't look at it too much. If I start to think about it-- like sit down and think about it and piece it out in a really cerebral way-- it all starts to fall apart or I start to ruin it.

I really start to think about how everything I could possibly do has been done by somebody else and how little new stuff, arguably, there is to do... but of course the point is to do things, to feel that thrill, to feel like you're doing something for the first time.

Pitchfork: From the sound of it, you've had first-hand experience with film-making.

WS: My parents were both prep school teachers. I grew up on the grounds of a prep school in New England-- a really, really small town, and the school was the only thing there. I was raised in the dorm, and ate every meal at the high school cafeteria.

And my dad, he wanted to be an experimental filmmaker. You know there was this new cinema movement in the 50s, with people like Stan Brakhage and Kenneth Anger who came out of Maya Deren in the 40s. My dad wanted to be that kind of guy, but he had some really difficult experiences with the poverty of it early on and he had kind of shelved it, and he was teaching at this school.

But he taught a film class, and in lieu of babysitting me all the time I would go to the little auditorium the school had and sit there and watch these films and watch my dad talk about film. And I think that the combination of my dad having been an aspiring filmmaker-- and also myself having been at a very early age, sitting in this quiet room and listening to the whirring projector-- it kind of made me want to be a filmmaker. Actually I wanted to be a filmmaker far before I ever wanted to be a musician.

Pitchfork: But you decided against film in the end. Why was that?

WS: I decided not to do it in college. I don't really know why, I think it was just a contrary thing, or it seemed like there was a whole lot of money that was involved in film, and it still seems that way. I have filmmaker friends whose lived are consumed by trying to raise money. They spend five years trying to make a movie and it's such a difficult thing and then it comes out, and it's been five years or something, and if anyone sees it it's just and hour and a half of their life and then they sort of brush it off or go on imdb.com and say 'that sucked' or whatever. So I dunno, I feel like it's a discouraging thing. I think that was what scared me away from it in college.

Pitchfork: Getting back to The Stages Names, you sound more confident on this record than before, both as a songwriter and a vocalist. Do you feel more confident?

WS: Yeah, I feel that way. I mean it's good to hear you say that, because sometimes it's frustrating because when I listen back to earlier records, I get disappointed with my voice. I'm like, 'Ah man, I wish that I could sing better.' I really liked the songs that I was writing when I started out, but nobody knew who the fuck I was or cared, so it was this thing where it was like, 'Well, I'm going to have to sing these songs because nobody else is going to sing them.' And when I listen back I realize that I didn't even know how unnatural of a singer I was. But I just kept on doing what I was doing, and after nine years of doing it [laughs], I should be a better singer, hopefully, than when I started.

Pitchfork: Tell us a little about "Plus Ones" [A Stage Names song in which Sheff uses the titular formula to riff on classic song titles/lyrics from ? & the Mysterians, the Zombies, the Commodores, Paul Simon, R.E.M., and others]. From just a songwriting perspective, that's quite an impressive tune.

WS: I think it was the last day of SXSW, and I was in that... you know how the last day you don't even want to see music anymore? You're tired, you're hungover, and you're still having a good time, but nothing's really registering anymore. I wrote that song the last day of SXSW. I was sitting around and [listening to ? and the Mysterians'] '96 Tears' and later that night I was lying in bed trying to sleep and I started thinking, '97 Tears, 97 Tears'-- and it started cracking me up. What about a song called '97 Tears', wouldn't that be really stupid? And then it kind of came to me: 'No one wants to hear about your 97th tear' and I just sat up and I wrote about 75% of the song. It was really fast after I had that idea.

I think if I hadn't been so worn out by SXSW, I probably would've stopped myself, because that song is so cheeky. I was worried about people's reaction to ['Plus Ones'] because I love it, but it was kind of my attempt to write a novelty song, in some ways-- a kind of punning, silly thing-- but in the end, to bring it around and have it have a serious theme. That's one of my favorite songs on the record, but some people, like the producer of our record [Brian Beattie], hate that song [laughs].

Pitchfork: Really?

WS: Yeah, he was saying that we can't put it on the record because it's just terrible. He said it was like 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' by Bob Dylan, and I was like, 'Well I like that song, jerk!' [laughs]

Pitchfork: On the new album, you often sing in the first person, but about things that don't necessarily read as first-hand experiences.

