Pitchfork

As reported earlier this week, one too many emotive yelps sent poor Will Sheff's voice a-packing. Vocal chord strain forced the Okkervil River frontman to to cancel his solo tour with Josh Ritter and suspend work on the band's new album.

Figuring Sheff might be trolling the interweb a little more frequently right now, Pitchfork caught up with the man for a brief e-mail interview, in which he revealed what happened to that expressive voice of his, what fans can expect from the new LP, and just how definitive the Black Sheep Boy Definitive Edition (out March 6 on Jagjaguwar) is.

But first, that lost voice: Following several months of intense touring last fall, Okkervil River set to work preparing for the new album. "We rehearsed every day, four hours a day for about a month," wrote Will. "An unintended and painfully ironic consequence of all that work was that, by the time I stood in front of a microphone to record the vocals for the record, I could barely get a sound out of my mouth."

Sheff visited an ear, nose, and throat doctor-- "he had all these signed head-shots of local opera singers hanging on the wall"-- for the first time in his life. As the specialist told Will, while things could have been worse, "my vocal chords were inflamed and fatigued and I'd developed a couple other problems that just had to do with using my voice too much. He put me on two different medications and prescribed a month of vocal rest."

"Since then," Will told Pitchfork, "we've stopped all work on the record and I've just been sitting around Austin waiting, trying to use my voice as little as possible."

It hasn't been easy. "I've spent stretches of several days where I only talk with a pad of paper and a pen. Whenever I'd go to the grocery store or something, I'd run into friends; they'd walk up to say hello and I'd have to stick a pad of paper in their face with the words 'Sorry - I lost my voice!' on it, and they'd say, 'oh!' and try to ask me a few questions about it. I'd try to scrawl a few responses down before we'd both kind of back away from each other wearing embarrassed looks."

Sheff's voice should heal in due time, however, at which point the band will reconvene and get back to work on the follow-up to Black Sheep Boy. As mentioned yesterday, they're working once again with producer Brian Beattie, and dividing their time between three studios: Jim Eno of Spoon's Public Hi-Fi, Austin's Wire, and Beattie's own studio-in-progress, Wonder Chamber. "Weird circumstances have forced us into actually working at legitimate studios, the kind real bands use," Sheff joked.

As he revealed to Pitchfork, Okkervil plans to take a considerably different approach to this record.

"When we started work on Black Sheep Boy," he said, "I intentionally didn't want any of us to be too familiar with the songs when we went in because I wanted there to be a sloppy, rough quality to the performances. We went in barely knowing the songs, smashed out some skeletal basic tracks, and then took quite awhile feeling out what they might need during an overdubbing process where we tried an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach, bringing in all of our friends to see if they had something to contribute to the songs."

"It seemed like it might be fun to take the opposite approach this time, so for this record we had about a month of daily rehearsals and then went into the studio and recorded live as a six-piece, trying to get everything right in the basic track. In this we were thinking in terms of a Motown or classic pop approach, the solidity and confidence of those basic tracks, and the way that overdubs are used more as accents."

Will's reluctant to reveal any album or song titles yet, since nothing is finalized. As he put it, "It's very easy to get attached to your idea of what something should be and fail to notice that something different, and perhaps better, might be happening instead. Along the way, you can change your mind entirely about something, or make a mistake that throws the entire track into a different context and quickly becomes something you have to follow somewhere new."

The play-by-ear approach is nothing new for Okkervil. "We've traditionally reworked everything-- especially lyrics-- in the studio, and have even added overdubs during mastering. This record seems to be more that way than all of the others: since we've gone into the studio(s), I've rewritten the lyrics on three different songs to fit more snugly with what I think has been happening all over the album."

Before that new album hits shelves, however, fans will have the opportunity to revisit Black Sheep Boy and its companion EP Black Sheep Boy Appendix in one slick package, the Definitive Edition. Turns out the band and their European label-- Virgin/EMI-- originally conceived of the bundle for overseas audiences. Jagjaguwar then requested an American version, et voila, come March 6 you can take it home with you.

Among the assorted bonus goodies, said Will, is "a kind of 'video' for an alternate, slow version of our song 'No Key, No Plan', made up of footage I shot during our Australian tour on a VCam, a toy video camera made by Hasbro and Tiger."

Sheff's quite pleased with the Definitive Edition. "We tried to present William [Schaff]'s booklet artwork in a more elegant manner, too (for instance, without all the legal fine print required by the major label). I think it came out pretty nice, and I'm excited to own a copy, which is pretty much my measure of everything we do."

Okkervil dates:

03-15 Austin, TX - Bourbon Rocks (SXSW day party)
03-15 Austin, TX - The Mohawk (SXSW showcase)
04-21 Austin, TX - Hogg Auditorium at University of Texas