Music / Okkervil River

Okkervil River is an indie folk band formed in Austin, Texas, in 1998. They've gone through many lineups; the sole consistent member is singer/songwriter/guitarist Will Sheff. While their music has changed genre over the years, it is consistently marked by Sheff's hyper-literate and often self-referential lyrics. They have ten full-length albums and a number of shorter releases and collaborations:

• Bedroom (EP, 1998)
• Stars Too Small to Use (EP, 1999)
• Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See (2002)
• Down the River of Golden Dreams (2003)
• Julie Doiron / Okkervil River (split EP, 2003)
• Sham Wedding / Hoax Funeral (split EP with Shearwater, 2004)
• Sleep and Wake-Up Songs (EP, 2004)
• Black Sheep Boy (2005)
• Black Sheep Boy Appendix (EP, 2005)
• Overboard and Down (EP, 2006)
• The Stage Names (2007)
• Golden Opportunities Mixtape (EP, 2007)
• The Stand-Ins (2008)
• I Am Very Far (2010)
• True Love Cast Out All Evil (with Rory Erickson, 2010)
• Golden Opportunities 2 (EP, 2011)
• The Silver Gymnasium (2013)
• Golden Opportunities 3 (EP, 2013)
• Away (2016)
• In the Rainbow Rain (2018)

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Provides Examples of:

• Age-Progression Song: "White," which codes the narrator's aging as progress through the seasons.
• Album Intro Track: The instrumental "The Stand Ins, One."
• Album Title Drop: "Title Track," from The Stage Names.
• Alma Mater Album: The Silver Gymnasium is named after a building at the boarding school Will Sheff attended.
• Anti-Christmas Song: "Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas" and "Calling and Not Calling My Ex."
• Audience Participation Song: "Pop Lie" both warns against it and demands it.
• Concept Album: Pretty much all of them.
  • Down the River of Golden Dreams deals mainly with uncomfortable moments and realities people would rather forget.
  • Black Sheep Boy is about '70s singer/songwriter Tim Hardin's heroin addiction and about Will Sheff's romantic entanglements.
  • The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins are both about fame and the glories and failures of rock music.
  • The Silver Gymnasium is about nostalgia and identity.
  • Away is about loss and rebirth.
• Cover Album: The three Golden Opportunities mix-tapes, for the most part.
• Driving Song: "Unless It's Kicks," kind of.
  What hits against this chest
  Unless it's a sick man's hand
  From some mid-level band
  He's been driving too long
  On a dark windless night
  With the stereo on
  With the towns flying by
  And the ground getting soft
  And the sound in the sky
  Coming down from above
• Epic Rocking: Six of the nine songs on Away are more than six minutes long; four are more than seven minutes long.
• Everything Is an Instrument: Away makes use of wind chimes, church bells, and twittering birds between tracks.
• Fading into the Next Song: "Singer/Songwriter" ends with the same sleigh bells that begin "Starry Stairs."
  • Many of the songs on Away fade into each other with the aid of ambient noises.
• Four More Measures: The beginning of "Rider" and the third verse of "Black Nemo."
• Friendship Song: "It Was My Season"—only there is a homoerotic, sexual undercurrent to the friendship, and it ends poorly.
  They say that I'll go to college
  And you will stay home
  And watch while I'm leaving
  The cold will just creep in
  Oh, Jason, I know
  • Also, "Down, Down the Deep River" from the same album, which jerks from two pre-adolescent boys talking about music and movies in a tent to the narrator weeping over the early death of his friend.
• God-Is-Love Songs: "Mary on a Wave."
• Grief Song: "Walking Without Frankie" and the third verse of "Down, Down the Deep River."
• Heavy Meta: Uh, yeah. The chorus of "Pop Lie" deserves special attention—it's an eminently singable song about how singing along to a song whose writer doesn't mean it makes you a liar, too.
• Hymn to Music: "Unless It's Kicks," man.
• Hypocritical Singing: See "Pop Lie," above.
• Idiosyncratic Album Theming: Until Away, all Okkervil River releases featured album artwork by William Schaff.
• Location Song: The Silver Gymnasium is a location album, set in Sheff's tiny hometown of Meriden, New Hampshire.
• Love Nostalgia Song: "Calling and Not Calling My Ex," "Your Past Life as a Blast," "It Was My Season."
• Lyrical Dissonance: "Your Past Life as a Blast" floats along very sunnily, until Sheff gets creepy: "Your throat where it's exposed looks like a crime / I'll creep up slow and whisper quiet."
• Lyrical Tic: For a band whose lyrics are so clearly well-thought-out and meticulously crafted, Okkervil River has a lot of these.
  • Sheff shouts "Hey, I'd watch it!" after the second verse of "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe."
  • "Down, Down the Deep River" features multiple "Kid, I know"s, as well as some Simple Minds-esque vocalizations.
  • "Okkervil River R.I.P" features dual proclamations: "Okay!" and "No way!"
• Murder Ballad: "Westfall," about the infamous Yogurt Shop Murders.
• Non-Appearing Title: Many. "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe" subverts the trope a bit—the lyrics pick up right after where the non-appearing title should go.
• Ode to Intoxication: The band's cover of Ted Lucas's "It Is So Nice to Get Stoned."
• Ode to Sobriety: "Stay Young."
  Off love
  Off drugs
  Just feel it in your blood
• Ode to Youth: "Stay Young" again, obviously.
• Pep-Talk Song: "Where the Spirit Left Us," with the twist that the 37-year-old Sheff is addressing his 13-year-old self.
  And when you get hard and your eyes get mean
  'Cause you're on the march
  Well, I could almost kiss you
  Don't let them twist you
  Here, have this song
  You can take it with you
• The Power of Rock: "Unless It's Kicks."
• Rock Star Song: Several from the Stage Names/Stand-Ins era.
  • "Unless It's Kicks" celebrates the power of rock music, even from a "mid-level band."
  • "Lost Coastlines" portrays a band spiritually adrift on tour.
  • "Singer/Songwriter" presents the lack of originality inherent in pop music.
  • "Pop Lie" suggests that rock and roll is an inherently false medium.
  • "A Girl in Port," "Blue Tulip," and "On Tour with Zykos" are all about female fans' relationships with band members.
  • "You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man" continues that theme but adds some angst about the music industry and its executives.
  • "Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed on the Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1979" finds the glam-rock singer Jobriath sick of his lifestyle and his music.
• "Setting Off" Song: "Lost Coastlines," kind of. The band is on tour, but wishes they weren't and has no idea where they're going (metaphysically speaking).
• Sequel Song: The Stand-Ins is more or less a sequel to The Stage Names. The former album's "Starry Stairs," moreover, is a sequel to the latter's "Savannah Smiles."
• Shout-Out: Dozens.
  • The title of "Black Nemo" refers to the classic comic strip Little Nemo. Its lyrics reference the Atari game Pitfall! and perhaps the children's book Where the Wild Things Are.
  • The whole Black Sheep Boy album is a shout out to the singer/songwriter Tim Hardin.
  • In "Down, Down the Deep River," the narrator's father tells him, "You'll be my mirror."
  • "A Girl in Port" references the Crystal Corner, a bar in Madison, Wisconsin.
  • "John Allyn Smith Sails" is about the suicide of the poet John Berryman. It also references a number of landmarks in Minneapolis, where he killed himself.
  • The title of "Lido Pier Suicide Car" recalls a scene in The Big Sleep. Its lyrics refer to "That Jag, the Jaguar," a reference to the band's previous record label, Jagjaguwar.
  • "Mary on a Wave" references the traditional folk song "Pick Poor Robin Clean."
  • '90s R&B group the Force M.D.s and '70s folk singer Judee Sill show up in "Okkervil River R.I.P.," as does Sheff's grandfather T. Holmes "Bud" Moore.
  • "On a Balcony" has a lyric about Firefall, a band best remembered for the 1976 song "You Are the Woman," which is also referenced in "On a Balcony."
  • The title of "On Tour with Zykos" references a fellow Austin band, although they don't show up in the lyrics of the song itself.
  • "Pink Slips" says "We can't go back to those 227 days" and also features a combination Shout-Out and Take That! to Kevin Costner: "Hey, mariner of the dirt trade / Oh, Postman of the post-apocalypse / From Academy Awards to pink slips."
  • "Plus Ones" references songs by ? and the Mysterions, Air Supply, Nena, R.E.M., The Byrds, David Bowie, The Zombies, Paul Simon, Lionel Richie, and Tom Jones. Oh, also the film Some Kind of Wonderful.
  • "Rider" talks about "Rock, Rockaway Beach."
  • "Savannah Smiles" and "Starry Stairs" are both about the adult-film actress Shannon Wilsey.
  • Several songs on The Silver Gymnasium reference The Last Starfighter.
  • "Singer/Songwriter," since it's about a relentlessly cool artist, has many shout-outs of its own, some of which possibly double as Take Thats: The Kinks, Edgar Allan Poe, Antonin Artaud, F.W. Murnau, Coco Chanel, and the gnostic Gospel of Thomas.
  • The last verse of "Stay Young" references both Michael Jackson and Acts 4:11.
  • "Walking Without Frankie" seems to reference "The Spiderbite Song" by Flaming Lips and The Last Starfighter, like several other songs on The Silver Gymnasium. It also contains this gem:

