NEW TODAY: Video Premiere: Okkervil River “Lost Coastlines”

Register to Vote with HeadCount

We will be working with the non-partisan organization HeadCount this year to register voters and encourage every eligible citizen to vote in the upcoming election. If you are interested in volunteering at a registration table at concerts, or want to register to vote online, visit http://www.HeadCount.org

HeadCount has set a goal of registering 100,000+ voters in 2008, ensuring that people from all walks of life are represented at the polls. We are proud to be among the many artists supporting this important cause.

We're pleased to announce that Newbury Comics has a special pre-order of The Stand Ins that includes a limited edition autographed booklet! Click here to purchase.

To celebrate the upcoming release of The Stand Ins, we've asked some of our favorite songwriters and performers to record cover versions of each song on the album. The first song, "Lost Coastlines," is a duet between our own Will Sheff and A.C. Newman of the The New Pornographers and is currently streaming on the Okkervil River YouTube channel. We'll release a new song every few days until album release on Sept 9th.

Hi everyone,

We are part of a design project that Insound has done with award winning
designer, Jason Munn, of The Small Stakes

Jason did a design for us and 19 other bands, including The New
Pornographers, The National, Spoon, etc. Insound is now taking pre-orders (a
lot of this will sell out very quickly) at: www.insound.com/insound20

You can get 10% off by entering coupon code "insound20or"

Hey Everyone! We've added a tour stop at the Latitude Festival on July 20th and more UK & IRE dates in November.
Tickets go on sale Wed, May 14th and can be bought through:

http://www.artistticket.com/link/?s=okkervil+river (UK)
and www.ticketmaster.ie (Rep of Ireland).

July 20, 2008 - Latitude Festival

November 5, 2008 - UK Norwich Waterfront
November 6, 2008 - UK Manchester Academy
November 7, 2008 - IRE Dublin Academy
November 9, 2008 - UK Glasgow Oran Mor
November 10, 2008 - UK Wolverhampton Wulfrun
November 11, 2008 - UK London Shepard's Bush Empire
November 12, 2008 - UK Brighton Concorde 2

Hey everyone, we've added some tour dates in April. Some headline shows, and some with The New Pornographers. Pre-sale begins this Saturday, Feb 2 for the dates with The New Pornographers through Ducat King (http://thenewpornographers.ducatking.com).

And then of course our dates in the UK and Europe start this week, and Australia and NZ later in February. See "Shows" page for all the details.

April 5 Dallas, TX Granada
April 6 Memphis, TN Hi-Tone**
April 7 Bloomington, IN Buskirk-Chumley Theater**
April 9 Toronto, ON Phoenix Concert Theater*
April 10 Pontiac, MI The Crofoot Ballroom*
April 11 Columbus, OH Newport Music Hall*
April 12 Munhall, PA Carnegie Music Hall*
April 13 Ithaca, NY The State Theater*
April 14 Washington D.C. 9:30 Club*
April 16 Richmond, VA Toad’s Place*
April 17 Athens, GA Georgia Theatre*
April 18 Nashville, TN The Cannery*
April 19 St. Louis, MO The Pageant*
April 20 Chicago, IL Riviera Theatre*
April 21 Madison, WI Orpheum Theatre*
April 22 Cleveland, OH Beachland Ballroom*
** Howlin’ Rain supporting
* with The New Pornographers

 

Why did Okkervil River decide to release a live covers album for free and with no notice? Not to sound corporate, but there was no hype or marketing, even for a free release. I'm struck by the words, "wanted to do a release fast and for fun and give it to you guys for free." That's something unheard of these days.

Does Okkervil River plan on including any of these tracks on a future album, as live or studio versions?

-W3stfa11 (from the Okkervil River message board)

There are no current plans to include any of the Golden Opportunities covers on any future releases.

The release-date PR hoopla model of putting out records can be extremely tiring. The way that every band works these days, including us, seems to be: record a big full-length release roughly every two years, send it out to press four months in advance, try to drum up anticipation for it and, once it comes out, spend the next six months or more (with Black Sheep Boy, it was almost two years) promoting the life out of it – interviews, radio sessions, tours and tours and tours. At times, you start to feel worked to death in service of something that was supposed to originally be a product of joy and fun.

