Moving From a Folk Influence Into a Darker, Literary Realm

Okkervil River, like other folk-minded bands, is often called alt-country, but singer and guitarist Will Sheff resents the label. "We've gotten called alt-country right out of the gate because of having, like, a mandolin," he says, "but we also have a trumpet. Does that make us a mariachi band?"

If anything, Okkervil River falls into the category of troubadour. Sheff crafts literary, dramatic songs about moments and lives. His lyrics are touching and disturbing, often simultaneously, and they are found in tracks that range from just vocals with spare guitar parts to driving country-rock tunes, thick with instrumentation.

The result are tales which are both intensely personal and yet oddly universal, a juxtaposition Sheff finds hard to comprehend. "It's really difficult for me to connect my experience of writing those songs with them being meaningful to somebody [else]," he says. "[It's] this crazy hall of mirrors where you're seeing these shards of things that were meaningful to you reflected in people around you."

The Austin band has been receiving more attention since their April 2005 release, Black Sheep Boy, an album that is inspired by and begins with a cover of the song of the same name by '60s folk singer Tim Hardin. The album's 11 songs are all related to that one song, but Sheff doesn't think of Black Sheep Boy as a concept album in the "Pink Floyd, The Wall kind of sense where you have to have exposition, you have to have characters, it's really clear what the arc of everything is." As he explains, the album's thematic content is spare: "I knew I wanted this Black Sheep Boy character ... I knew I wanted the songs to have a thematic link to each other, and a link of language, and a link of musical power."

This album's songs run the gamut from the folky title track to the slow, ethereal "In a Radio Song," to "Black," which is closer to a standard pop song, although one whose upbeat catchiness belies its dark lyrics-"I can still see where you loved yourself before he tore it all down," and later, "I'd call, some black midnight, fuck up his new life where they don't know what he did." All songs benefit from Sheff's sometimes-clean, sometimes-raw tenor.

Even with his wide range, Sheff felt there was more to explore in this project, so he created the Black Sheep Boy Appendix, which will come out on Nov. 22 on Jagjaguwar: a mini-album that continues the Black Sheep Boy theme. Okkervil River chose to make a theme album in the first place because, as he says, "we wanted to narrow our focus." He adds, "You have the liberty to walk away from it feeling like you've dealt with it. ... That's sort of why we did Appendix, to get it all out of our system."

The other way to get an album out of the band's system is by taking it on the road. Okkervil River have been touring almost constantly, with frequent lineup changes from one tour to the next, and not without incident. On their current tour, named after a track on Appendix, "No Key No Plan," Sheff came down with strep, and drummer Travis Nelsen fractured his wrist. "It's just really, really hard to keep a steady band together because touring is a hard life, especially when you're not making much money doing it," he says. "People taking breaks and coming back, it keeps the focus on me, and that's sort of a shame because that's not how I meant it to be."

"There's a lot of other things going on" besides his songwriting, Sheff says.

Sheff doesn't know what's next for Okkervil River now that the Black Sheep Boy story is finished: "You just wait for an idea that you find really exciting enough to commit a lot of energy and love to, and then you go from there."