25°
The Album and Okkervil River
12:00 am Sep 13 - by Brian McGovern
Matching socks, lights around a Christmas tree, the songs of an album - singular objects that find meaning only as parts of a whole. Or, at least, that's how it should be. A single broken bulb removed from a strand or a lone wet stocking in the bottom of a washing machine are identified only as incomplete. Individual songs, however, stripped from their proper place, are not seen as lost or fractured. Songs are world-changing bits of art, but when sewn together in a cohesive album, they create something so much more. Will Sheff, lead singer of Okkervil River, hopes the world won't forget that.
"I've always been really charmed by a bunch of short stories that have something to do with each other, or a collection of poems or some clothing designer's season of clothing," Sheff said between bites of a sub sandwich. "I like it when things are put together and they all seem like pieces of one unified thing."
Okkervil River, born from the thriving music scene of Austin, Texas, plays the kind of songs that feed off and work with each other like chapters of a disjointed novel. The band's latest example of literary-like work, The Stage Names, has rightfully created a lot of critical buzz.
Their albums, including Stage Names, jump through time and space but tie up loose ends to show a tight and taught, wonderful and startling view of humanity. In short, they've shown how the album can still be an art.
"I worry that the album is going to go away and there won't be the chance to make these kinds of records," Sheff said, seeming only partially concerned as talks on the phone outside a lonely Oregon rest stop. In the midst of a cross-continental tour that stops in Urbana on Sept. 19, Sheff isn't quite ready to over think the state of music at the moment.
"Sooner or later I'm going to be ... this cantankerous old man who grouses about how everything sucks now [but] I want to stay young as long as I can. I'm trying to not be too depressed," he said.
The demise of the album is nothing totally new or unexpected. Everything from file sharing to iPod shuffles to the Elizabethtown soundtrack has hurt the format. Even when a song is good, even Sheff admits to skipping to the next track of a playlist like anyone else, adding, "the world just goes the way it goes."
The world and the way it goes, is the basis of Okkervil's latest album. Unlike their previous and equally brilliant record Black Sheep Boy, which painted vivid pictures of a gothic and dark fairy tale, The Stage Names is concerned with "ordinary people trying to be happy."
"You don't have to save your life, or save somebody's life or fall in love. It's ordinary disappointment, and that's how life really is," he remarked.
As the album title may suggest, there is also a high level of artificiality throughout the record. The characters Sheff writes are living in, what he calls a "cinematic recreation of real world things."
In a Truman Show-esque twist, he stresses the strange world a fictional character occupies. "Shit happens to them and they don't understand they're in a movie or in a song," he explained. "I'm not denigrating movies or magazines or paintings, I'm saying they're not real life." But, Sheff means it as a positive as much as a negative.
"I wanted to write an album that acknowledged that but also kind of gave you the same nice feeling you get from something that takes you away from reality ... I love the feeling that it's all floating away from me."
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