Okkervil River’s School of Lit Pop
Will Sheff from the Lit Pop group Okkervil River writes unabashedly intelligent lyrics for highbrow hipsters. He belongs to a camp whose members include authors David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, Indie Rock bands the Decembrists, Magnetic Fields and Andrew Bird, and visual artists like Matthew Barney. Unlike most popular contemporary bands, Okkervil River doesn’t so much rock as reflect. The height of the Lit Pop movement on paper occurred in the late 90s, when (predominantly) young, white men looked around, decided that they were the most interesting people in the room, and ran with it. It’s no surprise that the movement filtered down to popular music; Okkervil River’s success is due in large part to the fact that they transfer this hyper-intellectualism to a pop song format.
One should not confuse self-regarding with self-indulgent. Wallace’s stories may be overloaded with information—but no one would confuse them for autobiography. Unlike Bright Eyes or the current crop of emo artists, Sheff tells stories about characters other than himself. As a songwriter, Sheff is uninterested in the confessional elements of his art. Sheff’s voice, like few others in the Indie rock world, adeptly blurs the line between the author and narrator. If his lyrics echo Morrissey’s structure and approach, his voice also matches Morrissey’s in providing the motivation. His vocal delivery is emotional, if not emo—and as a result is a compelling listen.
Speaking by phone from home in Austin, Sheff addressed what he called the “blessing and the curse” of his voice. “I don’t have an emotionally blank voice…like Brian Eno. I have a voice that has a lot of emotion in it. And I think that sometimes a lot of people hear a lot of personal investment in myself personally that isn’t even there necessarily. It’s just a characteristic that my voice has.”
He elaborated, explaining the character-driven nature of Okkervil River’s songs. “For me, the emo thing has been an unfortunate thing that people have brought up. For me, a big difference is that when I’m singing a song, I’m not crying over some personal issue. The songs are written in much more of a fiction sense, where in my mind I’m creating these stories and scenarios. And I don’t feel this burning urgency to express to you how Will Sheff felt about some heartbreaking thing that happened to Will Sheff.”
Everything about Okkervil River conjures High Art. Sheff named the band after a short story by the popular Russian author Tatyana Tolstoya; and though he later disavowed the name, the literary aspirations of his selection are clear. Sheff’s lyrics tell stories first and provide the basis for pop tunes second. Okkervil River’s songs also overflow with references and allusions. Their most recent album, The Stage Names, manages to name-check IMAX, crib Big Star, and incorporate whole-scale the melody of a Beach Boys song. An earlier record, the gorgeous Black Sheep Boy, was, in essence, an extended exposition of a Tim Hardin song.
Asked about his dense songwriting, Sheff said: “My sensitivity to that sort of referencing may be lower or higher than other people’s—I don’t really know. But for me, it’s just that you have to kill your favorite children—that’s a Faulkner quote. And you just have to say, ‘This thing—though I love it—though it’s great is hurting the whole song.’ So ultimately, I try not to fall too much in love with ideas that I have. I try to be fun, and be overly ready to kill ideas without remorse or sentimentality.”
Sheff continued: “You know, I always hated our band name, even though it was my idea. I think, in a lot of ways, one of things I keep telling about it—because I’ve always loved the story [Okkervil River]—is this theme of difference between this voice on record that the protagonist hears in his favorite singer and the reality of the crumbling old woman he meets. And I was reading the story again, and that really struck me and I think it opened the door, and also showed me a way to fiercely reclaim our band name. To kind of justify this damn band name if it takes me a double album to do it.”
The stories on The Stage Names juxtapose the idea of pop culture with individual character’s experiences with it. On the opening track, “Our Life Is Not a Movie Or Maybe,” Sheff unmasks that distinction, singing “It’s just a life story, so there’s no climax.” Sheff explained his reaction to the deluge of media with which we surround ourselves. “You know, people now are very aware of all of the culture around them. Their lives have been laid out and mapped out by pop songs and movies and TV shows. And these things invade our dreams and our ideas about how love should be, how our goals should work. And I wanted to express my own experience of that.”
At times on The Stage Names, Sheff echoes David Bowie’s tendency to simultaneously inhabit his characters as he addresses them. On “Unless it’s Kicks,” he sings “What breaks this heart the most is the ghost of some rock and roll fan, floating up from the stands with her heart opened up. And I want to tell her, ‘your love isn’t lost,’…I want to scream ‘hey, you’re so wonderful!’” This is a clever re-working of both “Five Years” and “Rock and Roll Suicide.”
This “soup of pop culture references” occasionally comes off as condescension. “Plus Ones,” an inside-joke about rock songs (the lyrics consist of adding one to numerically-inclined pop songs: 97 tears, 100 luftballoons, TVC16, seventeen candles, and so on), is the most pretentious song this side of Tullycraft’s “Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend’s Too Stupid to Know About.” But on most of the album, Okkervil River’s approach is transcendent and gorgeous. An incorporation of “Sloop John B” is so deftly done that one has no choice but to share Sheff’s love of the song.
Though initially “scared” at referencing so much of the pop culture canon, Sheff decided to run with it: “A lot of postmodern stuff—in a lot of ways, echoes a lot of folk art from thousands of years. In folk art forms people are totally unafraid to pilfer other people’s stuff and rework it and repurpose it. So I always wanted to lean back and fall into that world on this record.” “Sloop John B” is a traditional folk song after all.
Sheff also has an industrious approach to his work and a generosity towards his fans. Okkervil River is currently recording an “Appendix” to The Stage Names, which expands the themes of the album. Sheff explained. “I found myself with a number of songs that seemed related to the album we had just recorded. We had originally discussed making The Stage Names record a double album. Though it didn’t work out that way, there’s a lot of music I had that develops on the idea.”
Summing up his approach to art, Sheff said: “Basically, I really like working a lot. I’m happiest when I’m following an idea through, and for me, it’s really fun to always have something always coming up. It keeps me out of trouble, so to speak.”
“You know, if you look at The Beatles and look at how many albums they put out a year…” Sheff paused, and then shifted gears. “You know it’s recording and writing that I love. While doing work—while making something, I just feel much more myself and it makes me very happy. So this constantly working has worked out very well for me.”