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About Okkervil River
The goal was to push my brain to places it didn’t want to go. The idea was to not have any idea to keep myself confused about what I was doing, frontman Will Sheff says about Okkervil River’s newest album. “I produced it myself so that I could extend the songwriting process all the way through to the very last second of recording, so the songs would never really stop changing.” The resulting record, ‘I am Very Far,’ is a startling break from anything this band has done before. By turns terrifying and joyous, violent and serene, grotesque and romantic, it’s a celebration of forces beyond our control.
When Okkervil River released their breakthrough ‘Black Sheep Boy’ in 2005, Uncut wrote that “Sheff’s novelistic lyrics and the dexterous blend of country, folk and nervy indie-rock suggest a band approaching the peak of their powers.” A New York Times piece on their 2007 follow-up ‘The Stage Names’ (and its companion album ‘The Stand Ins’) echoed, “Sheff writes like a novelist,” and Pitchfork called him, “One of the best lyric-writers in indie rock.” But on ‘I am Very Far,’ Sheff emerges not only as a songwriter of the highest caliber, but a producer and arranger of singular vision. Abandoning the tidy conceptual arcs of Okkervil River’s previous albums, ‘I am Very Far’ is a monolithic, darkly ambiguous work, one that doesn’t readily offer up its secrets.
Work on ‘I am Very Far’ started in early 2009, after a year spent on the music of others. Sheff contributed vocals to The New Pornographer’s album ‘Together,’ wrote a song for Norah Jones’ ‘The Fall,’ produced an upcoming album for Brooklyn-based Bird of Youth, and helmed the Roky Erickson record ‘True Love Cast Out All Evil,’ for which his album notes received a GRAMMY nomination. “I’d never worked with Roky before and never produced someone else’s record before. It was a life-changing experience,” Sheff recalls, “When it was over I felt both completely drained and completely inspired.” Immediately upon wrapping up work and leaving Erickson’s company, Sheff drove to his home state of New Hampshire for lengthy isolated writing sessions. “I wanted to go back home and re-start writing again, like I’d never written a song previously,” he says, “and I wanted the music and lyrics to be both completely wedded together and a little bit beyond my control. I kept trying to write from the state of mind of someone who had just been born, that feeling of being very young and being aware of not existing before a certain moment, which is a feeling I remember having as a kid.”
Sheff emerged from the writing process with 30 or so songs, which he narrowed down to 18. In contrast to Okkervil River’s usual practice of holing up in one studio for months on end, he opted for a series of short, high-intensity sessions, each in a different location, each employing completely different methods than the one before it. For songs like “Rider” and “Wake and Be Fine,” Sheff gathered together a massive version of Okkervil River two drummers, two pianists, two bassists, and seven guitarists, all playing live in one room and led them on a week of live-in-the-studio marathon session, performing a single song obsessively over and over for as many as 12 hours to capture just the right take. Songs like “Show Yourself” and “Hanging from a Hit” were worked out in improvisational sessions with the core band, minimally recorded to 8-track tape, and then re-structured and re-written in the editing process. For the strange science-fiction parable “White Shadow Waltz,” Sheff self-recorded the entire song and then had Okkervil River re-record every instrumental track on top of that. After basic-tracking was done, Sheff overdubbed the songs with the band’s largest instrumental palette to date not only choral elements and orchestral colors like strings, tympani, tuba and bassoon, but also file cabinets thrown across the room, unreeled rolls of duct tape, and, on “Piratess,” a solo created out of a fast-forwarding and rewinding boombox. Finishing the record from home, Sheff constantly edited and reworked the album, reinventing the song structures, re-recording vocals, re-writing until the very last minute, reshaping even the tiniest of details, ultimately creating an album that plays not only as a lush, seamless epic, but also as the most deeply personal effort of his career.
What can listeners expect? Richer and weirder than ‘The Stage Names’ and deeper and moodier than even ‘Black Sheep Boy,’ ‘I am Very Far’ is dense, fragmented, opaque. A reverie of uncertainty, it feels at once disorienting and oddly familiar, threatening and friendly. Okkervil River have thrown away all maps and compasses but they continue to chart their way, unblinking, toward destinations unknown.
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