I think this model might be changing, though I don’t know what it’ll eventually change into. For example, the Big Release Shrouded In Secrecy Before The Release Date model doesn’t really work anymore as pretty much every album gets leaked before its release date these days – sometimes even many months before. As much as the huge-PR-push model of promotion can make you feel herded, an album leaking can make you feel kind of betrayed. You’ve just spent nearly half your year and thousands of dollars and countless dreams and fears and hopes on every minute detail of music and artwork and, in five minutes, some anonymous stranger has stolen it and it’s being given away for free, its “release date” determined by when they get around to ripping it to their computer and uploading it to OiNK.

I think it’s important for everyone, not just bands, to periodically ask themselves “am I still having fun?” And it’s important to figure out ways to make the answer still be “yes.” The idea of an album just being an album – a collection of songs that was fun to put together and hopefully will be fun to listen to – appealed to me. And I have to admit I kind of got off on the fact that no one knew this thing existed until the very minute we posted it.

Your lyrics are notoriously laden with references and lyrics from other songs. This was less prevalent on past albums with songs like "Listening to Otis Redding...", but has grown into thematic concepts within the albums stemming from other artist's ideas, ie "Black Sheep Boy" and songs like "Plus Ones" on The Stage Names, and now a mixtape of covers. How do you feel that "borrowing" the words from other artists contributes to your writing while still maintaining originality?

-Lietome (from the Okkervil River message board)

I think the first music to have a deep and powerful effect on me – such that it changed the way I listened to everything else - was old American folk music: delta blues, hillbilly, ragtime, early country music. I was captivated by the intensity of those performances, the way the lyrics were both tough and poetic, the spiritual yearning as well as the creepy-crawling evil and lust and murk, but most of all I was struck by how modern the music felt to me. Some of these songs had an incredibly sophisticated, subtle morality to them; others were so surreal as to verge on the psychedelic. What I realized, listening to this stuff, is that no significant artistic innovation was ever really “invented” by anyone. There was never a birth of surrealism, of punk rock, of nihilism, of postmodernism. Rather, these things have always existed as currents in the air. They’ve always been accessible in art, and have come to the fore and been given names and labels at different times in human history. Some of the ballads and blues recorded in the early part of the 20th century had roots that stretched back hundreds of years, maybe thousands. Folk culture is like a core sample of human thought and feeling throughout history – the thoughts and feelings of humans nobody wrote about in history books.

I was particularly struck by the way, in folk music, songs would be passed back and forth between people, and the concept of authorship seemed to be incredibly loose. A.P. Carter of the Carter Family, for example, claimed to have written a great deal of songs that were obviously famous folk tunes that existed before he was born. Weirdly, he also didn’t take credit for songs it’s pretty clear he actually did write. There are so many examples of this kind of thing it would be impossible to list them all, but the point is that, in A.P. Carter’s mind, he wasn’t lying. The folk structures from which he borrowed had become a kind of air that folk and blues and hillbilly musicians were all breathing – they got sucked in, broken down, changed around, and breathed back out again without anyone thinking very much about where they originally came from. People would crush two songs together; a melody would be taken from one and lyrics from another, or one set of protagonists would all but disappear halfway through the song and a new set would show up. Someone would totally rewrite someone else’s song from the opposite perspective. Nobody thought they were being terribly clever, nobody considered whether they were infringing anyone else’s copyright, and nobody staked their claim as having invented postmodernism. They were doing something that felt natural.

I guess I always had these ideas in the back of my head, and that’s where a song like “Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas” comes from. More recently, though, I guess I started thinking about this phenomenon more consciously when I noticed something like it in rock and roll, too. I think it’s just a very human thing to do (currently, you can see it in hip hop and in mashups). I guess what really blew open my brain about covers, though, was listening to Nina Simone, who I’d always loved but of whom I only relatively recently started chasing down as many recordings I could find. What amazes me about Nina Simone is that – in addition to the handful of songs she wrote (some of which stand among the best songs of the 20th century, in my opinion) – most of her career focused around taking someone else’s song and violently remaking it as her own. She seemed almost perversely to focus on songs so worn-out and clichéd (“Kum By Ya,” “Feelings,” “Angel of the Morning”) that no one with any taste would touch them, and she somehow made them new again. She’d throw out verses, add new ones, steal melodies, rewrite lines to mean to exact opposite of what their writer intended. Really, she didn’t give a shit about their writer. She was loyal solely to her vision of the song’s true identity. Her incredible version of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” is over 18 minutes long, includes many verses, bridges, and breakdowns that Harrison never wrote, and ends with the line “Lord, today you are a killer” (by the way, many thanks to Jonathan Meiburg for bringing this song to my attention). Nina Simone ignored the boundaries between rendition and originality (just as her records ignored the boundaries between live and studio compositions by integrating both and even splicing between them); she acted like those boundaries weren’t there. Because they aren’t.

