Ready to Start: Part 1/3

Blog-y posts about our drive to Beaverton, OR and week of settling in.

Prologue Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

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Day 1

For sanity, posterity, and fun we kept a log of milestones, things we saw, and activities we did on the drive. You’ll notice two sets of handwriting and we used four different colors depending on the entry type. Here’s the page for Day 1: Sunday, May 22 for the 620 miles from Maumee, Ohio to Greenfield, Iowa:

As promised, the first thing we did after getting on the Ohio Turnpike was listen to Okkervil River’s I Am Very Far. We still listen to it once or twice a day and are enjoying it more each time. Another album we enjoyed and continue to enjoy is Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea. Cool readers probably know about it already, but I just discovered it as a going away gift. So good and it was bumped among the first three vinyl albums I ordered for our new turntable setup.

“P & P” refers to a stop for two words that begin with P. The term was coined by my dad and I remember the exact moment that he invented it. When I was in the seventh or eighth grade he used to let me ride along while he drove to several grocery stores in Indiana or Michigan to talk to meat managers or stick coupons onto products. While exiting the highway at one stop he said, “We can get some pop here, and go pee. Hey, those both begin with P. P and P.” and then chuckled. It’s been observed that my dad is Hank Hill.

“FCRS” stands for “crazy rain storm”. One of those where for a terrible span of seconds the windshield wipers could not keep up. Come on wipers!

It was supposed to be my wife’s pick for lunch, but options were limited and she was waffling a bit, so I offered to give her my dinner pick to stop at a place declaring itself “Best Wings USA”. They turned out to be the same as Wild Wings Cafe in Raleigh (not a bad thing!); even the graphics in the menu for the sauce choices looked similar. I think there’s some common corporate DNA there or something. Around dinnertime I made the mistake of rubbing my eyes and a severe case of eye strain came on out of nowhere. I had to take the next exit with tears running down my face and of course eye drops were $7 at the gas station. They had me and they knew it! I wanted to take a break and eat dinner, but the only choices at the exit were an unknown Mexican place and KFC/Taco Bell. We went with the devil we knew (is that the right way to use that expression?), to the horror of my wife who’s the editor of Life’s Healthy Journeys.

Day 2

The 746 miles from Greenfield to Rawlins, Wyoming:

We stayed at a Super 8 for all three nights, having gotten addicted to the sub-$80 room rate. Right outside of the lobby door in the morning was this mangled apple in the middle of a linear trail of splatter in two directions. I was so curious about how it got there: was it thrown from outside or did someone come out to throw it? I asked my wife to take a picture and she recoiled, then stated the obvious that the apple had been thrown *up* by someone (i.e. puked). That made sense and explained the splatter. But I'm still curious about whether it was road sickness or someone that was drunk, and if the latter whether the apple was eaten before or after the getting drunk.

Although it didn't get to that point, the puke turned out to be a harbinger for what would begin with an innocent stop for gas and snacks in the morning. I remember asking my wife for a "big drink" and a surprise snack. She came out with a 64 (!) oz. cup, some strange taco flavor of Dorito's, and two Heath-topping'd donuts. We shared one donut and I was going to save the second, then traffic came to a standstill an hour later and I ate the second one: with no way to leave the highway I might have been starving! Between the wings, Taco Bell, Dorito's, and donuts my body was not a happy temple. I vowed to have a salad for dinner, but by that time I was feeling good again and thought it would be dandy to have ribs and fries at an Outback. I ate all but the last rib and bushel of fries, and suddenly realized that I had to stop. "Dave, if you take one more bite the next trail of splatter in a parking lot will be your's." But splatter aside, almost getting sick isn't much more pleasant than getting sick, maybe less so. So for that night and the next day, I suffered.

Without really meaning to, one P (I’ll let your imagination decide which) stop happened to be here.

Day 3

The 734 miles between Rawlins and Baker City, Oregon:

This time I stuck with my resolution to eat better: McDonald’s oatmeal (without the brown sugar that makes that such a treat!) for breakfast and soup for lunch and dinner at Chili’s and Applebee’s. If you’ve never been to Chili’s with me, you will not understand how pitiful it is that I only had soup. Soup! FWIW, both places had both synchronized on potato bacon soup that day.

