Okkervil River

It's not a great day to be Will Sheff. It's 8:30 pm in Texas and Okkervil River's frontman is in the parking lot of a self-storage warehouse, attempting to secure sleeping arrangements for the night.

"I'm trying to get into my storage unit so that I can put a bed into my empty room, but I don't know if I'm going to be able to. It's basically the worst possible time to be interviewed," he sighs.

After a brief move to New York earlier in the year, Sheff is back in Texas for good and is busy rehearsing with his band in order to prepare for their upcoming Australian tour. Though, it's pretty clear his mind is on more pressing issues right now.

"I'm back from New York now - I don't have a home, right. It's great to be homeless at 30," he sneers dejectedly, "fantastic."

There's a brief pause while Sheff shouts to someone in the background; "Don't worry about it. I'll sleep on the floor again. I'll get it in the morning."

Attempting to change the subject, I ask if he enjoys touring.

"Sometimes it's pleasurable," he replies, before sighing again, "sometimes it's very frustrating. Because of all the time I've toured, I don't have a job and I don't have a home and I don't have a girlfriend and I don't feel that I've made much of my life at all. I don't have any money to show for it. So sometimes I get a little frustrated about it all.

"I haven't had a house for a while. Well, I was temporarily renting a place earlier this year and we did some recording there," he says, referring to Okkervil River's EP 'Overboard And Down' which is only available in Australia and for which Sheff cleared out all the furniture out of his rental property to be replaced with recording equipment.

At the time, he explains, the band didn't intend to release any of the 22 songs they worked on.

"The reason we did it was because sometimes it's a fucking rat-race, man. You just get really, really sick of just having to stress about recordings, about interviews, about rehearsal schedules and you start to go, 'wow, I hate what I'm doing - this is kind of horrible'," he says, before pausing again to briefly yell more about the bed.

"I wanted to do something for fun," he continues, "and remember that music was fun for me, once upon a time, as opposed to something that everybody was constantly trying to harp on me."

Sheff explains that the decision to release the EP 'Overboard And Down' was viewed as a way to give something back to their Australian fans - given that 2005's 'Black Sheep Boy', the band's fourth album, is the only one available here. "Because the stuff hadn't been available previously, we thought it would be nice to put something out in Australia," he explains. "We decided that we felt good enough about some of that stuff."

It would be wise not to expect a similar decision in regards to the rest of the session's tracks though, Sheff notes.

"Those won't ever come out. It's about me - I think it's nice to have something that's for yourself. Sometimes you have to remind yourself that the reason that you do things is for your own pleasure, not to gratify other people.

"It's a slow haul," he muses. "It's not like our success is astronomical. As you can see, I don't have enough money to get my bed out of the storage space so I don't have to sleep on the floor."

It's not all bad news, though, he assures me, "I am looking forward to coming to Australia. A lot." He emphasises, "I'm really looking forward to coming to Adelaide especially, too - we had a great time the last time we were there."

Alistair Wallis

dB proudly presents Okkervil River at Fowler's Live on Sat 9 Sept 'Overboard And Down' is out now through Inertia.