I said hi to you in a pub in Kilburn, London, just before your Luminaire gig (I’m the Indian guy with the scarf). When I said hi, I really wanted to say how much this past year I have massively fallen in love with your band, how BSB kept me going through a tough winter, how your performance at ATP in May was awesome, how The Stage Names is one of my favourite albums of 2007, how you guys are now up there with my other fav bands/artists, including Radiohead, Dylan, Spiritualized, Prince, The Wu Tang Clan etc.

But I may have come across as weird, because you seemed really awkward about me saying this stuff.

My question is: Does this kind of fandom, this tightly held love from people you haven't met, freak you out? The fact that there are people sound tracking their lives to your songs and then hounding you in pubs just to say "Hey man, thanks". How aware are you that your songs are becoming swallowed by these strangers' lives, and are no longer truly your own anymore? (What break this heart the most is the ghost of some rock n roll fan...)

-Tiru (via email)

My super-limited quasi-celebrity has made me think about this stuff a fair amount, and I’ve come up with a lot of reasons for it, though I don’t feel I fully understand any of them.

When I was a kid, I’d imagine being famous and having the work I’d done known by everyone all over the world. All alone in my room, I’d picture adulation from fans, accolades from critics, my voice coming through some stranger’s headphones like I was sitting right next to them in a chair. But it wasn’t just the approval I wanted; it was the sense of connecting with someone I’d never even met, sharing an intimate and mysterious bond with someone I’d probably even be tongue-tied around in real life.

When Okkervil River first started out, the only people we could get to come to our shows were our friends, who we pretty much forced to attend despite their resentment (sorry, Meagan). Once we finally started making any fans who weren’t personal friends of ours – after I’d long since stopped believing it would ever happen - I was amazed by how much like my childhood fantasy it felt. At the same time, I was surprised to find myself feeling strangely uncomfortable instead of validated. I’ve never quite been able to explain why this is, but I think it’s because - having grown up a little, and having, at that time, a sense that I’d failed in my career (which kind of had the effect of making me stop caring about what people thought as much) I saw the naked desperation of my younger self with embarrassing clarity. I think the fans themselves were just motivated by a straightforward desire to just get to know and say thanks to someone who had made something they’d appreciated – but somehow the experience ended up being uncomfortable for both parties.

In many ways, I think that what can occasionally make the interaction between a fan and a musician uncomfortable is a kind of unspoken admitted vulnerability or exposure between strangers. While the songs might not be literally about me, there’s a lot of myself in them, a lot of myself I might not show to my acquaintances or even friends very often. At the same time, if someone comes up to me and tells me these songs are deeply meaningful to them, they might find themselves feeling slightly vulnerable. They’re complimenting a stranger on something they found personally moving, and this stranger knows nothing about them (their age, their background, their personality, what their friends are like, whether they do creative work as well) other than an anecdote about being emotionally moved. If we met at a friend’s house, or in a drunken evening at a party, we might have hit it off and become friends. But we didn’t, and we don’t even really know each other at all. All we know about the other person is that we share with them an intimate and mysterious bond, a bond that connects us when we’re apart and, when we’re together, separates us.

Blah blah blah - ultimately, though, it’s all incredibly flattering. I remember seeing you and your girlfriend (or friend: maybe I’m presuming) getting you a beer at the bar and you both seemed really cool and happy. It was a cold night outside and everyone was bundled up and I was getting a beer too and I remember feeling, in the back of my mind and beneath all the stress of getting ready to go play, incredibly lucky that I was ever able to do something that could give someone I never met some real enjoyment.

Where the heck was that Gainsbourg cover recorded? It sounded like maybe a TV show.

