On Wednesday, we rang up Will Sheff at home in Brooklyn, the Okkervil River frontman suspending dinner prep to talk about the 10th anniversary reissue of Black Sheep Boy, which includes the original LP, a follow-up EP, and a third CD of unheard material. Kitchen tips were also offered ahead of his sold-out solo sets this weekend at the Cactus Cafe.
Austin Chronicle: Where am I reaching you?
Will Sheff: You’re reaching me in Brooklyn, where I’m about to start slicing some potatoes and blanching some broccoli rabe.
AC: Ooh. What are you making?
WS: I’m just making steak with potatoes and some broccoli rabe. Really low-key. I like to boil the potatoes a little bit before I roast them and also blanch the broccoli before I cook it, so then I can just let it sit there forever. Then, it takes no time to actually cook. So that’s a little tip for your readers there.
AC: Definitely a bonus to the shoptalk.
WS: I try to bring a little bit extra value to every interview I do.
AC: Tell me about the Black Sheep Boy reissue and how it came about.
WS: Chris Swanson at Jagjaguwar sent me an email and asked me if I wanted to do it since the 10-year anniversary was coming up. I hadn’t really thought much about the anniversary, and at first I thought that it seemed hokey and not worth doing. But the more I thought about it, that record is really special to me. It’s a record I feel like – particularly at this moment in my creative and personal life – that I relate to a lot more, because when I was making it, I think I was shutting down a certain part of the way I had lived and the way I had made work.
You know, whenever you’re at the beginning of something there’s a moment where you’re at the end of something old still. So you’re in something that’s dying, and you’re about to go into something that’s kind of like a new birth. I feel like that now, too. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s the fact that 10 years has passed. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve had all kinds of ups and downs since I made that record, or whether or not I feel like something has kind of run its course. Probably a lot of those things, but I feel like I’m at this point right now where the way that I’ve been doing things the past 10 years is not the way that I’d like to continue on doing things. That was definitely the headspace I was in when I was making Black Sheep Boy.
I guess for that reason I feel myself coming back to the record. And, indeed, when I was listening to it and I was approving masters and trying to relearn the songs and all of that stuff, I found it really speaking to me. You can’t really ever go back to the same place that you were, ever, but what you can do is instead of going full circle, you sort of go in a spiral shape, so that you’re in the same position that you were, but it’s not the exact.
So I guess because of that affection that I have for it, I thought maybe we should do it. It’s also been a really fun opportunity to put a cap on 10 years and start over again.
AC: The reissue obviously has more on it than the songs from Black Sheep Boy. For an album that was so important to you personally, how did you pick songs that would complement the original material?
WS: In a sense there’s two phases to that. When I recorded those songs, I didn’t anticipate that one day there would be enough demand for a record that I hadn’t even made yet. I definitely had conceived the record and planned it, but I didn’t know that there would be enough demand to put out bonus material on a 10th anniversary edition. I was just recording those songs because they meant a lot to me at that particular moment, so much so that I wanted to sing them. I just wanted to have it. I’ve done a fair amount of that throughout my career, where I kind of do a recording that isn’t clear what it’s going to be used for, or if it’s even going to be used at all. It’s kind of just for me.
The other way that I sometimes think of it is burning the sacrificial ram. You know what I mean? You’re taking something and not using it for anything else but for the gods, somehow. That’s why I did those initial recordings. I didn’t think of it as a companion piece to Black Sheep Boy, but the reason that it does feel like a companion piece is because it was made in the same headspace that I was in that time. So they seem like they’re cut from a similar cloth.
When Chris asked me, “Do you have anything else from that time?,” initially I said, “No.” In my mind, I assumed those recordings weren’t very good. I hadn’t really listened to them, but I was young and I had a lot of misgivings about the kind of performer I was back then, so I guess I assumed that they sucked. Then I went back and listened to them, and I was like, “Oh, wow. These are really cool.”
