Taking hold of the scene

Okkervil River’s breakthrough album, 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, is based on a dark tale of violence, heartbreak, alienation and bleak depression. Fittingly, the band’s singer-songwriter Will Sheff wrote it while spending a particularly cold winter in Bloomington.

“The first gig we ever played outside Texas was at Bloomingtonfest (in 2002),” Sheff said. “I know Bloomington really well. I’m really looking forward to coming back.”
Okkervil River is due to make its return on Monday, April 7, to play the Buskirk-Chumley Theater.

However, in the years since the band first came to town as new signees to local record label Jagjaguwar, things have changed a bit. Okkervil River’s latest album, 2007’s The Stage Names, went beyond the success of Black Sheep Boy, garnering widespread critical acclaim and becoming the best-selling album in Jagjaguwar’s history. Not too bad for a band whose frontman has proclaimed that, to pursue his artistic goals, he must become “a professional failure.”

Formed in Austin, Texas, in 1998, Okkervil River began when Sheff reunited with bassist Zach Thomas and drummer Seth Warren, who he had first met while all three were kids in Meridian, N.H.

Taking their name from a short story by Tatyana Tolstaya about a bureaucrat’s quest to track down a forgotten singer, the band has released five albums and undergone numerous personnel changes in the past 10 years. The current lineup features Sheff (vocals/guitar), Scott Brackett (coronet/keyboards), Jonathan Meiburg (vocals/various instruments), Travis Nelsen (drums), Patrick Pestorius (bass) and Charles Bissell (guitar).

But in the course of all this change, Sheff has remained the band’s constant – his lyrics gaining a reputation for their vivid, empathetic portrayals of characters both real and imagined (and sometimes a mixture of both).

“There’s no song that I’ve ever written that’s true in terms of everything applying to Will Sheff,” he said. “I’m 100 percent eager to lie, change how I felt about things, change details, facts, put another person into the situation. ... The only thing I care about is the song being good. I don’t feel I have any responsibility to tell things the way they happened.”

In this, Sheff draws inspiration from books, movies, music and personal experiences – some of which prove surprising.

Stage Names features songs about both the suicide of poet John Berryman (cited by his real name in “John Allyn Smith Sails”) and that of groupie-turned-porn-star Shannon Wilsey (cited by her stage name in “Savannah Smiles”). Meanwhile, other influences include the reality show “Breaking Bonaduce” and the literary work of Ed Sanders, author and former front man for underground ’60s rock group The Fugs.

Likewise, concepts carried by the lyrics stretch and interweave across each album. For instance, in Black Sheep Boy, a bitter misfit antihero appears throughout the album, railing against the world and himself. Stage Names, on the other hand, addresses questions of how entertainment (particularly, but not exclusively, rock music) affects those who produce and consume it – although Sheff declines from assigning the album a single overarching theme.

“I handle that stuff with kid gloves,” he said. “I feel like if I’m just lining up the album in my brain with a theme previously decided in a clean-cut way, it feels like paint by numbers or designing something to be picked apart.”

But rock is not merely about brains – and all the complex ideas behind Okkervil River’s lyrics might amount to little were it not for the emotional punch of Sheff’s voice.

“His feelings come through loud and clear when he sings, whether he’s pissed off or hopeful or wanting to die, you know it as soon as he opens his mouth,” IU sophomore and Okkervil River fan Britani Hutchinson said.

“His passion for what he’s singing floods the entire room.”

In the past, this intense, heart-on-sleeve approach has cost Sheff his voice (he now rests it when he’s not onstage) – but he claims it has more to do with how he loves to sing than his being a particularly dramatic person.

“There’s an emotional quality to the way I do music,” he said.

“I really like soul music that feels very raw, very invested in going on ... (However) I don’t want people to think there is a quivering delicate soul emoting and spilling his guts in diary entries.”

But while he may not be the emo type, it doesn’t take much digging to find Sheff’s personal investment in his work. In talking about Stage Names’ “You Can’t Hold The Hand Of A Rock And Roll Man,” the tale of a down-and-out rock star whose pitiful state runs in satirical contrast to his ex-wife’s portrait of rock ’n’ roll excess, Sheff suddenly switched gears.

“Something like that deserves to be made fun of,” he said. “On the other hand, you’re not supposed to let go of your dreams. What do you do if the response is ‘no one cares’?”

Fortunately, Okkervil River doesn’t have to answer that question.