A Week With Okkervil River's "The Stage Names": Day 1

21 September 2007
tell your friends... tell your friends...

Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Marie Grib

Will Sheff clutched the copy of Tatyana Tolstaya’s White Walls, a collection of short stories and a signed copy of George Saunders’ new book of non-fiction, The Braindead Megaphone, that he’d just gotten as a gift last Sunday night. It was close to midnight on a and nothing was open for miles in all directions. The air was not fall, but close and Sheff, the lead singer of Austin’s Okkervil River was in a pair of old man dress shoes, slacks, a faded tee-shirt bearing some long-gone and forever obscure rock and roll band, a suit coat and glasses. The bank sign and the street lamps were lit and he asked, “So I take a left and a right to get to the hotel?” He was slumped and loped along with the big steps of someone – and really, this only makes sense if you’d seen it – rushing home to dive into another waiting book. He looked like a librarian, a bookophile who doesn’t take the time to put down a stack of chapters even to eat – the corners of the eyes always straining away from the plate of cookies and dunking milk toward the pages or over the ham sandwich without crusts to the same. He, the lover of that smell that is of decomposing wood pulp and dingy basements, moves with a sort of aloof urgency that he’d not treat the written or cinematic word with. With words and stories, he takes his time digesting and they, when he chooses to do the telling, he does so with a thoughtful blaze – leaving no one the opportunity to pay attention elsewhere. The songs on Okkervil’s latest, The Stage Names, the follow-up to the exquisite Black Sheep Boy are every bit as tightly focused as those that came before them. They are dark and joyful and make most of what we let pass by our eyes or ears look and sound utterly disgraceful. Sheff and his Dewey Decimaled mind allow one to consider that there be a new method of qualitative analysis. Sheff equals ten and others fall in line.

Okkervil River Official Site
Jagjaguwar Records

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whither the progressive reviews? do you guys need me to do them? Because i will. i will. I enjoy them and was especially excited when day 1 of the okkervil river appearead—now about a week and a half ago? harrumph.

Daniel | 18 October 2007

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