This morning we have an interview with
Will Sheff, lead singer of Okkervil
River by Sarah Hepola.
The Nerve Insider is a huge fan of Okkervil
River, and the interview
does not disappoint. Sheff is thoughtful, insightful and extremely appealing.
At the beginning of the piece Sheff orders a sandwich from
Subway. Sarah didn't put this in the article, but he told her, “I want this
interview to be really good, let me finish this sandwich and call you back.”
Other tidbits that didn't make it in the piece:
"One thing about will is
that he's a movie fanatic, and he's pretty encyclopedic in his knowledge. I
used to write about film for The Austin Chronicle, and we actually asked him to
contribute to the film section. The articles are published under his full name,
Will Robinson Sheff. Here's a link to the archive of his work.
Also, during the interview, we had a funny conversation
about his working at video stores. He told me he'd been fired from his job at I
Love Video, another famous indie movie enclave in Austin, and I asked why. This is what he
said:
WS: Because I was incompetent. I forgot to open the
store one day. What can you do? Musicians. But this one girl was really gunning
to get me fired, too. She wanted to see me go down.
ME: Do you think she just wanted your space on the
employee pick's wall?
WS: Yeah, she wanted to fill it up with vampire
movies.'" -- Sarah Hepola
From the interview, Will Sheff on...
Trashy TV:
I think low culture is all culture. Rock and roll is low culture that has been
elevated to high culture. There is something so boring about the idea that
something must be an opera or an etching to matter. It's all human beings
trying to connect, trying to understand one another.
Porn:
It's the most simple art imaginable: It's people and sex. You might throw in
costumes and a storyline, but that's not what people rented it for, or
downloaded it for. They downloaded the porn to see people fucking. There's so
much debate about what it means. All it means is what it is.
I think rock and roll is supposed to be about sex. It's my duty to talk
about sex, just a little bit. Especially in indie rock, because there's this
trend toward kind of fetishizing childishness and being freaking out by sex.
But the songs that I loved, the David Bowie and Iggy Pop, those songs were all
about sex.
Groupies:
That was a big theme, yeah. I guess I'm trying to look at people who are
such big fans of art that they would throw their lives away. And they're such
big fans that art becomes sexual. This is your way to interact with this
person, that you want to have sex with them.
His sad songs:
I don't think of the songs as being sad. I think of them as being ecstatic.
Like having a blended sadness and happiness and poured on in enormous
quanities. I like the idea of these strong emotional states, for those things
to be present at once, that there is something jumbled in the way they co-exist.
