Image by Laura Leebove
5 minutes with Okkervil River's Will Sheff
Lollapalooza '08, Day 2
By Laura Leebove
Published: August 3rd, 2008 | 9:05am
Austin indie-rock band Okkervil River has been around for about a decade, but 2008 marked the group's first stint at Lollapalooza. It's safe to say the past year has been one of the craziest for the group, whose 2007 album The Stage Names landed on countless "best of '07" lists. Okkervil's next album, The Stand Ins (essentially the second part of The Stage Names) will be out in September, paired with a two-and-a-half-month tour through late November.
Frontman Will Sheff took a few minutes to talk with Venus Zine after begging a bouncer to let him in and then sneaking in to the festival (Another band member gave Sheff's wristband to a friend. Whoops!).
So you're getting ready to release a new record and I read that The Stand Ins is kind of an extension of last year's The Stage Names, can you tell me a little bit about that?
It's sort of like you divided the two into two different pieces, so there's songs on The Stand Ins that echo or answers songs on The Stage Names. … It echoes different characters occurring, different themes coming back, and we tried to sort of echo the way the album was sequenced too, so it really is kind of like a part two.
And you have a massive tour coming up in the fall. Is that the longest run you'll have had?
No actually, it's not. Probably the longest run we've had is sometime a couple years ago we did I think four months straight. Somewhere in there, there was like a month-and-a-half stretch where we didn't even have a day off, and I got strep throat, bronchitis.
What do you do to prepare for going on a tour like that?
You just try to make sure your bills are paid and your stuff is in the right place and somebody's gonna take care of things if they go too wrong. One time I was gone so long that my apartment developed a mold problem. It's not easy. You make sure you have all your adapters for the different European countries, make sure you have adequate toiletries, stuff like that.
Other than your songwriting, are you working on any other literary projects right now?
Well I just finished a couple days ago writing a piece for McSweeney's, so there's gonna be a McSweeney's coming out later this year that I'm gonna have a somewhat long prose piece in.
What have you been listening to lately? What bands?
I'm in Chicago so I've kinda been listening to Howlin' Wolf and some other Chicago blues and stuff like that. That's what I've been listening to this week. Besides that, I guess a lot of old soul. Somebody I know is a record collector and I've gotten a lot of old soul and garage and early punk and I've been listening to a lot of these weird, obscure sort of singles that never were.
Do you think that kind of stuff influences your music at all?
Oh yeah! It's interesting to hear that stuff too because there's an eccentricity to the way that stuff is mixed and recorded. It's making very non-conservative judgments about how things are mixed and sometimes there's something that's phenomenally out of tune and it's a lot of personality in there. I think when we were working on The Stage Names we were trying to craft the sound and echo the music of the '70s and '60s and we tried to keep a lot of that weird eccentricity.
Where are you headed after this?
I'm going back to Brooklyn for one day, and then I'm going to Norway, then Sweden and Germany and then back. And that's in like, four days.
Issue #35
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