Interview: Will Sheff (Okkervil River)

Will Sheff is apologizing to a hotel employee for spilled coffee. His guitarist, he says, dropped his morning beverage on the exact same spot in the lobby where Sheff himself had a similar mishap with his seltzer the day before. He jokes to me over the phone that the spot must be cursed by someone who had a heart attack and spilled their drink there, and we laugh over the absurdity of it as he makes his way out of Iowa City and on to his next tour stop in Minneapolis. Then I can hear him relay the same thing to the hotel employee: “I’m so sorry,” he says politely. “I think it may be cursed right there.” 

It doesn’t occur to me until later, after we’re done talking, how much a cursed spot on a hotel carpet where someone died long ago and spilled their drink sounds like something you could find in a Will Sheff song. The founder and, until recently, only constant member of the Austin-based band Okkervil River has a way of working little stories of mythology and mystery into his lyrics. Consider these lines from “Holy Man” from Sheff’s new solo release, Nothing Special: “The waves they rise/The baby is carried down/The idol’s eyes are rolling to his sound/He’s shaking in his jewel and jasper gown.”

This is a songwriter unafraid to bring magic and spirits into his music, and he did it through the 20-some-odd years of Okkervil River. Now based in LA, Sheff is asking his fans to follow him on a new journey as he lets his old band, as he says, “drift out to sea.”

Sheff is well aware that he’s taking a chance striking out on his own. Fans like what they like, and it can be hard to steer people to a new sound once they’ve latched on to the one they consider true. Even while Okkervil River was still intact, fans discussed online how each new release supported or deviated from their idea of what the band was. 

It was that tug of war that left Sheff feeling landlocked by his own music and convinced him to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown untethered from Okkervil River and set out on his own. Though infused with musical collaborators, the new album is undoubtedly Sheff’s vision.

“The thing that I'm most proud of with this album is that it feels whole,” he says. “When I try to describe to people what it was that I wanted, or how I feel like it came out, I have a hard time with complicated sexy exciting adjectives. I just end up saying things like, ‘It just feels right,’ or ‘It just feels whole.’”

The songs on Nothing Special are calmly contemplative, jettisoning most of the indie rock kicks from the band’s eight albums. They don’t burst in unannounced; they approach softly, like lullabies. But the tracks are still entwined with vivid lyricism and the eye of someone examining the tea leaves for meaning. On the meditative “In the Thick of It,” Sheff sings, “Shattered my hand/On the old baby grand/After six months it had healed/They cut off my cast/And a path was revealed.”

But the somber tone — the album deals in mourning and grief, as well as transformation — shouldn’t frighten off those who think they found the end version of Sheff in Okkervil River. If you can hang with “In a Radio Song” from the band’s essential Black Sheep Boy, you should feel right at home with Nothing Special. 

The album is a personal exchange, one easy to imagine Sheff sharing only with you. And like any truly personal revelation, it carries with it the risk of rejection. Indeed, with Nothing Special, Sheff is taking a trust fall and hoping the fanbase he’s built over the years will be there to catch him. 

He laid it all on the line in a conversation with Asheville Stages.

Brian Postelle: So how was the first show?

Will Sheff: It was good, man. You know we're trying to create something where there's some continuity with the past but it doesn't feel like it's a slavish imitation of the past. So there's a little bit of careful formulation and balancing and evaluating that's naturally part of that process. But we felt like it was a really satisfying show. It's exciting to play these new songs, and for whatever reason I find myself playing keyboard for most of the set, which is kind of a really fun challenge. We're a four-piece and I wanted there to be keys, so that's kind of a fun thing I haven't done before. It makes the experience different for me. 

BP: How is working as a solo artist, but with musicians accompanying you, different for you rather than having a formal band?

WS: I don't know if it was so much about that as it is about feeling unburdened from people's preconceptions about the style of my music. One of the things I find difficult is trying to honor my contract with the audience — give them something that they really enjoy and that they came to see, while at the same time honor my contract with the force that makes me want to play music. Oftentimes, for whatever reason, there's a very slight difference between those two things. But it feels almost criminal to compromise in any way, to be honest. I think going under the name “Will Sheff” as opposed to “Okkervil River” was a way that I could draw that line. 

BP: Yeah, there’s a little bit of a push and pull, isn’t there? Because sometimes fans find their favorite sound and they want you to sound like that forever, but you want to be able to move and change.

WS: Yes, and it's really a bad look to seem ungrateful that I have fans who are invested in that way. That's definitely really meaningful to me, so I know it's all coming from a really awesome place. But at the same time, I have to be listening to my own inner directive about what it is that I want my music to do and be.

BP: One of the things that strikes me on your new record is that you sound a lot closer in, if that makes sense. You sound like you're very close to the mic, almost like you're singing into my ear. Can you tell me about that choice, and working through that sort of feel?

