Work on Okkervil River's "I Am Very Far" – released in May on Jagjaguwar Records – began early in 2009, after the band and frontman Will Sheff spent months on collaborations with Roky Erickson and The New Pornographers.

Whether that accounts for why the new record differs so much from its predecessors is hard to ascertain, but Sheff does say that he drew some inspiration from those outside projects.

"I Am Very Far" is a record of contrasts, of chiaroscuro. There is joy and sorrow, violence and romance. You'll be able to hear it all for yourself when Okkervil River takes the stage this Wednesday, Sept. 21 at The Pabst Theater with opener Wye Oak.

We got a chance to ask Sheff about making "I Am Very Far" recently and here's what he had to say:

OnMilwaukee.com: Was it re-energizing to be able to get back to your own work after the collaboration with Roky Erickson and the collaborations with
Norah Jones and The New Pornographers?

Will Sheff: It was fun in the sense that when you're working on other peoples' stuff – no matter how much you might love it – you don't feel the same sense of attachment. That can actually be a good thing. Sometimes the attachment you feel to your own work can make you treat it too carefully and even preciously, bringing all your fears and insecurities to bear on it and sometimes creating something that feels too tame or too conservative.

When you work on someone else's stuff, it's easy to clearly feel where it can go, based on your tastes and unencumbered by any baggage you might bring to the idea of how you're perceived by other people. I felt freed of that baggage after working on a bunch of other projects and I felt I was able to apply that sense of freedom to my own work.

OMC: Had the songs been sort of piling up during that time, or was it the
opposite? Did you spend so much energy on the other things that you
hadn't really had time to write?

WS: Well, I certainly spent a lot of time and energy on the Roky record. I was working on my own stuff a bit during that time, but it felt a little bit like a sin to take too much of my energy away from the Roky project because I felt such a sense of urgency to make that record as great as I could make it. When I finished with the Roky record I thought I would feel exhausted, but I actually felt energized instead.

OMC: What did you take away, especially from the Roky record, but with the collaborations in general? 

WS: I think working with Roky was especially inspiring because he's so open-minded about where a song can go. His songs mix aggression, tenderness, humor, spirituality, anger, love – often all in one song! Roky might start one verse praising Jesus and be hailing Satan by the next verse, or he might start a song as a love song and then start singing about disemboweling someone by the end. And then he could mix love back into it and you'd weirdly buy it!

OMC: Did you get new ideas from them, new approaches, new energy, etc., from taking on less of a leadership role and more of a collaborative one?

WS: His songs have so much wild energy that they feel dangerous, and I was really inspired by that.

OMC: I heard the record was made with sort of a super-sized Okkervil River. Can you tell us a bit about how the sessions went and what the mood was like?

WS: Some of the sessions were done with the really large version of Okkervil River, but not all of them. You'd imagine the mood on those sessions was party-like, but it was actually incredibly disciplined. Everyone really felt an immense pressure to get their parts right and play them in perfect sync, because the songs literally wouldn't work without that. It felt more like being in a marching band or an orchestra than like being in a rock band. That might sound counter-intuitive, but if we'd all just gotten wild and crazy and "jammed out" it would have sounded like complete slop.

I really admire a band like James Brown's, which is quite a large band but everyone is playing a very tiny little part and they all interact like this perfectly-tuned gigantic machine. Of course, nobody can be quite as good as James Brown's band and there was still a lot of sloppiness in what we did, but I love that energy that comes from a whole big room of people all paying attention to the same thing very carefully and concertedly, and sloppiness was all just a fun byproduct, and not the goal at all.

OMC: After the initial sessions, you did a lot of work on the record at home, right? Was that a more solitary stage and one with a more singular vision?

WS: I guess you'd say that. I really worked again and again on songs to try to edit them into some kind of decisive shape. This was partially because I specifically wrote the songs to be somewhat formless and baggy, like a big suit that you'd slowly and carefully take in to fit the body inside. A lot of the time it was a really careful process, trying to figure out what the dimensions of that body were.

OMC: Was it difficult to narrow down your 30-odd initial songs to the 18 you ultimately recorded and then down to the 11 on the record, or did that kind of happen on its own, with the strongest ones forcing you to choose them?

WS: It was really, really hard. I didn't make the choices based on my favorites. I made them based on what songs seemed to go together. I really like an album that feels like a "collection" – whether it's a clothing line or a menu or an exhibit at a gallery – a bunch of things that seem to communicate with each other in some mysterious way.

OMC: Will the seven others appear in some form?

WS: Some of them already have, as B-sides and whatnot. "Weave Room Blues" is one of my favorite songs from all of the sessions, and that came out as a B-Side. There's a very poppy song I decided to leave off the record because I felt it wasn't a "pop" record, and I'm sure we'll put that out at some point. There were some quite weird songs that didn't make it on but that I love. Maybe we'll finish them eventually.

OMC: Any memories of Milwaukee – fond or not so?

WS: Well, our very first drummer, Seth Warren-Crow, lives in Milwaukee. He's one of my oldest friends and when we formed Okkervil River we all used to live together in a house and rehearse every night. It's always wonderful to see him when I come to Milwaukee.

OMC: What will the show be like here? Will you bring a double band like you used on the record?

WS: No, we're playing in a six-piece like we have for years. The lineup has altered a bit, but six pieces feels right to me. It's still maneuverable like a smaller band, but there are opportunities to fill things out with more texture. We've always been more about energy than texture, though, and I like a band where there's a smaller amount of ears and brains onstage and everyone can really listen closely to each other and react quickly.