Interview with Will Sheff of Okkervil River

Given our show with Okkervil River at Newcastle University on November 8th is just around the corner, we got an interview in with singer Will Sheff via electro-post (e-mail).

I asked the questions myself this time, so, ever the narcissist, i injected a few of my own personal existential dillemae regarding myspace, artistic pain, and one, inspired by The Hold Steady line 'Big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers' into some of the questions. you can probably guess which ones.

cheers,
David

p.s. for tickets to see one of the absolute greatest bands in indie rock (in both mine an Lou Reed's opinion), click here


How has touring The Stage Names been going, any good anecdotes?

I guess the funniest anecdote I have is when they took Travis into an isolated room at the border into Ontario, Canada and told him, “We’re going to arrest you, so tell us where the drugs are now and we won’t take your van apart.” They went on like this for some time, telling him they were going to arrest him, so he should just make it easier, etc… Then the discussion went into them interrogating him about whether he’d ever used drugs. After about a half an hour, their discussion culminated in one of the men reaching his hand down the front of Travis’s pants and kind of feeling around for a little while. Then they let us go.

So, that was pretty funny.

This is your fourth full length not including various EPs... do you feel like a veteran songwriter these days?

Not really. To me, the word “veteran” – when not used to refer specifically to retired soldiers – makes me think of someone who’s old, self-satisfied, doesn’t have anything new to say. I think if I started thinking of myself as a “veteran” I’d probably develop that whole self-impressed cantankerous old man persona before my time.

Something I’ve been wondering myself lately, your latest record has shed the melodrama that characterised early Okkervil recordings: is angst immature?

Well, pain isn’t immature. Pain, and why we have to be on the receiving end of so much of it, is one of the central enduring subjects of art. I think a big difference is that I hear a lot of songs where the pain seems to mainly stem from complaints like “my girlfriend broke up with me” or “society seems like a bunch of fake robots” or “I feel a vague sense of anguish about life that it’s difficult to exactly pin down.” Those subjects seem, to me, to be immature.

I feel there’s more crocodile tears/ teen angst in pop music than ever now, that there’s a pressure to be ostensibly ‘tortured’ to make credible art

Yeah, exactly. Like you’re not making some kind of deep statement about the world unless you’re wallowing in misery, so you’d better come up with something to be miserable about posthaste. But I feel like there’s a maturity to looking at the world and saying, “wow, there sure are a lot of profoundly shitty things that happen, but I guess that makes it even more important to try to find joy and compassion and kindness and pleasure out there, huh?” than to just run around shrieking “Life sucks!”

Should everyone in the Western World accept that they’ve got it pretty good these days ?

Well, I don’t know if it’s productive for people – or groups of people – to go around trying to compare pain and trauma with one another. I, personally, though, find it comforting at times when I’m feeling sorry for myself to remember how laughably petty my own problems actually are.

There’s this assumption that rock critics can’t make genuinely good music. You were a rock critic once….

I get the sense that you’re trying to bait me with these questions.

I think the belief that rock critics can’t make good music is most adamantly insisted upon by insecure musicians who have had negative experiences with rock critics who resent the fact that musicians are cool and they get laid when the rock critic himself is just hunched over a laptop and a stack of promo CDs, getting more and more bitter with each tappity-tap on the keys. Rock musicians and rock critics share this symbiotic relationship of love/resentment and fear/desire-for-approval between each other and it’s very sweet.

I think that criticism can be a very noble art when practiced by the likes of a Lester Bangs or a Pauline Kael. However, it’s all about picking something apart to show how it works. Creating art, on the other hand, is the opposite process: you’re making something out of almost nothing, and you might even be ignorant about how you’re doing it. It doesn’t necessarily follow that someone who’s good at one thing would be good at the other, though I think it sometimes happens. All the French New Wave filmmakers started out as critics…

You used to author character assassinations of rock stars that should have hung their guitars up long ago for audiogalaxy – when is it pertinent to put the plectrum down and turn off the mic? Do you get to be a rock critic full time then?

I think it’s time to stop doing any art when you’re no longer having fun, when you no longer feel like you’re making progress in a direction, when you feel like there’s no longer something to what you’re doing. Each work doesn’t have to be an utter masterpiece, but it should have something that makes it worth existing out there. There is so much mediocre art in the world and so many talented artists; if you’re no longer having fun, maybe that’s your signal to step aside and give someone else a chance.

In your interviews, you seem to have a libraric knowledge of rock history….how does this impact on your songwriting…

Well, I don’t know if I have a vast knowledge of rock history…I’m really just a fan, someone who takes it all more seriously than perhaps he should.