WS: A lot of people write songs about things that happen to them-- and I don't really do that. I sometimes do, but if I do I usually tend to mess it around so that it's not very autobiographical anymore. And I also write more imaginative songs or songs where the details have all been fudged. But I have noticed this thing where sometimes what I write about happens to me after I write about it, and I've been joking about that for a time. There've been many songs that I've written that've been very painful for me to sing live because exactly what I wrote about happened like a year later, in a much more thrilling way [laughs]. So my whole joke for this record was that I was going to write a lot of songs about being a big famous rock n roll star, and being rich and all that, and that was going to become my self-fulfilling prophecy if I wrote about it in advance.

I really am not a big fan of autobiographical writing, and I think it's only worth it if you can use the fact that the 'I' of an autobiographical song is easy to steer people in a certain direction or to mislead them or something like that-- that's a powerful thing. And I kind of like that aspect of an autobiographical song, but to me it's kind of like this illusory, fictionalized, self-incriminating version of myself.

Pitchfork: Is there a song in particular that was especially prescient, and that you guys aren't playing anymore?

WS: Well, we've stopped singing 'Kansas City' [off Don't Fall in Love With Everyone You See], which was an old staple of our set. But that was just because we'd done it like a million freaking times.

Pitchfork: I think every time I've seen you you guys, you've played that and the crowd's gone nuts for it.

WS: Yeah, and it's tough not playing a song the crowd goes nuts for, but after a certain point you have to be like, 'We have to succeed on our current merits, and not on some song that's six years old or however long it is, that we know is going to make people enjoy it.'

'Kansas City', that was a breakup song that I wrote and a lot of breakup stuff happened later that happened in that song to me. But by the time we stopped playing it I had beaten any emotion that I could feel from that song to death-- actually, that's not true. I still was feeling it, but nobody else in the band really was, so that was why we decided to do that.

Pitchfork: Raw emotion certainly seems like a hallmark of Okkervil's music, both on record and in the live setting.

WS: I guess there's any number of ways to be genuine or not genuine-- and if something's good, it's good no matter how it works. We've gone through a little bit of being called 'emo' or something like that, but I always feel like I do what I do and I try not to worry about what people say about it, because it's not coming from the places that people think it is.

What's really interesting is that Black Sheep Boy was such-- I mean I wrote it to be melodramatic, and I wanted to know if I could play it right, and it was such a hard kind of record. With The Stage Names, I was like, 'Well one of the things I want to do differently to not parody myself is I want to make a record that's unemotional, that pushes people away and is sort of flippant, and where my tone is sort of the tone of an asshole, instead of your friend who's going to cry and drink a beer next to you.' But the weirdest part is that people don't seem to pick that up about the record. At least, when I listen to it, I hear that a little bit. But it also has the same original tone; I guess it's just something about my voice that I can't really shed, and maybe that's a good thing.

Pitchfork: Haha, yeah, I don't exactly hear 'asshole' in most of these songs. Maybe with some of the characters though...?

WS: These characters-- it's so corny-- but I really love them, I get really into them. And certain characters that are in my mind, I really want to do them justice and I really want to defend them somehow. Maybe everybody hates them, or maybe nobody gives a shit about them, but I know that they have these faults and I just wanna push everybody away and be like, 'These guys are fucking great. Don't you dare not care about these people in these songs.' You know what I mean? It sounds corny, but that's how I feel about it.

Pitchfork: You duet with Daniel Johnston on Don't Fall in Love. Did you consider special guests for this one?

WS: The success of Black Sheep Boy put us in a position where, if I'd really wanted to, I could've tried to get celebrity guests for the record. And don't think I didn't think about it. But I was just ultimately like, fuck it, man, this record is about us, it's about us going it alone. Everything good put into this record needs to come from the six guys who've gone all over the world doing this shit.

Pitchfork: So you stuck with Jagjaguwar once again for this album. You were on Virgin briefly overseas-- have you been courted by other majors here? Would you consider changing labels? What's kept you with Jagjaguwar all these years?

WS: When we were working on Don't Fall in Love With Everyone You See, we didn't have a label and we sent tracks from that to every label that I've ever heard of-- every one-- but Jagjaguwar was the only one who responded. So we have a lot of loyalty to them. We were nobodies, we couldn't even get a local gig really, and they believed in us. Plus we've kind of come up with them; they've gotten more successful as we've gotten more successful, and I count a lot of people on that label as close friends.

It's not like we would never move on-- I could imagine us at some point doing that-- but for right now it's a relationship that works well: Lots of people who are friends and who mutually respect each other who've been working together really hard and have grown to understand each other the way you do in any relationship.

Pitchfork: You recorded something like 15 songs for this album, but only nine wound up on it. Are there plans to release any of the others?

