VIDEO: Ryan Walsh interviews Will Sheff

Will Sheff is a songwriter’s songwriter — an artist whose ear for a hook is bolstered by his keen eye for telling details, and whose passion for pop is grounded in an appreciation for the poetry of language. Like Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes and Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, Sheff has honed his talents as part of a band, the Austin-based Okkervil River, rather than as a solo artist. On Okkervil’s new The Stage Names (Jagjaguwar), Sheff’s literate storytelling is buoyed by everything from rootsy pedal steel to orchestral flourishes provided by strings and brass octet. But his art is more about striking the right emotional chord than about achieving perfect pitch — he places himself in the shoes of troubled characters like the parent who sneaks a peek at her daughter’s diary in “Savanna Smiles” and the poet John Berryman (né John Allyn Smith) in “John Allyn Smith Sails,” which morphs into the classic folk song “Sloop John B” as the album comes to a close. So when Sheff, who brings Okkervil River to the Middle East downstairs this Tuesday, stepped out on his own back in July to perform a series of solo shows in the month leading up to the release of The Stage Names, we asked the singer-songwriter who opened the July 13 show at the Brattle Theatre — Ryan Walsh of the local indie-rock band Hallelujah the Hills — to sit down with him.

—  Matt Ashare, Music Editor

One of my favorite Okkervil songs is “Maine Island Lovers,” from Down the River of Golden Dreams [Jagjaguwar; 2003]. Is there a story behind the story of the two lovers whose infidelities come to light in the song?
I was just thinking about people that I knew, and it’s a good example of a song where the characters kind of dictated what ends up happening. It may sound disingenuous, but sometimes the characters really can do that.

I know what you mean: you feel like you’re in charge of the kernel or the spark of a song, and then the song takes over. But when you try to explain that, you don’t want to come off as saying “I’m this vessel.” . . .
Yeah, because that sounds pretentious. But, in my favorite songs, that’s the actual experience — you feel like you’re a radio antenna. I’ve written certain songs where I’ve felt like I was just a calculating guy, you know, like “Ah, I’m gonna write a song, it’s gonna do this and this and this,” and there’s no radio-antenna effect. But my favorite ones are the ones where I feel like I don’t fully know what they’re about — like if you add up all the sum of its parts and you listen to me talk about it for an hour, there’d still be a mystery to it.

The subject of the final song on the new album is the suicide of poet John Berryman. Like a lot of your songs, it seems to be more about painting a portrait of a character than passing judgment on his actions. If all of the characters in your songs were gathered at a bar, who would you avoid and who would you want to talk to?
Answering that question would be difficult because I feel a huge amount of affection for John Allyn Smith. But, I guess I do tend to like the girls — not like fantasy girls but girls that I think are cool girls. So I think I’d want to hang out with the girls more. There are certain people I really wouldn’t want to hang out with, and those characters are usually a reflection of something in myself. I love writing songs that are ostensibly about me, and I tend to portray myself in the worst possible light. Usually there’s a kind of a horror at the core of those. That’s the person I would want to have kicked out of the bar so I could go home with the girls.

How did you end up segueing into “Sloop John B” at the end of “John Allyn Smith Sails”?
That’s an example of something that happened that I didn’t plan on. I hit a part of the song and it seemed like that was the next step. It’s also just that I continue to be really interested in the idea of being referential — the way that, in folk music, there’s a tradition of people using each other’s songs and transforming those songs.

Last year you released a single that could have been interpreted as a political statement — “the president’s dead.” It’s really a fairly neutral snapshot of an imagined event. But what kind of responses did you get from it?
I’ve had people who are Republicans say to me that they liked our band but they don’t like us anymore because of that song. Which is legitimate. But I’ve also had liberals react negatively. One guy wrote me and said that “it’s cowardly” because I chose not to be political. He cited Dylan as an example and said that he was disgusted. But the thing is, that song is as political as it needs to be.