Google as my witness, there are some stupid-ass band names out
there: Slippery Nipple, Pull My Finger and, get this, Hootie and the
Blowfish. Thankfully, Austin-based emotive mope-rockers Okkervil River
actually put some thought into their handle, borrowing the title of a
Tatyana Tolstaya story about a dried-up diva and her one obsessed fan.
On the phone from the “blandly pretty” state of Nebraska, head
Okkervillian Will Sheff admits that he hasn't always liked the name.
“It's hard to spell and pronounce,” the singer says. “And it
makes everyone think that we're a picking and grinning country hoedown
band.” According to Sheff, The Stage Names, Okkervil River's
fifth and latest lauded album, “is an attempt to reclaim the name
thematically.” Like Tolstaya's story, the record explores the distances
between art and reality, between artists and audiences, and between
performers' personas and their personalities.
As the album opener “Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe”
suggests, art immensely affects the experiences we expect and the
meanings we make in our daily lives. To paraphrase Jim Carrey's
character in The Cable Guy, most of us learn the facts of life from watching The Facts of Life.
Sheff concurs: “As a fan, I'm just like anyone else: I'm really
influenced by movies and music. On some level, I wish that life was as
easy as the movies. I wish that things worked out in the end. And I
wish that a pop song that's so pretty was true.
“But it's bullshit. When you talk about art, you're talking
about artifice. There's no way to really be sincere as an artist. It
doesn't have anything to do with sincerity. What it has to do with is
whether or not it's good. A Clash song that's sincere is awesome, but a
David Bowie song that's totally fake is also good.”
On The Stage Names, Sheff wears his love of pop music on
his sleeve, name-checking the works of everyone from Paul Simon to ?
and the Mysterians (on the uncharacteristically playful “Plus Ones”)
and breaking into a rendition of “Sloop John B” during the album
closer, “John Allyn Smith Sails,” a tune dedicated to the late poet
John Berryman (who also shows up on The Hold Steady's equally awesome
last album Boys and Girls in America).
In the past, Sheff's fandom has led him to work as an editor and journalist for Audiogalaxy.com and as a film writer for The Austin Chronicle. While Sheff is an astute cultural critic, a visit to his website www.jound.com
reveals that not everyone appreciates his work. User pinion refers to
the writer as “one of those pencil dick weasel brains,” while
Nick311fan notes that Sheff writes “SHITT ARTICLES.” Thankfully, it
seems that the ever-unimpressed Nick311fan hasn't reviewed Okkervil
River's latest record because the press has been unanimously glowing.
Recently, all this hoopla helped land the band on Late Night With Conan O'Brien.
“I had never been on TV before and it's kind of funny to see how cheap
the set actually looks,” Sheff says. “Have you ever seen King of Comedy?
Do you remember when Robert DeNiro's character builds a fake talk-show
set in his basement? It kind of looked like that. But when the lights
went down, it suddenly became TV world.”
To an extent, Sheff has joined this TV world. Like DeNiro's
Rupert Pupkin, he's still a fan of artistic illusions. But he has also
become one of those illusions himself.
“As far as being a musician, my job as an entertainer, this
kind of work causes people to have an attitude about who you are, which
is different than who you really are and in some ways you're tempted to
try to be that person. But it's all kind of bullshit, so you can't.
This is my livelihood, projecting a certain image, but so much of it
isn't true.”