#365songs (178 / 365)

Black Sheep Boy was my first Okkervil River album, and for a long time I considered it the album that's the best spiritual successor to In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. In a way I still do, even though I've come to like several other Okkervil River albums more than this one. There's the loose-concept-album-ness of it, for starters, and even though "Black Sheep Boy" is from a Tim Hardin song from the 1960's (that Scott Walker also covered!) it still resonates with the "Two-Headed Boy" from Aeroplane. The biggest thing is just the feel of it though. The musicality is really proficient but still kinda ramshackle. The emotions are sometimes adolescent, usually pretty unsubtle, but always really big, bursting at the seams, larger-than-life.

"For Real" captures all this pretty well. I find Okkervil River's lyricist Will Sheff to be a fascinating interviewee, so like in my last entry for one of his songs I'll quote an interview where he drops this gem in the middle of an exchange about "For Real":

You have these moments where you’re like—Do I like this girl? Do I love this girl? Or do I just like her? Do I want a ham sandwich or do I want a turkey sandwich? Are my political beliefs just somebody else’s beliefs that I’ve simply adopted or are they what I really think? But when your head is smashing into the concrete you don’t have that kind of question about whether it’s a real sensation... And I think that we want it, on some level. Or some people want it, maybe. Or we don’t want it but we wonder about it and we wonder about who we’ll be in that situation and what it will do to us.

In that interview Sheff also talks about rock 'n' roll being the art form that most embraces the idiocy of humanity, and a good venue for getting away with things you can't in any other medium. I like Okkervil River because they take this kind of cerebral high-minded intellectualizing about rock 'n' roll and use it to inform music that swings for the fences in that sometimes kind of over-the-top way. "For Real" is a song about seeking a kind of extremity of feeling, to an idiotic extent, and Sheff sings it with spittle-flecked passion. It's a head-smashing-into-the-concrete-ass song.