WS: We knew from the beginning that we wanted this album to be shorter than our other albums, so a lot of songs got booted off-- not because we didn't like them but because we were trying to keep it precise. And a lot of the songs that got booted off were some of my favorites or ones that I felt were really important to the whole thing.

For a while we had this idea that we were going to make a double album. I've always thought double albums were super pretentious and really terrible to do, but I have this thing with me where whenever I start railing against something being terrible and telling everyone I know that it's a bad and awful thing, sooner or later this perverse side of me starts getting drawn to whatever idea that I've been railing against. I'm like, 'Oh that's such a terrible thing, a terrible thing' and then it slowly turns into 'it's so terrible, but kind of in a good way'-- and then-- 'you have to do it.' So for a while there we were thinking about doing a double album, but in the end I think sanity prevailed.

So some of [the leftover songs] are going to be B-sides or special downloads or something like that, and maybe some of them will be collected and put out on some kind of a later release, too.

Pitchfork: Like the Black Sheep Boy Appendix?

WS: I'm not sure. I was a little bit worried that that was a bad, repeating-oneself kind of thing, but what do you do with these songs? They have so much to do with the record.

Pitchfork: You recently opened for Lou Reed, and he's called Okkervil River one of his favorite bands. Your thoughts?

It's the single most proud thing that I've ever experienced, honestly, because Lou Reed is pretty much maybe my favorite artist of the 20th century-- not to say his work isn't anything in the 21st. He's really one of the biggest influences on me, if not the biggest on my writing, and having that vote of confidence really makes you feel-- in spite of the fact that you've been doing it for a long time and in spite of the fact that sometimes you get scared that there's no job security so to speak, that you're just dangling out there-- the fact that I got this affirmation from someone like that gives me a lot of strength. It's an incredible honor.

Pitchfork: So you're playing your first show ever in your home state. Are you pumped? And what finally brought you out there?

WS: Yeah, in Concord, New Hampshire. So that's pretty exciting. New Hampshire people have this thing where nobody cares about New Hampshire except when it's time to vote for the president. And they have this thing where they notice anybody else who's from New Hampshire who's successful. And actually the way this all came about is there's this player for the San Antonio Spurs-- his name is Matt Bonner, he's from New Hampshire, and that's how he heard about us-- and so there's this weird unlikely marriage of basketball and indie rock going on. The whole thing is put on by this organization that's called Sneakers and Speakers. We're going to be playing this thing that he set up that's like a benefit for the Boys and Girls Club of Concord. And the very next day we're doing a really low key bar show in Providence with Will Schaff, who's the guy who does our artwork, with his marching band [What Cheer? Brigade] opening up-- so that'll be a lowbrow version of the Concord show, I think.

Pitchfork: Do you do, or have you considered, non-song-based writing-- books, short stories, plays, and the like?

WS: I do write like that, and I don't tend to do anything with it; I just keep it to myself. Part of that is because I've been really busy, and part of that is because it's paying tribute to the songs, I guess, ultimately. I do occasionally publish critical pieces and stuff like that, but I think another thing is that I'm really hesitant to be the musician-turned-writer, you know. I don't wanna be like Billy Corgan [laughs]. So I would like to publish something at some point, but it's not really anything that's on the horizon right now.

Pitchfork: Some folks have lumped Okkervil in with the recent, so-called "lit rock" trend-- bands with a supposed bookish bent like the Decemberists and Sufjan. What do you make of this?

I don't see myself as a part of it. I know other people see us as a part of it and that's fine; I'm glad for people to say anything about us rather than 'it's a rock group; bunch of dudes with guitars and drums and stuff.'

So any association that we've got with that is great, and I don't want to sound ungrateful, but I personally think it's just a marketing gimmick and people aren't consulting the music. As if somehow literature is better than music and therefore these 'literary' bands are smarter than the average troglodyte rock n roller. I happen to like troglodyte rock n rollers better than I like highbrow artistes. I would feel like I failed on some level if our music wasn't just good rock n roll that you could enjoy.

It's like using the word 'painterly' when talking about an artist's painting; it's descriptive, but that's where its usefulness ends. It's just a word-- and when there's a sense that there's a superlative in there I get really annoyed. When people say that a song needs to be like a novel, it's like, 'Are you insulting a song like 'Walking the Dog'? [Laughs.] Are you insulting a song like 'Please, Please, Please' by James Brown? There's an intelligence in their stupidity; ultimately it's just about immediate emotions.

Dates:

06-10 Seattle, WA - Neumos (Noise for the Needy benefit)
07-14 Concord, NH - Capitol Center for the Arts (Sneakers and Speakers benefit)
07-15 Providence, RI - TBA *

* with What Cheer? Brigade