Here's the word on Okkervil River: Serious lyrics spell success

Literary lyrics are on the serious side, but new album shows a band that wants to have fun

By Michael Corcoran
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 29, 2007

Words and music aren't equal partners in the songs they make together; the importance is 80/20 in favor of the music. But what do we do when we get a new record? We put it on and read along with the lyric sheet.

After listening to the freshly melodic and almost glammy new Okkervil River album "The Stage Names" several times without reading exactly what Will Sheff was singing, a proposal is in order. When you buy a CD, it should come with a prepaid postcard that you drop in the mail. The lyric sheet arrives within five business days.

Sheff says Okkervil producer Brian Beattie holds similar views about words vs. music.

"He doesn't care about lyrics and says that the only thing that matters is that they're not bad," Sheff says via phone from Brooklyn, where he's hanging out before Okkervil returns home Saturday to play Fun Fun Fun Fest at Waterloo Park. The band then tours Europe, where it's signed to Virgin/EMI, for three months.

The word on the 31-year-old Sheff, who can count Lou Reed among his admirers, is that he's a brilliant wordsmith whose songs are poems and short stories set to music. Fans spend hours dissecting his lyrics and critics more often compare Sheff to writers such as Oscar Wilde and confessional poet John Berryman than to musical models such as Big Star and Elvis Costello.

But the nerd word buzz is working. "The Stage Names" debuted in August at No. 62 on the Billboard album sales chart, selling 10,000 copies the first week. Soon after, the band was booked on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," where Sheff aired out his upper-register-reaching voice on "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe." This sort of stuff doesn't usually happen to bands signed to small Indiana labels like Jagjaguwar.

"I sometimes read (in reviews) this image of myself as humorless and melodramatic, but I think they're not picking up on the playfulness and the joy in our records," Sheff says. The new one is especially fun, as the band, which also features Shearwater frontman Jonathan Meiburg on various keyboards, seems intent on throttling the "lit rock" tag.

The theme for the sessions that produced "The Stage Names" was "be generous." Producer Beattie explains: "I was thinking about when 'Magical Mystery Tour' came out — what a gift it was to anyone who listened to it. The Beatles knew how much they owed their fans and so in a totally uncompromising way they just gave them more."

"Be generous" meant more musical ideas, more curious instrumentation, more of everything for Okkervil's growing, loyal fan base. Lyrically, Sheff deftly explores such dark themes as suicide, delusion and social disconnection, but the melodically sprawling "Stage Names" ventures into Arcade Fire territory, which takes Okkervil to a whole new arena.

The new album defines itself with the juxtaposition of "John Allyn Smith Sails," a song written from the point of view of Berryman on the verge of his 1972 suicide, with a cover of "Sloop John B," the folk song popularized by the Beach Boys. The line "this is the worst trip I've ever been on" is the hinge between the quite different tunes.

Although they've had the term "post-modern" heaped onto their distinctly original sound, old music is a big inspiration for Okkervil River. As with the band's previous four albums, "The Stage Names" project was initiated by Sheff bringing in records that had the same feel he was going for with his new songs. For 2005's "Black Sheep Boy," Sheff played Big Star and Scott Walker records for producer Beattie. Before recording "The Stage Names," which he wrote in Brooklyn during the summer of 2006, Sheff brought in everything from Diddley to Dylan (Bo and Bob), with Costello's "Get Happy," assorted T. Rex, "Every Picture Tells a Story" by Rod Stewart and the Hall & Oates album with "Rich Girl" on it in heavy rotation.

Hall & Oates?

There's no guilt in Sheff's musical pleasures. "When I was in high school and college I would never even consider listening to, say, an album by Fleetwood Mac," Sheff says. "But now I realize they made some very good records. Hall & Oates are totally underrated."

Taking its oft-misspelled name from a short story by Russian writer Tatyana Tolstaya, Okkervil River's original lineup consisted of former New Hampshire high school mates who, after college, decided to move to Austin in 1999 to start a band. "We had a really hard time getting shows in Austin," Sheff says, but things started taking off in 2002 when "Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You See" was released to universal raves. "Down the River of Golden Dreams" followed in 2003. But it was 2005's "Black Sheep Boy" that established Okkervil as darlings of the influential Pitchfork set. Lou Reed heard "For Real," a song seemingly about kids cutting themselves just to feel something real, on Sirius satellite radio and got the album. Okkervil became the first band to ever play the Highline Ballroom in New York City when Reed tapped them to play before him on opening night six months ago.

Sheff didn't think any of this would happen when he helped start the band with the clumsy name nine years ago. The goal was to make a record and have it reviewed in the local weekly. Maybe play a couple of times at South by Southwest. But playing on national TV? Making the Billboard charts? Being Lou Reed's handpicked opener?

Now that's the kind of fantasy you only find in books.