On the eve of their second tour down under, OKKERVIL RIVER’s WILL SHEFF talks philosophy and feng shui with CLARE FLETCHER… until they come to blows over the comparative merits of George Michael and Wham!

Despite the circumstances – an awkward, transcontinental phone delay, my post-Ekka holiday hangover, the fact Will is moving furniture as we speak – my conversation with Will Sheff is truly memorable. He is one of the most candid and considered interviewees I’ve come across.

We are talking in aid of Okkervil River’s imminent Australian tour and the exclusive tour EP they’re bringing with them: Overboard And Down. Well, I’m talking – Will is “sweating and moaning and groaning” while moving a bed into his sparse new apartment. Our (admittedly uninformed) discussion of feng shui is punctuated by muffled bumps and grunted asides about box springs to someone called “Trav”.

But enough heavy lifting. Will’s chatter is a world away from the hang-dog storyteller of Okkervil River I’ve come to love on record. On last year’s Black Sheep Boy LP, he whispered, howled and wailed dark, dense songs of love and violence. With bandmates Scott Brackett, Brian Cassidy, Travis Nelson and Patrick Pestorius, Will’s music is something between rock & roll, country music and poetry.

Now the Texas-via-New Hampshire five-piece are due back on our shores – and they only made their maiden voyage here late last year. There must be an impressive Okkervil fan club down under, right?

“I don’t really know,” Will admits with a giggle. “All I know is we had a really great time last time we were there… and we didn’t lose money, so…!”

But of course, it’s not all about the money for Okkervil River. Far from it. Overboard And Down is the product of a session that was never supposed to be released. A session designed to break the monotony of the release/publicity/tour merry-go-round.

“You start to feel like you’re hustling to get successful…. The point is not to be desperate not to be broke, but to have fun,” Will says.

 “You have to set aside a time just to make music for fun. I guess it’s like married couples having a date night. You get so caught up raising the kids you forget to have a romantic night by yourselves!”

So Okkervil River set about recording something just for fun, songs no one need ever hear. New songs, old songs. Songs like a rollicking cover of Big Star’s O Dana, whooped-up and hoarsely hollered like it was recorded at 3am in a honky-tonk bar.

Or The President’s Dead, a not-a-protest song. Written from the perspective of a republican Bush-supporter, the song imagines what it would really be like if the president were assassinated.

“I don’t wanna write protest songs per se – I think that’s a waste of a good song. It’s like advertising,” Will says.

Instead, the song zooms out from the violence, pans past the salivating media tent, and focuses on the domestic minutiae of the narrator’s breakfast with his girlfriend. The stuff you really would think of maybe thirty years in / when somebody will say what were you doing when.

“In a lot of ways it’s more about time, about relationships, about this clock ticking away toward your own death than it has to do with any current political situation.”

Such is the music of Okkervil River, named after a real river outside St Petersburg and namechecked in a Tatyana Tolstaya story. These songs are almost worlds within themselves; fully-fledged narratives peopled with dark, flawed, beautiful characters. I couldn’t help but wonder: do you write fiction, Mr Sheff?

“I write miscellaneously, here and there – more critical writing than fiction – but generally I haven’t sought an outlet for that stuff,” he muses.

“I always think of that Billy Corgan book of poetry that’s just this terrible, terrible piece of shit. It’s just embarrassing to humanity. That to me just epitomizes the sort of self-indulgence that musicians have.”

But if ever a medium were created for self-indulgent writing, ironic or not, it is the band website. And on this band’s website, the curious traveler will find “A Story of Okkervil River”; a gloriously unhelpful band biography full of private jokes, incomprehensible to the casual observer. It is a fantastic tale, and one I suspect takes leave of reality now and then.

How important is the truth to a good story?

“Not at all,” according to Will.

“What you’re trying to get at in a good story, or fiction, is a truth that’s deeper. That’s a dumb, 20th century, romantic cliché, but I think it’s true. Ironically, that’s why I think fiction can sometimes get at the big truths better than if you’re being slavish to the reality of what really happened.”

Sincerity, Will says, is a quality many listeners automatically associate with Okkervil River – along with seriousness and glum dispositions. But just as the band are “not all depressed, Leonard Cohen types”, sincerity is not that important either.

“I think all those things – lying and telling the truth, false sincerity and genuine sincerity – all that stuff is just tools you can work with to colour your work,” Will explains.

The only thing that matters, it seems, is that something is good.

“I look at pop music, and I see synthetic crap that’s great, and I see heart-on-your-sleeve stuff that’s great. Woody Guthrie is incredible, and so is Prince. That’s the glory of pop music: all that matters in the end is whether something is good or not.”

Which, naturally, prompts the philosophical debate that has raged eternally: how does George Michael’s solo work stack up against his canon with Wham!?

“Better. Way better. What do you mean? Wham sucks! George Michael’s awesome,” is Will’s considered argument. I counter with a passionate discourse on the cultural significance and artistic merit of Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.

“Maybe it’s because everything’s upside down in Australia you think Wham! is good and George Michael sucks…but that’s just my opinion. This is what I’ve been saying – it’s pop music, so it’s everyone for themselves.”

We agree to disagree. But I’m wearing my Choose Life T-shirt to the gig.

Okkervil River play the Zoo on Wednesday September 6. Tour EP Overboard And Down is available through Low Transit Industries/Inertia, and at shows.

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