There’s something different about The Stage Names, and on my first listen I mistook it for a weakness. Compared to earlier Okkervil albums, this one is small, even spindly; the songs never reach for the sweeping crescendos of Black Sheep Boy. Instead they remain tight and focused, hinging on simpler structures and reworked turns of phrase.
I have to say now that this creates an album that’s ultimately more satisfying, and on closer inspection The Stage Names is the band’s best work yet. Not only because of its subtlety – these songs don’t need to stretch out or graze the borders of melodrama to be effective – but because the complexity of Will Sheff’s lyrics is even more impressive when squeezed into a smaller context.
The emphasis on fiction is obvious, but the roots of the album’s themes run so deep and intertwine so well that it begs for some analysis. Ignoring the side ideas and distilling it down to one point, the album’s basic conceit seems to work off the twisted relationship between art and life. Art, of course, is influenced by life, but life is also invariably influenced by art, creating a loose circle that Sheff plays with very carefully.
The first two tracks establish the revolving convolution of this circle, the idea that life and fiction are separate realms but also that they tend to exist within one another. “Our Life Is Not A Movie, or Maybe” exposes the tendency towards enjoying the former as a mixed cocktail of fiction and reality but denies that impulse, while “Unless It’s Kicks” wonders “what gives this mess some grace unless it’s kicks, man / unless it’s fiction / unless it’s sweat or it’s songs.” The emphasis lies in the last line – the two are basically inseparable.
“A Hand to Take Hold of the Scene” contains first use of nesting on the album, where Sheff buries one layer within another to expose how easily they mix. “I’m the band in a show” he begins, establishing the reality of himself as something standing behind a fictional curtain. The whole thing gets even messier when you acknowledge that he’s talking about a reality show (I’m not even going to think about opening that can of worms). In this case, the first two verses refer to Okkervil River’s songs being featured in TV shows, Breaking Bonaduce for the first and Cold Case for the second.
The song continues with the mention of “a line” that the narrator “picks up right through the TV.” Art intrudes in life and gives rise to more of its kind. The repetition of a need for “a hand to take hold of the scene” calls up the idea of an outside influence that exists to steady life. Normally this role would be expected of God, but in Sheff's view of our media-saturated world, the steadying influence is instead the comfort of the cinematic imagery that he speaks of earlier in the song.
“Savannah Smiles” places this whole thing in a smaller context, with the story of a father and the disconnect between he and his daughter. The obstruction here exists between the reality of her life and his personal expectation of his her. He sees her as the child of eight, the girl in the picture, not what she actually is. What he reads in her diary upsets him because it challenges the fictional image of her with which he's struggling to keep hold. The song gains yet another layer as the story of Shannon Wilsey, the porn star Savannah, whose assumed name comes from a film about a neglected child who ends up being sheltered by two criminals (check Sheff’s Pitchfork interview for more information about this and some good insight into the album).
“Plus Ones” seems on the surface the most artificial song on the album, hinging on a lyrical gimmick (Sheff toying with the titles and lyrics of popular songs), but its genius is that it embraces its own inanity while exposing the love song as a cobbled mash of previously used ideas. The fun in interpreting the song is separating the references from the actual content (the use of "What’s New Pussycat" breaks the ‘plus one’ mold, so all bets are off). Where do Sheff’s borrowed words end and his own begin?
This kind of inspection is exhausting, so I’ll skip to the last song, “John Allyn Smith Sails,” which is probably the most complex. Here Sheff focuses on the suicide of poet John Berryman (born John Allyn Smith). Within he reminds us that stage names are in effect ways of fictionalizing ourselves, recasting our person as a specific image we’d like to portray. Berryman himself is quoted as saying that at a young age “he didn’t want to be like Yeats, he wanted to be Yeats.”
In the song Sheff blends two narrative perspectives – himself and Berryman – to show how much of a mess this all is; the poet is the reader is the songwriter is the listener. Sheff seems to be speaking of Berryman’s childhood with the idea of the imagined suicide attempt, but at the same time refers to his own age (31) and the figure of ‘John’ coming in with his mother and seeing his cold body.
So John, like all of us, is both creator and viewer. We’re all creators because whether or not we produce something directly, we all experience (be it from reality or from fiction) and that experience is channeled into our created version of ourselves, which is never the same as the one that existed before that experience. We are always changing based on what we experience, and the version of ourselves that we project (like the three poems that stand in for the body at the funeral) becomes the only reality of ourselves. Sheff wraps this all up by fulfilling his own prophecy (“by the second verse my head will burst”), although a little late, lapsing out of his own words into the slightly modified words of the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B.”
It seems telling that this song itself is a cover of a traditional Caribbean folk ballad. Not an original, but what really is?
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