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Okkervil River.
 Let's say you heard a song that you were really impressed with; not simply that you thought that, say, Living On A Prayer had a really kick-ass chorus, but a song that's really, really affected you deeply. Well, if you're Will Sheff, and the song in question is Tim Hardin's Black Sheep Boy, you'll be inspired to take his metaphor and base an entire album around it. And that dark, heartfelt, country-tinged album just might be the best thing you'll hear in 2005.
"I don't know," Sheff shrugs when I ask why Hardin's Black Sheep Boy evoked such a strong response in him. "I really liked the song a lot and I really liked the theme of the song, and it was like a key that I could use to unlock the whole album that I felt like making at that particular time, which was an album that had a little bit of a rough, dark quality to it, I guess. It was more a jumping-off point than the core of the record: I felt like I could just take that phrase 'black sheep boy' and run with it. So we elaborated on it, taking the literally taking a physical, phantasmagorical Black Sheep Boy, and then also the whole idea of what that character would be like, both as a creature and as a character that wants things and doesn't get them."
It proves an unexpectedly fertile metaphor across the album: we follow the Black Sheep Boy from lamb to ram, shorn and led to the slaughter, mixed with what seems to be a decidedly non-metaphorical story of unrequited love and relationships gone astray. "I was a little bit concerned with that," he admits, "because I am in a lot of ways trying to play with a lot of images that are already in the culture and yet not make it seem hackneyed; and at the same time I was trying to come up with some new images and a new feel for what this character could be that didn't seem like it was borrowing too much from elsewhere - even though the title's borrowed from another song I wanted to turn it into something that was our own thing. So that extends to actually, literally talking about people messing up, and painting a picture of a creature in, like, a fairy tale setting."
And of course it opens up the odd joke, like So Come Back, I Am Waiting's reference to "life on the lam". "Yeah, I'm an insufferable punster, I can't help it," he laughs. "I really, really enjoy punning. It's really interesting, that aspect of language where you can make use of puns. To me, there's a lot of humour in the record and that's what you're picking up on, but I think a lot of people who maybe take music very seriously might even think that we're being very grave and dire. Certainly it's serious, but to me there's a lot of fun I'm trying to have in it. That's the song where I'm trying to deal with some pretty heavy subject matter, but do it in a way that's got cheek and it's sort of playful; having fun with language and being coy a little bit. And I think if people don't get it they'll just think 'oh, he's using big words and being pompous.'" He pauses, before laughing. "And, well, I am really pompous - but I wasn't trying to be in that song. To me, that's funny."
Given the way the songs work together I was curious as to how conscious Sheff was when writing the album: was it a theme that emerged, or if the songs were deliberately written as a suite? "It was definitely conceived as - well, not as a suite, necessarily, but as a group of songs that would share the same imagery and the same style of language and the same melodic content at times, and the same tone," he explains. "I had in mind the themes and the feel and the imagery and the emotions that I wanted to stick to and I didn't care to go out of that on this record: I thought it would be good to have a very limited palate of things that we were trying to do, and I wrote all the songs with that in mind. And some of them came out really easily and naturally and seemed to be related to each other, and there were other ones where I had work them to get to know each other a little better and work the congruencies out a little bit more thoughtfully."
It's no surprise that people don't get the record: it's a very dense piece, and I confess to Sheff that it took me a couple of listens to even decide whether I liked it, let alone delve into its considerable depths. He laughs delightedly. "That's good! I like that. That's sort of what we were going for - we wanted to beat people into submission."
Andrew P Street
 | 'Black Sheep Boy' is out now through Low Transit Industries. |
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