There were actually about 22 of them. So then I went through and I chose the ones that went on there based on which ones I liked the best, but also to a certain extent based on the songs that I feel like make explicit the way that those themes are connected to what I ended up coming up with on Black Sheep Boy six months later.
AC: I know Okkervil River has done a few full-album performances recently. Is that what’s planned for the Cactus sets as well?
WS: In short, no. What I’m doing at the Cactus is a solo show. With the band dates, there are a lot of people involved and it’s an expensive enterprise. Then people started saying, “Why don’t you play this? Why don’t you play this?” And I thought maybe this was a chance to play these songs in a different way.
I’ve always really liked doing a solo show. It feels less like getting up there and playing a drunken rock concert, and more like doing a poetry reading or something like that. I enjoy that aspect of it, so I started agreeing to do them. It’s funny, because the band shows we did out on the East Coast, which were just so fun and great, we really put so much care and effort into trying to really, truly recreate the album, even the little ear candy moments.
What I’m doing with the solo shows is the opposite. I’m trying to cast these songs in a completely different light and present the bones of them, the heart of what they are. As opposed to showing the whole dressed person in their outfit, you’re showing the skeleton.
AC: Was it difficult to strip back that much after putting all of that work into recreating songs faithfully?
WS: Yeah. It’s been quite difficult, because every single song is like some kind of weird math problem. Some of them are straightforward, like “A Stone,” which is a pretty easy song to do in a straightforward way and play it solo. But a song like “Black” or “The Latest Toughs” or “Another Radio Song” – which I’m still on the fence if I’m going to do – if I’m up there and just wailing on an acoustic guitar and screaming, it’s not good. Nobody wants it.</p
And I’m not talking about me. I’m not saying I’m not good at it. I just think it’s really difficult to sell someone just pounding on an acoustic guitar up there by themselves. So what I have to do is very slowly dismantle them, piece by piece, and put them back together into something that works.
AC: I know Black Sheep Boy was based on Tim Hardin’s folk song of the same name. Do you still find yourself turning to folk for inspiration in your songwriting?
WS: Absolutely, yeah. I think of it as the source of what I do. It was where I started out with Okkervil River. The whole idea, on some level, was to draw something from traditional, old-time folk. Not necessarily in the sense that it’s the exact instruments or the exact style. There are some people who try a thing that’s based in folk music or in the American songbook or something, and what they do is try to steal the ticks and the mannerisms from the old-timey shit that makes it feel like a museum piece. To me, that’s the most embarrassing and least appealing part of it. That’s the stuff that’s excessively dated and doesn’t really have anything to say about us now other than the fact that those musicians were really great and they didn’t need pedals, and obviously that part of it is a relevant and interesting lesson.
To me, what I always thought was the big, beautiful secret behind all of that wasn’t in the trappings. It was in the directness with which they performed, the way that those songs addressed really powerful elemental topics like life and death. And the way that the singer sang to you in a manner that was a complete and total no bullshit approach. That, to me, is what I got out of folk music. I guess that’s something I always try to have inform what I do.
AC: Did you expect that this album, the third album that you put out with Okkervil River, would have this much influence a decade later?
WS: I think there are other ones that have had even more influence. When we did The Stage Names, that was an album I actually hear its influence in other things. Certainly, Black Sheep Boy was the album that kind of got it all rolling for us.
I don’t really know the answer to that question.
I definitely, without a doubt knew that it was going to be the best thing I’d ever done, but that didn’t necessarily translate into believing that it was going to be successful. I really hadn’t had any kind of success at all, so the message I was getting from the world at large is that people weren’t interested in what I was doing. I thought it was good, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I thought, “Oh, this is going to make me money, this is going to get me fans, this is going to let me quit my day job.”
It was more like I thought that the guys from the label would be super happy and into it, and that I’d be proud of what I did, and that the guys in the band will think I’m good at writing songs.
This article appears in December 11 • 2015.