FRI., JUNE 06, 2008
eMusic Q&A: Shearwater, Pt. 2
by Adrienne Day
You used to play with Will Sheff in Okkervil River, and he used to play in Shearwater. Now you don't play together at all. What happened?
Will's a friend, and I've loved playing music with him over the years. But right now with our schedules the way they are, we just can't keep doing it. Back when we first started, we had a lot more time on our hands. We were just writing songs and trying to find an outlet for them. We couldn't get a show booked to save our lives.
A few years ago, you took issue with a review AMG posted of Palo Santo. Do you feel a need to guide or control the way your work is received or interpreted?
I only squawk when I think someone's got it wrong in a way that could really damage perceptions of us in this critical period where we're just being introduced to people. There are two heresies in particular that I'm trying to stamp out: "Okkervil River side project" (wrong) and "Jeff Buckley" (I don't like his music).
Lets talk about Rook. Why all the bird imagery? Why that bird in particular? Are you an ornithologist?
By training, basically. I have a master's degree in geology. I studied a particular species of bird for my thesis. It started in 1997, when I had a fellowship to travel around the world going to remote human communities, and it just so happened that in these places there were a lot of really weird birds, too. I never thought it would've grabbed me the way it did, but boy, it has really held on... [Trails off, while his birder's Tourette suddenly kicks in.] Right now I'm looking out the window, and just saw a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. Amazing bird — looks like a mockingbird, but its tail is a foot-and-a-half long, and it's pink underneath.
I don’t think we have those in New York.
No, you don’t. [Texas is] about as far north as they go. But to get back to your question, the bird I studied, the Striated Caracara, has the local name of Johnny Rook. I've always liked that name. I have a deep, deep fondness for that animal. And I saw a card that my girlfriend had gotten for her grandmother that had different birds on them. One of them was a rook [which is different from a Johnny Rook]. And the more I looked at the word, the more I thought, that’s a nice powerful word that has lots of different associations, such as "theft," and it’s a good one-word title, like Tusk.
Rooks are thieving birds, aren't they?
Yes. The verb comes from the animal. They're a funny type of bird — they nest communally in trees. That's where the word "rookery" comes from.
You made a series of nature videos in the Falklands and the Galapagos Islands that Matador is using to promote Rook. How do these trips inform your music?
Being in places like those really jolts you out of your everyday life. You start to think differently, and your mind opens up in ways that can be hard to do in places like central Texas. I have to be way from cell phones and the Internet and cars and that kind of thing. We are so dependent on this stuff. The landscape where we live has been so transformed by the action of people, we can't even imagine what it was like before we were here. In the outermost [Falkland] Islands, you really can go back in time to what it was like thousands of years ago. There's a presence that you feel of this ancient world, incredibly powerful and poignant, because it's vanishing. The old world is going away, and it's not coming back.
Take a song like "Seventy-four, Seventy-five," off of Palo Santo. Is there a corollary you can draw between your experience in the Galapagos and the writing of that song?
On that trip I was thinking a lot about Nico's music, and her life, and for some reason her songs kept coming to me while I was out there. A lot of that record is fashioned around her bizarre and tragic story. That particular song is about her father, or one version [I heard] about what happened to her father. He was in the German army and got shot in the head, which made him crazy, and he was put in a camp where he died. Whether or not that's true I will never know. But that's the story.
To read more of Adrienne Day's interview with Jonathan Meiburg, including the reason why the singer decided not to become a ornithologist, click here.
Will's a friend, and I've loved playing music with him over the years. But right now with our schedules the way they are, we just can't keep doing it. Back when we first started, we had a lot more time on our hands. We were just writing songs and trying to find an outlet for them. We couldn't get a show booked to save our lives.
A few years ago, you took issue with a review AMG posted of Palo Santo. Do you feel a need to guide or control the way your work is received or interpreted?
I only squawk when I think someone's got it wrong in a way that could really damage perceptions of us in this critical period where we're just being introduced to people. There are two heresies in particular that I'm trying to stamp out: "Okkervil River side project" (wrong) and "Jeff Buckley" (I don't like his music).
Lets talk about Rook. Why all the bird imagery? Why that bird in particular? Are you an ornithologist?
By training, basically. I have a master's degree in geology. I studied a particular species of bird for my thesis. It started in 1997, when I had a fellowship to travel around the world going to remote human communities, and it just so happened that in these places there were a lot of really weird birds, too. I never thought it would've grabbed me the way it did, but boy, it has really held on... [Trails off, while his birder's Tourette suddenly kicks in.] Right now I'm looking out the window, and just saw a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher. Amazing bird — looks like a mockingbird, but its tail is a foot-and-a-half long, and it's pink underneath.
I don’t think we have those in New York.
No, you don’t. [Texas is] about as far north as they go. But to get back to your question, the bird I studied, the Striated Caracara, has the local name of Johnny Rook. I've always liked that name. I have a deep, deep fondness for that animal. And I saw a card that my girlfriend had gotten for her grandmother that had different birds on them. One of them was a rook [which is different from a Johnny Rook]. And the more I looked at the word, the more I thought, that’s a nice powerful word that has lots of different associations, such as "theft," and it’s a good one-word title, like Tusk.
Rooks are thieving birds, aren't they?
Yes. The verb comes from the animal. They're a funny type of bird — they nest communally in trees. That's where the word "rookery" comes from.
You made a series of nature videos in the Falklands and the Galapagos Islands that Matador is using to promote Rook. How do these trips inform your music?
Being in places like those really jolts you out of your everyday life. You start to think differently, and your mind opens up in ways that can be hard to do in places like central Texas. I have to be way from cell phones and the Internet and cars and that kind of thing. We are so dependent on this stuff. The landscape where we live has been so transformed by the action of people, we can't even imagine what it was like before we were here. In the outermost [Falkland] Islands, you really can go back in time to what it was like thousands of years ago. There's a presence that you feel of this ancient world, incredibly powerful and poignant, because it's vanishing. The old world is going away, and it's not coming back.
Take a song like "Seventy-four, Seventy-five," off of Palo Santo. Is there a corollary you can draw between your experience in the Galapagos and the writing of that song?
On that trip I was thinking a lot about Nico's music, and her life, and for some reason her songs kept coming to me while I was out there. A lot of that record is fashioned around her bizarre and tragic story. That particular song is about her father, or one version [I heard] about what happened to her father. He was in the German army and got shot in the head, which made him crazy, and he was put in a camp where he died. Whether or not that's true I will never know. But that's the story.
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