There was less variety in the entertainment because my wife had had the inspired idea that we could both respectively watch and listen to DVDs on our portable player by putting one ear bud in my ear. I listened to seven episodes of season 5 of my favorite show, The Wire: a great day stomach notwithstanding.

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Next: our arrival in Beaverton, some big spending, and a nugget.

Things I Made: A Nintendo Poster

A poster of 128 images of games and systems that I didn’t make which was printed by a company on the web. An auspicious first Things I Made post , but I did have a lot to do with its creation.

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I knew I was moving to a new place about a year in advance and had very specific ideas about two rooms we would create: a bare-bones living room with no TV or permanent screens of any kind and a downstairs media room (which turned out to be upstairs, oh well) where screens are encouraged and games and movies are displayed in the open. The latter was going to have three posters in nice frames: one for a movie, one for a TV show, and one for a videogame. There will be a post about these rooms in general later, but I couldn’t wait to show off the game poster.

Clicking on the image should open the .png file which your browser can magnify.

My ideas for the poster proceeded from very lazy to time/labor intensive. First, I remembered seeing a post on GoNintendo about a retro game collage that someone had made. I thought it might have been something I could order in poster size, but it turned out to have just been an image on Flickr here. That’s a really cool image that inspired mine in a huge way. My next idea was to have the highest resolution version of that image printed at Kinko’s or similar. Finally, I remembered that though I don’t think of myself as much of a visual artist, I am a good programmer and it occurred to me that this kind of collage would be natural to automate with a program. This way the games could be customized to me personally.

I’d written a program in Java already which takes a directory of image files and some options (number of columns, optional image in center, number of pixels which each width and height is a multiple of) and arranges them randomly in a grid. If you like what it produces you can use it, otherwise you click to create a new random arrangement until you’re happy. I used it to generate my “goodbye North Carolina” collage here. I probably spent four hours on the code and a little more gathering images and cropping/scaling them to be multiples of 50 pixels in width and height (50×50 pixels is the size of small images on Facebook which is what most of the images are; see I am lazy at heart).

For the game poster I extended the program with a hook so that other code can be plugged in to be notified of which images are added and contribute graphics underneath the collage. The customization for the poster used a file with each game’s name, release year, and system to generate the appropriate graphics. I got most of the older game images from vgmuseum.com, some from GameFaqs, and some from searches and in one case a screen grab from Youtube.

Originally there was a section of text for each row of images which spanned several lines because videogame names tend to be unnecessarily long. This meant that there was a lot of empty space at the end of lines and between these sections. I let a friend who *is* a graphic designer in on my secret project and came away with a suggestion to number the rows somehow so that the bottom text could be written as a single section of continuous text. I considered using hexadecimal numbers as homage to what you see when an NES is turned on and the cartridge isn’t positioned just right, then had the idea to use sprites from Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. These 16×16 sprites are the best-looking part of the final poster — it doesn’t matter how pixelated they appear because they’re supposed to look that way — and I’m thinking about another poster which uses NES sprites more heavily.

For the games themselves I stuck with Nintendo systems. I had enough left over Nintendo in my brain to write that post for Things I Like. Like I said, the chief advantage of making my own collage is that I could choose games that are unique to me. For some reason me and my sisters decided that Ice Climber was a game we needed to have, and I have such vivid memories of grabbing or more often missing that damn red bird’s claws at the top. By most accounts (including mine when I tried to revisit it recently), Mighty Bomb Jack for NES is a terrible game, but I remember sitting down with it for an afternoon and really making progress: you work your way up this pyramid and at one point you come out the left side into clouds, then you go back in and later you come out the right side where there are more clouds; it was intense.