The new record has a fixation with celebrity. Do you ever think what it’d be like to wake up as someone really famous, like Bono or something? Would you put your publicity to good use?

Bono’s in an interesting position, because he actually has the power to influence people positively by being a role model and a mouthpiece for important ideas, but he also occasionally looks like a total sanctimonious humorless dork for doing so. I don’t quite understand why that is, and I wish I knew. If I were suddenly super-famous, I would probably try some Bono-style heal-the-world shenanigans too, even though I’d probably look even dorkier than he does.

There’s a theme on the new record that deals with the relationships fans make with artists they’ve never met. As an artist, then, how do you feel when you meet fans? Is it a ‘best be polite’ thing, or a ‘fuck you, I’m an insufferable let down, get over it’

I sometimes do feel weird when I meet fans, but not in a bad way. I am extremely grateful to them for caring about the band (I painfully remember a time not so long ago when absolutely no one did), but I don’t know how to express it in words that aren’t just kind of hollow clichés, and likewise I don’t know if they know how to talk to me without just saying things like “I’m a really big fan.” The relationship artists have with their fans can be frustrating sometimes, maybe. You do so much motivated out of love for them, but you can’t actually individually love and know them. Likewise, they respond with love they can never actually give you in the way that people normally give love to each other in real life.

Nerd question: do you think in the age of social networking its easier to know what certain people are going to be like before you meet them? (as someone that’s matured parallel to the rise of myspace/facebook, I always think about how I knew people before I saw their networking profile and afterward…how what they might write about themselves on the internet might colour my opinion of them)

I think it’s far easier to see how they like to represent themselves, and that says a lot about someone, but it’s not the whole picture. And let’s not forget that there’s a huge difference between a series of static pictures on the internet and a walking, talking, three-dimensional person with a tone of voice, a way of speaking, a height that may be different than you imagined, a smell that may be different than you imagined, a way of dressing that may be different than you imagined, etc…

You talked in an interview I read about writing songs about people that were different to you, and the more so, the better. To do that you have to know yourself pretty well, right?

I don’t know. I guess so. I feel like I know myself relatively well, but I’m not sure that helps me to change things in my life.

You’ve been reviewed by pitchfork consistently well, but Uncut and Mojo over here haven’t touched you. Is it just young hipsters at Okkervil shows? you’ve had comparisons to Bright Eyes and I know from experience that young teens turning up to their shows has tarnished their ‘palatability’ for some. Are there any ambitions you have for an audience that are unfulfilled?

Well, Mojo has actually reviewed several of our earlier records, but someone told me that someone in the reviews section at that magazine doesn’t like us and so has deliberately steered the magazine away from covering us. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, so I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt. But you’re right that we’ve been covered less by Mojo than by, to use your example, Pitchfork. Not sure why, and I’m not sure your audience theory quite works because I wouldn’t say we have a specific demographic making up most of our audience. We get young teens, but we also get college kids, nerds, jocks, hipsters, loners, middle-aged music collectors, people who don’t fit into any of those designations, people like you and me.

You’ve talked about being a fan before, but never really specified who you might have been obsessive about in the past.

Well, I was a huge, obsessive fan of the Incredible String Band for years.

Given you don’t like Wes Anderson, twee pop etc. and things that I tend to associate with outsider, maybe intellectual culture, infantilising sexuality I want to play the blonde one off sex and the city and ask: “are intellectuals shit in bed?”

I don’t really understand what the term “intellectual” is supposed to mean. I feel like when people use that term they often use it in a loaded way. Is an “intellectual” someone whose idea of a great time is wrapping their brain around kind of abstract, complicated problems and trying to figure them out? Or is an “intellectual” someone who snobbishly affects more intelligence than other people in an attempt to make themselves look more sophisticated? Since I don’t know what you mean by the word, I’m going to ignore it.

Obviously, there’s a lot of sex that doesn’t have anything to do with the mind. That kind of reptilian brain that takes over when you engage in activities like running in a race or mindlessly, happily driving a car or playing a rock show comes into play more. That said, a lot of sex is in the mind, especially when it comes to ideas about what’s dirty or slightly fucked-up. I think a lot of smart people are great about dirty sex, because they understand what’s so dirty about it and it fucks with their head more. Plus, smart people are fun to have sex with because all their intelligence is kind of beside the point in bed; they may have some distanced understanding of what’s going on, but ultimately they’re forced to just be a body, and that can be frightening for them, or liberating. All of that stuff brings a lot of electricity into sex that might not otherwise be there if it were just dumb bumping and grinding. Which is fun, too, obviously.

more info on okkervil river at the the Jagjaguwar site
and Okkervil's Official Site