    Freedom or whatever

    Whatever you call it

    It's a stairway or a slow ride

    It's "Rhiannon" or "Landslide"

  • "We Need a Myth" shouts out the classic macabre tale "The Green Ribbon," although the color has changed to red.
  • "You Can't Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man" gets its title from Joni Mitchell's "Blonde in the Bleachers." The lyrics reference Marcel Duchamp's Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.
• Singer Namedrop: "Okkervil River Song," "Okkervil River R.I.P."
• Song of Song Titles: "Plus Ones," with a twist. All the songs mentioned are famous pop songs with numbers in the title—only "Plus Ones," as the title suggests, adds one to each of them.
  You would probably die before you shot up nine miles high.
  Your eyes dilated as light played upon the sight
  Of TVC-16 as it sings you goodnight
  Relaxed as hell and locked up in cell 45
• Teenage Death Songs: "Down, Down the Deep River."
• This Is a Song: "Title Track" and many other songs from The Stage Names and The Stand-Ins.
• Title-Only Chorus: "Days Spent Floating in the Half-Between."
• To the Tune of...: "John Allyn Smith Sails," which turns the toothless The Beach Boys song "Sloop John B" into a song about John Berryman's suicide.
• Villain Song: "Westfall," sung from the perspective of the perpetrator of Austin's infamous Yogurt Shop Murders.
  • "Rider," sung by a murderous, pillaging marauder to his infant child.
  Little baby, be brave
  See your dad riding over the rise
  With his own cavalcade
  And the crowd, watch them run on all sides
  • "The War Criminal Rises and Speaks" starts with the narrator reading about an officer who massacred civilians, before switching to the officer's perspective.
• "When I'm Gone" Song: "Judee on a Street," whose narrator dies near the end of the song and waits for his girlfriend to come to heaven.