Okkervil River, hereby known as the best american band at the moment, is heading to the Oz. fasterlouder has a interview with Will, which you can read “here”:http://www.fasterlouder.com.au/features/5663/. They’ll be releasing a aussie only record, so for those of you kind enough to live there, pick one up for me (annie).
Why love Will? Simply because he cares when not many do. He cares about making the perfect song and turning his heart into art:
bq. My real concerns with file-sharing are primarily aesthetic.
bq. There’s a story by Jorge LuÃs Borges called “The Library of Babel.†It describes a fantastical library composed of an apparently infinite number of identical rooms. Each room contains 1,050 books. Printed on the pages are words whose lettering and order are apparently random. Because the library is complete, among the gibberish it also contains every book that is possible, every book that could ever be written. It also contains every imaginable variation of every book possible, whether that variation is off by thousands of letters or by a single comma. Borges adds that it must contain, somewhere, a book that explains the meaning and origin of the library itself – just as it contains thousands of variations of that book, true and false. He writes, “When it was proclaimed that the Library contained all books, the first impression was one of extravagant happiness. All men felt themselves to be the masters of an intact and secret treasure…As was natural, this inordinate hope was followed by an excessive depression.â€
bq. The internet – with its glut not only of information but of misinformation, and of information that is only slightly correct, or only slightly incorrect – fills me with this same weird mixture of happiness and depression. I sometimes feel drowned in information, deadened by it. How many hundreds of bored hours have you spent mechanically poring through web pages not knowing what you’re looking for, or knowing what you’re looking for but not feeling satisfied when you find it? You hunger but you’re not filled. Everything is freely available on the internet, and is accordingly made inestimably valuable and utterly value-less.
bq. When I was a kid, I’d listen to the same records over and over and over again, as if I was under a spell. The record would end and I’d flip it over again, doing absolutely nothing, letting the music wash over me. My favorite record albums become like a totem for me, their big fat beautiful gatefolds worked as a shield against the loud, crashing, crushing world. I would have laid down my life and died in defense of a record like Tonight’s the Night or Astral Weeks. I felt that those records had, in some ways, saved my life. These days, with all the choice in the world, it’s hard for me find the attention span for a single album. I put my iPod on shuffle and skip impatiently to the next song before each one’s over. I don’t even know what I’m looking for.
bq. Because my work is the most important thing in the world to me, I sometimes feel uncomfortable about it existing freely in the digital Library of Babel, these songs that I worked so hard writing and revising and rehearsing and recording and mixing (and re-mixing) and mastering (and re-mastering) shucked off the album and thrown up on the internet in hissy and brittle low-resolution versions with no kind of sequence or order, mixed in with odd leaked tracks and some sub-par live versions. In a world overstuffed with stimuli and choking on information, I feel like a musical album should have a kind of purity and a kind of wholeness, that every aspect of an album – from the sequencing to the artwork even down to the typesetting – should feels labored over and loved, and that the finished product should feel like a gift.
So, if you’ve not yet heard Okkervil River or Shearwater, do yourself “a favor”:http://jound.com/okkervil/mp3s/afavor.mp3.