Last night Okkervil River played the High Noon Saloon. Prior to show we hooked up with Will Sheff who offered some very honest and insightful answers to our questions. I think Will makes some great points regarding music in the “digital world” and think you’ll find it to be a very good read. Thanks to Will and you can catch the band on tour in a city near you.

Q. You recently played Austin City Limits, tell us how that experience was, and did you get a chance to catch any performances while you were there?

I was gratified to play the Austin City Limits festival in the sense that it kind of made me feel like, in Austin, we were suddenly thought of as a legitimate local band after what felt like years pounding on the gates. There’s a kind of inner circle to the Austin music scene, especially when you leave the indie part of it – a small group of AAA-format radio station and moneyed promoters and hobnobbing local critics and awards ceremony presenters – and it can feel like a small, exclusive institution. So it was fun to feel like we were being recognized by that institution, but it also filled me with the childish impulse to bite the hand that for the first time was offering me seared tuna steaks in a backstage “Artist Garden.” There was a kind of martial aspect to the way the festival was run, with lots of shouting and badge-checking and a complicated “chain of command” that kind of soured the experience for me. I felt like the gap was too wide between the performers and the audience, the latter of whom had shelled out hundreds of dollars to roast in the late-summer Texas sun. The whole thing made me feel funny, like something was fundamentally out-of-whack at the core of how things were handled.

I also didn’t catch too much of the other acts, and was slightly disappointed by both Van Morrison and Tom Petty, both of whom I’d been really excited to see.

Q. You’ve played Madison before while opening for the Decemberists. This time around you’re bringing Elvis Perkins with you, how did you guys get hooked up for this tour?

The truth is not very inspiring, but it was our booking agent’s idea. I hadn’t heard Elvis Perkins before his suggestion that I check him out. I liked the music, but it wasn’t until we saw Elvis and his band live that they really deeply impressed me. There’s so much joy and real feeling in the way that they play.

Q. What music is going to be keeping you guys company on the road? Any albums that you guys have been listening to a lot that you care to recommend?

I’ve recently been really enjoying the Harry Nilsson album Pussy Cats. John Lennon produced it, and it was made during Lennon’s so-called “Lost Weekend,” actually a period of several years in which Lennon and Nilsson were palling around getting blitzed and thrown out of Los Angeles clubs together. You get this weird sense that Lennon’s playing the role of Phil Spector producing John Lennon; he sets a lot of the songs (including several covers that shouldn’t work but somehow do) with that kind of righteous glacial 2-4 beat that backs a lot of the Plastic Ono Band stuff, and Nilsson’s singing on top of it has that same kind of primal-scream intensity, only instead of sounding wise from anguish Nilsson sounds wasted and absolutely wrecked by despair, though he occasionally rallies for tunes characterized by a berzerk looney-tunes antic humor that miraculously makes them even more accessible and touching (chief among these is the last song on the album, essentially a comedy track that exceeds six minutes). You get the sense that Lennon is just fucking around but that, because he’s John Lennon, he’s got the stature to fuck around using whole orchestras as toys and he’s got such a talent that almost everything he does while fucking around just coincidentally happens to be the perfect thing to do. For his part, Nilsson sounds like underneath his drunken stupor he has the vague idea that a record produced by John Lennon might be his ultimate big break, and so he sings his fucking heart out even though his voice sounds ravaged and broken. The results are very charming, tender, and human – it’s the rare record that sounds both like total raw nerves and like a killer party.

Q. The Internet has dramatically altered the way band’s can reach an audience. With things like blogs/myspace/etc, what are your thoughts on the power of the internet in terms of helping your music reach a larger audience?

I think the digital world in general is great in that it makes it so much easier for fans of bands to get together and form into communities, and it makes it easier for those communities to have direct contact with the artists they like. It many ways, this aspect of the internet fits in with the folk tradition. If you’re a certain kind of music fan, you don’t need any expensive publicists or paid-out radio airplay to define the musical landscape for you. My only qualm with the internet is that I feel like there’s so much information out there – so many Flickr pictures and YouTube videos and sound-board bootlegs and 128k mp3s of songs ripped off albums – and the quality varies so much that after awhile all information kind of starts to feel equally valueless.

Also, I feel like the mp3 format further changes the way people listen to music. A lot of people I know not only don’t listen to whole albums any more, but they can’t even listen to a whole song on their iPods without shuffling ahead to the next one. I kind of wonder sometimes if it would be possible to have a kind of cultural inflation, an information glut where you can’t even give the stuff away any more.

Q. Black Sheep Boy was one of our favorites. Will we be hearing a lot of new material on this tour? Do you find that you prefer road testing songs prior to their release?

We are playing some new songs on this tour. Some of them are songs that will be on the new album, some of them are songs we might leave off. Some of them are covers we thought would be fun to play. There will also be a lot of stuff from Black Sheep Boy as well as our older albums.

I think some songs benefit from road-testing and some don’t. There are certain songs that are more ambitious or require a level of musicianship that you don’t quite have yet, so playing them repeatedly will ultimately teach you how they should be recorded. There are other songs that are more perishable, and you feel like there’s something sweet and special about them that makes you want to insulate them from the world at large until you’ve safely housed them on a recording. It really depends on the song.