-Priceyeah (from the Okkervil River message board)

The whole Gainsbourg cover experience was kind of surreal. A couple months in advance of the European tour our French distributor told me that a well-known Radio France program wanted us to do a cover of a song “well-known in France.” I put it off and put it off and put it off but finally I was forced to choose and, somewhat spur-of-the-moment, I decided on that particular Serge Gainsbourg song. Not knowing French, I didn’t really know what the song was about; I only knew that a woman could be heard crying loudly throughout the entire second half of it. I kind of got a basic literal translation of the lyrics and set about trying to hammer them into an English version of the song that I felt I could credibly sing. Turns out that it’s an incredibly cold breakup tune, and the sobbing is courtesy of Gainsbourg’s ex-wife, Jane Birkin.

We arrived on the day of the Radio France performance at about 8:00 in the morning, after a long drive through the night from Brussels, all of us trying desperately to sleep while sitting bolt upright in the van’s bench seats. Our tour manager slept face down in the dark dressing room while we played, as did my girlfriend who had flown in to visit. Though the show was for radio, it felt like a TV talk show; we played on a large well-lit stage in front of an audience who seemed to represent a politely-applauding cross section of middle-aged France. In between us and the audience was a panel of guests, who commented on our performance, in French, once we were done. Not knowing French, I had no idea whether they were saying we were great or that we were awful, so I just assumed the latter.

The other band on the program that day played a slick, kind of African-inflected pop-soul. I talked to a fellow I assumed was their tour manager beforehand and he was extremely pleasant, friendly, and humble. I was surprised when he walked onstage and turned out to their lead singer. I also assumed the band were nobodies, like us, getting their big lucky break on French radio by some wild chance, so I was surprised a few days later when we were watching TV in a hotel in Italy and I saw their video sandwiched between James Blunt and Alicia Keys. Turns out they’re a band called Mattafix and they’re kind of super-famous in Europe, maybe elsewhere too. I have to say I was pretty impressed that the singer was so nice and down to earth.

Are there any other surprise projects in the works at this point, like perhaps a Stage Names Appendix? If not, do you have any plans at this point to do anything with the leftover songs from that writing period?

-Andrew (via email)

I wrote about twice as many songs for the Stage Names sessions as we eventually used. We actually originally had the idea to make a double album, and then I think someone gave me a well-deserved slap and I came to my senses. In the end, we decided to make the opposite of a double album and try to do our shortest album yet. However, those songs are still hanging around and a few of them were my favorites from the Stage Names sessions. Some of them are completely finished and mixed, some were almost finished when we put them down, and some were never recorded. We plan to go back into the studio with Brian Beattie and finish the ones we liked for eventual release as some kind of appendix, yeah. I don’t plan to do this every time we put out a record, but in this case I’m fond of these songs and they’re so linked to the Stage Names stuff that it seems silly to wait to put them out on a whole separate album later on down the road.

You said that the songs on Golden Opportunities “All kind of have something to do with themselves and kind of to do with The Stage Names material.” Would you mind elaborating a bit on both parts of that statement? Listeners can obviously make several of the thematic connections (The midnight cowboys, easy riders and drunken gigolo of “April Anne,” “The Blonde In The Bleachers” giving up pieces of her soul to the men of Rock `n’ Roll, a broken down circus clown Norma Desmond in “Antarctica Starts Here,” etc.), personal connections (who doesn’t love a Randy Newman ditty, just because it is?) and maybe even professional and poetic connections (The Fugs). But perhaps you could shed some more light on your choices, how the tracks pair with those on The Stage Names, and how each stands on its own?

-Christel (via email)

Some of the tracks were chosen as direct pairings to Stage Names material. Some of them are songs that informed Stage Names songs. For example, I personally got a kick out of a sort of macho chest-puffing song like “You Can’t Hold the Hand of a Rock and Roll Man” taking its title from Joni Mitchell, the chickiest of the chick singer-songwriters. Certain references are there for other people to pick up on; others are subtler and there just there for myself, because I think it gives the outside listener a sense of a richer world when there’s a kind of personal secret iconography going on in something.

All that said, I feel like a lot is lost when someone talks too much about their direct inspiration for something. As a fan, of course, I’m hungry for those kinds of details. (For example, I wish David Lynch would just stop being so damn coy about INLAND EMPIRE and just publish the damn Cliff Notes already. “A woman in trouble?” That’s not good enough! I want to break into his brain, pull out the contents, and become a hero to David Lynch nerds by posting my findings on a web-site somewhere.) At the same time, I feel like if this stuff isn’t a little mysterious, even to me, than some kind of wholeness is broken. And if it’s not mysterious to listeners than the whole album can be thought of as just a bright fluorescent-lit room with nothing in the corners, no secret doors, nothing hidden, nothing special. Ultimately, I like the idea of taking myself, and the listener hopefully too, someplace deeper, into some kind of hidden passageway where I’m just as confused as they are.

