Okkervil River

Misunderstood Muses

By Kyle Lemmon

11.03.08

Despite his name being framed in venue lights across the globe, Okkervil River’s Will Sheff is a working musician. The cinematic indie-rock singer only stopped working at I Love Video in Austin, TX during the recording of 2005’s Black Sheep Boy.  It was there in the dusty towers of movie rentals that Sheff’s recent meta-quest began. In lieu of the release of The Stand-Ins, Antics took some time to untangle the post-modern artist’s milieu with the man himself. Tortured muses, Randy Newman, glam rock, and the intersection of fandom, criticism and being an auteur serve as road signs along the way.

Your songs on The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins often deal with the misunderstood people left on the margins of society, i.e., porn stars, serial killers, novelists, and musicians. What attracts you to the stories of those kinds of people?

I think with the specific case of The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins, there are so many artist bio pictures out there. The idea that some really great artist is out there and after having their humble beginnings they wait patiently wait for the establishment to put them in their rightful place. You often see the sort of meteoric rise and then of course there’s them losing their way and then the return. It’s the VH1 Behind the Music story. The thing is, most artists don’t follow that pattern at all. For most of them, they have no meteoric rise at all. They are obscure in their lifetime, and forgotten after their death. For every Nick Drake, there are a hundred other people we will never know about. With The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins, I wanted to talk about those people and portray that kind of artistic story because that is one you never see, and in fact it’s the most common one. I wanted to show the working artist that is struggling away and isn’t going to make it. Those two are the icons of these last two albums.

I’m assuming that you see a reflection of yourself in the pursuit of those specific story arcs, correct?

I see myself as a working musician. I’m not Justin Timberlake, I’m not even Vampire Weekend. I think of myself as someone that’s been doing this for eleven years and has made a career out of it. I also don’t want to sound self-discouraging or grumpy or anything like that. When I was writing the songs for The Stage Names, I thought I was in a position to authentically speak about crummy break rooms, and not getting paid from a club, or driving in a van, as opposed to the more glittery depiction of the rock star lifestyle that we hear about all the time.

I really like that idea of having other performers like A.C. Newman or Zykos cover the songs on The Stand-Ins via YouTube. When did you come up with the idea and the list of performers?

I liked the idea of doing a cover before you hear the original. A lot of our ideas about songs come from our reactions to covering and the discussion of what it means to be “original.” It’s like one of those compilation tapes you can buy at a truck stop. It will be like, “great classic rock hits by the original artists!” It turns out the original artist is actually the name of the crappy session band they’ve put together. There’s personal significance in the people we chose to cover each song.

I know sub-par versions of extracted mp3s are floating around on your message board right now, but do you plan on releasing those covers in the future?

The music industry is a complicated business. We would have to talk to everybody and ask them if it was okay. I’m not averse to that idea but we’re trying to keep the audio and the video together for now.

I know you’re a big fan of Randy Newman. Have you listened to Harps and Angels? How did you like it?

Yeah, I liked it. Well, “Losing You” from that album in particular is one of the old devastating Randy Newman songs like “I Think It’s Going To Rain Today” or “Livin’ Without You.” I’m amused by the social songs on Harps, like “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country.” The song that slams John Cougar Mellencamp and Jackson Browne [“A Piece of the Pie”] is very funny. It’s all very apropos, considering our political parties are going towards complete disaster. It’s kind of cathartic listening to it. I feel like he squandered a chance on the title track though. He sort defended the ignorant image of Randy Newman that dumb kids who just know about him from Family Guy see. That’s always a bummer when an artist that many people have a negative or no opinion on actually sinks to the level of the caricatures of them. Come on, Newman! I think he’s amazing though. I really do like the new record.

Bruce Wayne Campbell seems like a perfect archetype for misunderstood people. What do you find particularly interesting about his framing as a glam pop star and ultimate defeat?

Back when I worked at I Love Video in Austin [during the recording of Black Sheep Boy] there was a guy that would come in a lot. He played in a lot of punk bands in Austin during the 1980s. He used to come in and talk to us and some of the people were pretty freaked out by him, but I talked to him a lot. He worked at a cafeteria and he used to bring me food that was made there. He would talk to me about glam rock and his experience growing up. He told me he first realized he was gay while listening to David Bowie. We would walk around the store and he’d tell me all these neat stories about him really being into The New York Dolls, Jobriath or the Cosmo Sonics. He was the one who first told me about Jobriath. His story is so fascinating. It says a lot about performance. You always run the risk of having an unstable life as a performer and Jobriath is the worst-case scenario of what your parents worry is going to happen to you. You’ll die penniless and you won’t be remembered, except for as the punchline of some obscure pop culture reference. He was hurt from hype and before the record even came out he was cut down by the backlash. Like Bowie, he was a very persona-based artist. The story of Jobriath is really at the heart of what I am trying to talk about on this new album.

I know you get asked about your critical writing work a lot but I was curious what your thoughts were on the themes of this album and how they play out in the critic vs. musician world.

I think both are on a continuum. Music critics and musicians have more alike than they are different. It’s just different reaction to the same thing—having your life changed by rock and roll. One way to respond to that is to make your own music and the other way is to explicate for readers what is meaningful about this song and what is worthless about other songs. You’re sort of the architect of the cultural opinion of this stuff. A fan is also doing the same thing. They respond to the music by buying the record, buying a ticket to a show, by going out and standing in front of a stage and cheering. They make the career of the artist possible. I think we’re all fighting the same fight. We just take different paths.

Why did you decide to include three interstitial instrumental tracks on the new release? They act like a musical theatre curtain perhaps. How do you see it?

I think it was sort of a nod back to Black Sheep Boy Appendix. It was a little bit of a way to intensify the cinematic aspects of what we were doing and justify the theatricality as well. Those little pieces harmonically lay the groundwork for some of the songs that show up later; on “Bruce Wayne Campbell,” “Blue Tulip” and “Calling and Not Calling My Ex.” They musically get you ready for what is coming next. I like that. It’s like a musical where you hear a lot of variations on the same song. So, [in a sense], they’re little overtures. For me, that is very charming.

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