Name: Will Sheff
Age: 31
Hometown: Austin, Texas
Achievement: Singer-songwriter and guitarist for renowned indie rock at Okkervil River. Was a rock critic and wrote a music column for file sharing site Audiogalaxy, before it was shut down. Graduated from Macalester College in Minnesota. Got into a knife fight once.
Background: performing on a co-headling tour with The New Pornographers in support of his band's hit 2007 album, The Stage Names
We're doing a tour with The New Pornographers. They're a great, great band, fun people, it's been really good.
We've been around for 10 years, it's been a really slow build, working real hard. I think there is a sense of people getting more of an awareness that we're out there, and it always feels nice to have people appreciate what you're doing.
Going into The Stage Names, I don't know if anxiety is what I felt; I think I just felt a knowledge that certain people were going to respond to it in ways that were outside of my control and irrelevant to how the record ends up being. I knew that certain people were going to say that it was really good regardless of whether it was, and I knew that certain people were going to backlash against it.
You just kind of have these little guidelines in your head about things you're going to focus on and things you are going to focus away on. And once you have those guidelines in place it's not hard to sort of follow right along.
It's not that I felt external pressure writing The Stage Names; I felt internal pressure from myself to not fit a certain image of me that I felt like I was seeing reflected back from people. And that specific image was a sort of, taking myself overly serious, overly dark pretentious artiste thing that was making me feel a little gross, and I just wanted to clear the air and make a record that expressed a certain amount of humor and a certain amount of joy and excitement.
I don't think that if I hadn't felt that way, I would have made that different of a record. I think that another part of it was that I was feeling like expressing those kinds of feelings at that particular moment in my life.
2008 Woodie Awards
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