You do a lot of interviews; does the monotony of being asked the same question over and over ever tempt you to experiment with your responses - to see what people will believe?

-Elizabeth (via email)

I’ve always felt kind of contemptuous of canned answers; I hate it when you read one interview with someone and they say something interesting and then you read another interview with them and they say the exact same thing in the exact same words. It makes you feel like they’re a robot, or a politician just regurgitating a stump speech.

At the same time, it can be incredibly deadening attempting to answer the exact same questions repeatedly in a different way each time. Every answer you give is a path that’s closed off to you the next time you answer the question, and each interview gets successively more difficult to think your way through until you are tempted to lie. But if you lie you’re just fucking around with someone who’s doing their job, which kind of makes you a dickhead. So eventually you kind of collapse into submission and find yourself saying the exact same thing in the exact same words, a la robot or a politician. At my worst, I’ve definitely been guilty of doing this. Eventually though, someone thinks of some new question to ask you and you come alive. I remember once an Italian interviewer asked me who my favorite superhero was and I started talking and wouldn’t shut up about it. Eventually, he tried to change the subject.

How does such a fucking fragile, tortured emo soul as yourself survive in a world that is oh so cold and cruel? Do you just cry yourself to sleep every night? How to you keep from just ending it all?

-Alan (via email)

It’s difficult, believe me. Every morning when I open my eyelids to see the same cold and harsh world outside of them, waiting to smear its icky misery all over my delicate sensibilities, I just have to pull the covers back over my head for a second, have a good handful of violent, body-wracking sobs, and gather what remains of my courage.

One of my favorite things about Okkervil River is that the band always has such a wide range of songs at its disposal. A couple years ago you guys played sets composed largely of fan requests, last year the band played some back to back shows with completely different set lists, and now you've managed this mixtape full of covers, many of which seem to have been thrown together on the fly. Why are you guys are so willing to "wing it"? Do you think that spontaneity makes things more fun for you in addition to the fans?

Jeremy B1 (from the Okkervil River message board)

As I mentioned above, there can be a lot of pressure around big album releases, what with all the money being thrown around and with everyone’s expectations, and I think sometimes people can let the pressure get to them and affect the work they’re putting out. For me, I’ve found the best remedy for artistic pressure is to just keep looking ahead and working. I like moving on to something else as quickly as I can because once something’s done it’s done and there’s nothing to be gained sitting around and marinating in it. And working fast is exciting! I’ve always loved the feeling of electricity and immediacy I get when I listen to the first 15 or so Beatles or Stones singles. They’re working so fast that you can hear a kind of evolution from song to song. And along the way you’ll hear weird mistakes or irregularities in the performance (especially in those early Stones singles, which are just loaded with human error), but those just make it more endearing. I liked the idea of the mixtape being a snapshot of us playing thematically relevant songs on tour – a series of postcards sent back to the listener – and playing them fast and rough, leaving mistakes and mishaps and warm human thumbprints all over it. To me, that stuff is amusing and – in an era where you can easily Pro-Tools any irregularities out of a recording – strangely comforting.

Golden Opportunities, an album of covers, is available now for free from this website. We recorded these songs at radio stations, at shows, in peoples' apartments, in hotel stairways. They were done here and there all around the United States and Europe, with the eventual intention of being rounded up in this collection. You can download artwork for the album from this site for making a physical copy of the CD packaging.

The "interview" for this release is currently being conducted - anyone who has questions for the band should send them to mixtape@okkervilriver.com . On Friday, a selection of the questions will be posted on this site.

We hope everyone has a good holiday season.

Greetings from Germany. We're about halfway through the European tour and thanks to everyone who has come out, it's been a good time. I'm writing this from a hotel in Münster - home of the bland orange-rimmed cheese. I was talking to members of the band about how it's not all that exciting of a cheese, but Scott reminded me that it's very affordable and then we ran into Jason Molina last night and he pointed out - correctly - that melted on a bagel, with a little mustard, it's a refreshing alternative to cream cheese. Which I'll concede. But that's neither here nor there. I'm mostly posting to tell you that the label put out a video show last year by our friend Mike Angelo Torres of me playing "A Girl in Port" on a beach in Italy and you can currently see it on our videos page. It was shot on a mix of 16MM and Super 8 and captures a really nice pleasant interlude in an otherwise turbulent touring season last year. I hope you're all well. I gotta go. They're playing "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel on the stereo in here. "JFK / blown away / what else do I have to say?" Cripes.

