Okkervil River's Will Sheff debuts new songs

Last Monday evening, Okkervil River frontman Will Sheff played a small, intimate show to one hundred people in Camden’s beautiful St. Pancras Old Church.

Overcoming no small amount of technical problems, Sheff mixed some new tracks from his band’s forthcoming I Am Very Far LP into a best-of Okkervil River set that revisited all but their second album, 2003’s Down the River of Golden Dreams. Sheff played a beautiful rendition of Black Sheep Boy’s ‘A Stone’, walking into the audience and elaborating the song with an extra verse. He finished with a rocking performance of ‘Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe’ that seemed fittingly out-of-place in its surroundings of the tiny church, before re-emerging at the back of the building to play a haunting piano version of ‘For Real’.

The set also featured Okkervil River bassist Patrick Pestorious, who played acoustic guitar and shared vocals with Sheff on a few tracks, including The Stand-Ins cut ‘Lost Coastlines’, taking Jonathan Meiburg’s lines. Sheff explained that this song had been written in Brighton while on tour in the UK, for a friend who promised to paint him some artwork for his wall if he wrote a “nautically-themed song.”

New album tracks ‘Wake and Be Fine’, set to be the first single from I Am Very Far, and ‘Your Past Life as a Blast’ were given their UK debuts, while Sheff and Pestorious also played a new non-album track, ‘Weave Room Blues’. You watch a full-band performance of that track via Pitchfork below.

Thanks to Rob Hakimian from One Thirty BPM for the photograph.