WS: It's funny. It wasn't so much of an intentional thing. I didn't make a choice like, “Oh, I want this song to sound more intimate and the vocals to sound more intimate.” And I’m not even sure to what extent I was aware of it at the time I was making the album. I remember remarking to my partner at one point that I feel like I have figured something out about vocals, but besides that, I don't remember thinking consciously about it. I think it's just a function of my relationship with this music and the way that it was engaging me and where I was at, and what it was that I was wanting and feeling out of the music. 

BP: Well, it’s a great sound. It has an intimate sort of trust. You know when you're hanging around and talking with close friends who you trust really well, that's kind of how I feel about it.

WS: That's really cool! What a cool description. I think that's a big part of the album is that I am trusting the audience to come with me, to come with us. I think that's something that I sometimes struggled with in the past, because I had my sort of “inner directives” for art, but I was trying to square it with my projection of people's expectations and at some level with the marketplace and all these other things. I think that's the big difference with this particular album is I'm kind of trusting the listener with this approach that I'm taking. Trusting that they're not going to turn it off, because it isn't about getting some kind of sugar hit in the first 15 seconds. 

And then you keep listening [and] it's about a sort of a gradual unfolding and the journey that you're taking, and that you know it is made with a lot of sincerity. So, I'm hoping that sincerity is the thing that will keep the listener with us, because we're not trying to be self-indulgent, you know what I mean? We're trying to go somewhere very carefully and thoughtfully.

BP: You mention in your media bio that this album is sort of putting Okkervil River out to sea, which I thought was interesting because this album sounds very sea-like. It feels like water or being underwater in a lot of places. It feels like the sea in a lot of ways to me. Does that track with how you feel like the album came out?

WS: I definitely feel that with “In the Thick of It.” The entire time I was writing and recording that, I felt so much like the sea. I was thinking so much about the ocean. I don’t know if it is from [some part of] my ancient heritage, like people living on the coast, involved in the ocean and sailing and stuff. Maybe it's some kind of memory, but I do seem to have written a lot about oceans and seas and things like that. California really feels so oceanic, you know. Just vast. There's something about when you look out at the ocean or when you're floating in a body of water [like] a big lake or the ocean [where] you feel held by some kind of cosmic mother. 

Actually, as a way of keeping my sanity during quarantine, I did a lot of flotation stuff. I'd go into float chambers and stuff like that. I’d go lie in this floatation tank and get ideas for the album. So yeah, maybe water does play a big role in that, but I haven't really thought about that until you mentioned it.

BP: You write lyrics that are sometimes whimsical, almost playful, and I wonder when you're writing, how do you arrive at that kind of imagery?

WS: I’m just a big fan of trying to be open — that sort of beginner's mind thing. I don't know if you have done this, but if you sit in a chair and what you're looking at, if it's, like, a nice view of nature but it could be just the room you're sitting in, and you just don't try to focus on any one thing in the room and you kind of widen your vision so that you're not focusing on any one thing. And you just try not to even think about the names for things or where you are or what anything is. You just kind of try to witness whatever you're looking at without any kind of thought or judgment about it.

I like that state of mind, and I feel like when you're writing and doing creative work, it's nice to have some flavor of that, where you're not applying your prejudices or applying those parts of you that are critical and sharp and good at editing. They're not welcome during that moment. You're going to bring them in later, but [for now], you've banished them from the room, just to let anything in that feels like it belongs there. 

I love most of all when you don't know what's going to happen in the song, especially when it feels like the person who wrote it didn't know what was going to happen when they started writing it. That sort of freshness of things that are just sort of spontaneously unfolding in a very free world. 

There's that surrealist thing, Exquisite Corpse, where you pass a poem around the room and nobody looks at the line before — they all just write a new line. You end up with these really striking juxtapositions. I try to be like a one man Exquisite Corpse.

BP: How hard is it for you, or how easy is it for you, to get into that quiet place that you want?

WS: Well, it's easy when I say I'm going to do it, but it's not easy to [remember] that all the things that I think are important for 90% of my waking hours are not important at all. I'm so caught up in the dream most of the time, just thinking that I know I'm late or I have something I have to do and everyone's going to be mad at me if I don't get it done. Or, like, what the fuck is wrong with me that I haven't called my health insurance company about a hospital bill? So for 90% of my waking hours, that stupid shit is just running through my head, and the ideas are still whispering.

But if I say to myself, “Stop. Let's be creative,” I’m pretty good at stopping.

IF YOU GO

Who: Will Sheff w/ mmeadows
When: Monday, Nov. 14, 8 p.m.
Where: The Grey Eagle 185 Clingman Ave., thegreyeagle.com
Tickets: $22 advance/$25 day of show

(Photos by Bret Curry)