aaaaaand a short excerpt from the okkervil river essay i wrote

because i know you're all so interested. this really is short, in comparison to the whole goddamn thing:

Will Sheff, Zach Thomas, and Seth Warren met in high school in New Hampshire, and together picked up instruments and barely avoided being expelled. They parted ways for college. Will’s college experience was a nightmare, but as he phrases it on the Okkervil River website “Each of my nervous breakdowns fell away when I made the most important decision of my life: to be a total failure.” Seth and Will moved to Austin, where Zach Thomas was already living, and in 1998, Okkervil River was born.

1998 was the year I turned 16. My musical life was populated by shitty bands I’d heard on top-40 radio and the saving grace of my parents and their excellent taste in folky songwriters. Thanks mostly to my mom, my favorite album was Blue by Joni Mitchell. I had it recorded on a tape and when I walked and bussed around Austin I’d listen to it on repeat, only occasionally switching it out for a tape of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, or my brother’s copy of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

A couple years after moving to Austin and forming the band, Will Sheff scored a writing gig for the music/file-sharing website Audiogalaxy.com. I read Will’s reviews enthusiastically before I had ever heard of Okkervil River. During this time, Will penned an article for the site’s “Rewind” feature on favorite albums from the past, and wrote about Blue.

“During subsequent listens to Blue, I became amazed at the subtlety of Mitchell's language - the elegant forms of her lines, her skill with metaphor, her alternation of clever internal rhymes with blunt, plain asides - as well as the small ways she'd worked to feminize her narratives. I'd always thought critics who talked about "feminine vs. masculine" styles of engaging an audience were being essentialist and vaguely insulting until I heard Mitchell, perhaps the songwriter most successful at imprinting a mysterious femininity to her songs which is hard to trace but which makes them feel as much the work of a woman as [Leonard] Cohen's feel like the work of a man.” –Will Robinson Sheff

Reading these thoughts on Blue solidifies my understanding of why it’s been such an important album to me for the last ten years, while my other musical tastes and favorites have swirled and evolved and shifted dramatically around it. I have always devoured words -- books and songs and conversation – but as I reached adolescence it became difficult to find a perspective that I could actually relate to as a woman without delving into the boring world of romance novels, ultra-saccharine female singer-songwriters, and girls who wanted to talk exclusively about boys and shoes. I rebelled against feminine culture by hanging on my nerdy male friends, playing role playing games and reading comic books. Joni Mitchell was one of the only things in my life that kept me from feeling completely divorced from my biological makeup. Joni is unabashedly feminine, in love with perfume and clean sheets, but she was also unabashedly human and very much alive. She sang about dancing and kissing statues and being helplessly drunk on love, and it seemed to me that she lived a life that I wanted to live. Someday.

Okkervil River recorded and self-released a seven song album called Stars Too Small To Use in 1999. It took three years for their next effort and their first real full-length, Don’t Fall In Love With Everyone You See to be released. It was the first time I would hear them, specifically the first song on the album, “Red.”

I immediately felt moved by the song to a spectacular degree. My friend Brian almost immediately decided that it was his favorite song of all time, out placing “Car” by Built To Spill. Brian and I listened to “Red” together a lot, speculating on what made it so special. We both felt that Will Sheff had created (or remembered, we weren’t sure) a perfect character and story. It still sounds perfect to me. The drums are steady and quiet, the organ alone could make me cry, and Will’s perspective on the mother-daughter relationship is almost unbelievably empathic.

Red is my favorite color, red like your mother’s eyes after awhile of crying about how you don’t love her. She says “I know I don’t deserve supervised sight of her, but each day becomes a blur without my daughter.”

Looking back, I think that what I heard in Okkervil River was similar to what I’d always heard in Joni Mitchell. I’m not saying that I can relate to Will Sheff’s songs as a woman, although that may be more true than he would care to hear about. What Will does is imagine a world as dark as the one that’s around me, but he shines a light on things that would otherwise be in shadow.

What the song “Red” says, in it’s own small and very specific way -- the thing that Brian and I heard and immediately took to heart -- is you are not alone. I am not alone. We are not alone. The infinite chasm between you and everyone else on the planet is smaller than you think. I understand you, and you understand me.