Another interviewer has jumped the queue and shamelessly stolen my allocated time with Will Sheff. I feel like a jerk, because when I call and Will answers I’m now unexpectedly interrupting him in the middle of a question and he sounds guarded and confused. It’s hardly an auspicious start to chatting with one of my favourite songwriters, but when we do finally speak the following day he spends the first few minutes apologising (unnecessarily) for the screw-up. The guardedness is gone, and we go way overtime in talking about music and nostalgia (and people having sex to your songs).
Okkervil River’s The Silver Gymnasium is a kind of concept album, a correspondence with Sheff’s own adolescence. The songs are full of vivid imagery and specific references. Anytime the past is evoked I wonder at how reliable the recorder is – if, despite our best intentions, we colour our recollections through distance. This would seem especially true of autobiographies, where memory is perhaps the most unreliable of sources.
“To a certain extent that’s what the record is about,” Sheff explains. “There are a lot of people asking me for details of what it was like when I was a kid, like that’s what I want them to ask. It’s really kind of the opposite. It was more about wanting to write about nostalgia, about why you’ve kept that painful memory. If I’d written about that in a generic way, it would have been pretty boring. It wouldn’t have been engaging. So the way to relate is to be specific, even if it’s so specific that people don’t know the streets that I’m mentioning, they didn’t experience anything like the time that I’m talking about. That doesn’t matter. It’s the authenticity of the detail that matters. So I felt like I had to work with the materials of my own biography to talk about these things in the best way that I could, but creating a biography wasn’t the goal in and of itself. If anything that stuff makes me feel a little uncomfortable.”
Given the nature of the new album, I ask Sheff how he feels about performing his earlier work – do songs like ‘A Girl In Port’ from 2007’s The Stage Names still carry the same emotional meaning for him? “You know, I never enjoy listening to my old records. I don’t think any musician really does. Sometimes it’s like looking at an awkward teenage photo of yourself. I’ll rarely listen to them unless I’m trying to remember how a song goes.
“A lot of times you can feel like a stranger to your own songs. It’s existed for so long, it’s like you’re not the person who wrote it anymore. The other thing is, I’ve played ‘A Girl In Port’ a thousand times, and yet I don’t even remember what the recording of it sounds like anymore. Once I played it live so well I remember thinking, ‘I’m never going to improve on that,’ and then that performance is gone forever. So the songs don’t really exist in a final form for me. They’re always able to be redirected or swapped around. I like that.”
Before we wrap up we talk for a while about the endurance of certain songs; how unique music is in its ability to associate itself so closely with your impressions of the world.
“Music is with you all the time,” says Sheff. “It’s a little universe or melody that you carry around with you that has different context throughout your life. That to me is a real honour. I love that there are people listening to us while they’re packing their kid’s lunch; that there are people who are drunk making up dance routines to our songs. I love that people have sex to our songs or smoke pot to our songs or cook dinner to our songs. That’s one of the great things about making music. You get to be a companion to somebody. You get to be a memory.”
Okkervil River play with Ernest Ellis at Oxford Art Factory on Friday February 21.
The Silver Gymnasium out now through Spunk/Caroline
