Okkervil River’s frontman Will Sheff discusses how to be your own action figure

By Erik Adams
Published: September 11th, 2008 | 10:10am

Will Sheff might know what drives people to leak new music onto the Internet, and it has to do with a childhood memory. “When I was a kid, I really wanted this one action figure for my birthday, and I tried to pressure my mom into buying it for me,” the Okkervil River frontman said in a phone interview. “I was really obnoxious about it, and I was asking her if she bought it for me. I was asking her again, and again, and again, and she was getting really annoyed. Finally she admitted that she had bought it for me. Then I tried to pressure her into giving it to me early, before my birthday, and she would absolutely not give me this present before my birthday.”

So, powered by the impulse to have what was his before he was supposed to, the young Sheff found where his mother had hidden the action figure. Upon telling her of this discovery, Sheff made one last demand for early gifting. His mother, fed up with his insolence, promptly returned the toy to the store.

“And I now have so much respect for mother for that approach, because I quite honestly think it’s the exact same impulse [that causes leaks],” Sheff said. Anecdotal theories aside, this is something Sheff had a recent experience with — Okkervil River’s new record, The Stand Ins (released September 9 on Jagjaguwar), has been slipping around the Internet, freely and illegally, since mid-July.

“There is a conception that certain people have that music should be free,” Sheff said. “I don’t understand why that is, because it’s not free for us to make.”

While The Stand Ins doesn’t address the scourge of file sharing, Sheff and his bandmates do spend much of the record discussing the concerns facing a rocknroll band in 2008. If it sounds like familiar territory, that’s because it is: Okkervil River’s 2007 record The Stage Names explored the same themes. In fact, The Stage Names and The Stand Ins could have been one double album.

“It was somewhat conceptualized as a double album, but I didn’t think as I was writing the songs, ‘This is going to be a double album,’” Sheff said. “I was just thinking, ‘Aw, I want to write some more songs like this.’ Then when it became time to take a look at the songs, and what I’d written, I started to realize, ‘Wow, there are way too many songs on here for one, single record, and I really like almost all of the songs.’ So in the end, we chose the ones that we liked and as we were working we set some aside, with an eye to answering some of the themes on The Stage Names.”

As such, Sheff pitches The Stand Ins as less of a sequel and more of a rebuttal to its predecessor. “The songs were kind of chosen for the way that they commented on each other, and the albums were pulled apart in terms of the way that they reflected each other,” he said. So the macho swagger of Stage Names standout “A Girl in Port” is deflated by the female point of view on Stand Ins' “On Tour with Zykos.” “Unless it’s Kicks” celebrated life as a touring band, and “Lost Coastlines” exposes the neuroses buried beneath that celebration. “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man,” states the title of one Stage Names track. But on The Stand Ins, it’s the rocknroll man who can’t hold the hand of a television actress (“Calling and Not Calling My Ex”).

But the connections between songs aren’t one-to-one, either. For instance, the aforementioned “Lost Coastlines” and “A Girl in Port” are connected by a string of nautical images, which Sheff characterized as “a nicely self-deluding, romanticized metaphor.”

“That’s a big part of being a musician,” he said. “Any kind of person who aspires to celebrity is self-deluding and self-aggrandizing their world. On some level, you have something missing that you want that to fill, and I think on a certain level you’re trying to replace who you really are with a romanticized version.”

The Stand Ins find Sheff singing from the perspectives of two deceased entertainers lost in romanticized versions of themselves: Bruce Wayne Campbell, who crafted glam rock under the pseudonym Jobriath, and Shannon Wilsey, who made a name for herself in the adult-film industry as Savannah. Sheff said that while it’s condescending to say Wilsey was deluding herself, an artist can gain a great deal by pulling the wool over their own eyes.

“Believing in yourself sometimes requires fooling yourself,” he said. “Somebody like Marc Bolan [of T.Rex], what people really responded to was his unbelievable cockiness — the sense that he was on par with Beethoven — that he had about himself. Now of course that’s utter bullshit. But if he hadn’t believed it, he wouldn’t have had that cockiness at all, which is his essentially charming feature.”

And, Sheff admitted, he’s just as guilty of this as any other artist. “I was talking to an engineer the other day, and he was talking with another engineer, and sometimes I feel like a clown when I see how much they know,” he said. “But then I just fool myself into thinking that I’m good.”

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