Photo by Jean-Marc Luneau
I'll be brief...I have gotten permission from every band I've covered here on A Better Offer. And in my humble opinion, I have been successful in getting some quality interviews and giveaways. However, Okkervil River is just too big for this little project. I did not receive permission from the band to write about them and share their music. But I just had to do it, and I'm going to keep doing it for the rest of this week and maybe a little bonus week (more to come). And now some little indie rock enterprise has got the goods. Pitchfork has a full (and superb) interview with Will from Okkervil River. I have posted one particularly interesting part below. Read the entire interview here.
Pitchfork was asking Will about how he writes songs. His response follows...
WS: There's this weird little thing about writing, to me, that I almost think about as-- let's say you're loading film into a film movie camera, and you have to do it in the dark, so you have these little tents that you put your hands inside and you can't see what you're doing. And so, at a certain point, what are you going to look at? You can't look at anything, so you just stare into space while your hands are feeling around, trying to figure out a way to thread this film into the mechanism. And I think about that when I figure out how to write a song and assemble a record. There's this weird thing that I do where my hands, so to speak, know what to do, but I can't look at it too much. If I start to think about it-- like sit down and think about it and piece it out in a really cerebral way-- it all starts to fall apart or I start to ruin it.
I really start to think about how everything I could possibly do has been done by somebody else and how little new stuff, arguably, there is to do... but of course the point is to do things, to feel that thrill, to feel like you're doing something for the first time.