-Will

Okkervil River will be back in the UK in February for some shows in the UK.
Tickets for the following shows go on sale this Thurs, Oct 25 at 9am GMT.

Sat, Feb 2 Empire - Belfast, Ireland (Tix: www.ticketmaster.ie )
Sun, Feb 3 Cabaret Voltaire - Edinburgh, Scotland (Tix: www.pclpresents.com )
Tue, Feb 5 Scala - London, England (Tix: www.livenation.co.uk )

NPR will be re-broadcasting their "World Cafe" recording session and interview with Okkervil River on Saturday, November 10th and Monday, November 12th 2006. Go to http://worldcafe.org for more information.

If you go to the"videos" section of this site, you can see a YouTube version of our new video for "Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe" (downloadable version coming soon). The video was directed by Margaret Brown, director of the documentary on Townes Van Zandt Be Here to Love Me.

A quick note: there is a version of this video currently available on YouTube with some scenes censored by artificial darkening and blurring out and with advertising beforehand. This is a leaked version of the video and it was not approved by the band.

The folks over at Jagjaguwar have posted an audio podcast on the making of The Stage Names, consistenting of a conversation with Will and Brian Beattie, the delicately attuned ears and grotesquely swollen brain behind the sonics of the new record as well as Black Sheep Boy and Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See. Check it out here .

Additionally, for those in the New York area, Will's going to be performing solo versions of songs from The Stage Names at Brooklyn's Sound Fix records at 8 PM this Saturday. More information available here .

So, The Stage Names, our fourth full-length (depending on how you count 'em) and our follow-up to 2005’s Black Sheep Boy, is now in stores as well as available for order or download online. For us, it’s been a long wait for a record we’re very proud of. The album was recorded earlier in the year with Brian Beattie, our co-producer on Black Sheep Boy, and was released via our old friends at Jagjaguwar. Cover art, as in the past, was created by the inimitable William Schaff. It’s currently available on CD and vinyl (purchase of the vinyl version comes with a download coupon from the label) as well as in a limited-edition 2-CD set, with a second CD containing demo versions of all the songs on the record. Pitchfork posted a review of it two days ago calling it “Okkervil River's most emotionally devastating record yet, and without doubt one of the year's best.”

Also, I wanted to let you know that we've been prodded by the label to put some bonus tracks out there as well. If you go to iTunes, you can download "Shannon Wilsey on the Starry Stairs," my personal very favorite outtake from The Stage Names (with horns by members of Grupo Fantasma, Prince's sometime backing band!) and a song that very nearly made it to the record. It's kind of a sequel to "Savannah Smiles" and kind of a sister song to "John Allyn Smith Sails" and I am extremely happy with how it turned out. Also, on emusic you can get the song "Love to a Monster," a slightly older song of ours that was intended to be on The Stage Names but didn't make it on, though a rough demo version of it showed up on our Australian tour-support EP Overboard and Down. This new recording of "Love to a Monster," which was made for original inclusion on the new record, is the version of it I feel like the song deserved. Anyway, this stuff is out there if you want to track it down, and I'm really happy with it.

Oh, and if you can believe it, we're gonna be on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" on the 28th of this month, promoting the record. Weird.

It's a thrill to finally have this record out. I can't wait to see everybody at the end of this month when we go out on tour.

If you're interested, here's a link to buy the record from Jagjaguwar:
here

-Will

Hi and welcome to the new Okkervil River website. This is, like, the first design change in our website we’ve made since 2000, when Zach and I whipped something up on Dreamweaver at his job after hours. Those who’ve been dissatisfied with how outdated the news on our website has been in the past will find all the latest tourdates and band news here, along with lots of music, lyrics, stories about the records, videos, tour pics, an extensive online store, and all yer modern amenities we've come to expect from a fancy-schmancy website. I’m really excited about it, and I hope all you folks enjoy it (and yeah, okay, there's still a few inconsistencies we'll be working out). Watch the site for more content in the upcoming weeks.

-Will

"I am a stranger in your land,
a wandering man –
call me sand."

Rest in peace, Lee Hazlewood.