I needed the images to be the same size, but handheld games use smaller resolutions than NES and SNES games which are 256×224. Scaling them larger would have made them look fuzzy and weird, but it turns out their smaller size was a blessing because it forced me to think of using the outside of the Game Boy, etc… screen as a border for those games. For the N64, GameCube, and Wii games I cheated by scaling the images down or adding black bars for the era of games that support widescreen. For the games I didn’t play on a flatscreen TV the border is slightly rounded and has a transparent dot on the left and right side in the middle. That’s how my TV looked upon examination from inches away; I was a weird kid but it wouldn’t surprise me if you did that too.

To print the poster I used a website called PosterPrintShop.com. I spent around $40 for a 27×40 inch poster. This was money that I was willing to forfeit if the site was shady or the printout didn’t look good with the file I’d sent, etc…, but as it turns out I can recommend this site highly and would use them again. When the poster arrived in about a week with a private shipping company that required delivery confirmation, I was pleased:

A friend whose apartment had some very nice looking framed movie posters recommended a $90 frame from this site, but wanting three and potentially more frames of the same kind I was a little hesitant. We ended up getting three frames that were around $35 each while we were at IKEA for furniture.

The framed poster in our media room:

    

Ready to Start: Prologue

Blog-y posts about our drive to Beaverton, OR and week of settling in.

I started a paragraph about things that happened before what I consider the beginning of our trip: the drive west from Toledo, OH where we dropped off our kids with my parents. But before long that paragraph turned into a post of its own. There should be three more which each cover three days of the trip itself.

Prologue Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

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Day -2

The morning we left Raleigh I went to the office one last time to round up volunteers to help load our U-Haul trailer. We had mostly boxes, it was a first floor apartment, and pizza and drinks were in the offering. I came back with a respectable group of three co-ops and four full-time co-workers.

I had appointed one co-op to be the captain of the trailer loading both because he had helped his mother load a trailer and because his forearms were impressively muscular. Another had skinny arms like me but came along anyways — on one trip he carried a plastic blue bin that my wife packed which looked deceptively light but was actually the heaviest box we had, packed with photos and frames with an infinitesimal amount of empty space. The last co-op ordained himself the lieutenant of trailer a.k.a. over-sized oven loading and removed his shirt to continue working at a steady pace. While my wife was making the pizza run I picked up items from the grass and asked dramatically why we needed to bring each along. “What is this, a box of pillows? What the hell is this orange shirt?” It was his.

One full-timer came with a van and made off very well for himself with items we couldn’t fit: a futon that we knew wasn’t coming along and a very dear and treasured step ladder that had its own opinion on the matter of the trailer door closing all of the way. These things went to a great friend who bought me his two favorite albums as a going away gift. The others worked hard and ate admirably. We are extremely appreciative of everyone’s help.

A spoiler that needs to be mentioned here: we made it to Portland with absolutely no problems — swaying, etc.. — with the hitch or trailer which was packed with precision. I did not take one step into the oven to load a box, so the credit belongs completely to our captain and his crew.

Our first stop after Raleigh was a town near Lynchburg, Virginia where my oldest brother-in-law and his family live. They greeted us with excellent burgers — thin and with cheddar, my fave — still-warm cookies and my favorite kind of potato chip. It was uncanny how these things were chosen even though they could not have known what my favorite things to eat would be. I remarked my suspicion that we had crashed on the road and were unknowingly in some after-life state constructed from our minds, a similar sensation to the one I had seeing the restaurants and stores in Beaverton, but that’s getting into the next post.

The thing that made this stop the most memorable was our just-three-year-old daughter’s reaction to the house and her two cousins who are two- and four-or-so- years older than her. She does this thing at a new place where she spends 10-15 minutes clinging to my leg and buries her face in my neck whenever she’s talked to before she works up the courage to explore and play. At this house she didn’t cow when her older cousin came up to her and took her hand and said, “let’s go play”. Not one minute after we arrived there were three girls with the same yellow-white hair giggling on the swing-set.

Day -1

We arrived in Toledo without incident. Well, one incident being the treacherously windy mountain road right after Lynchburg. I was so shaken up from navigating the trailer up and down and around S curves that I stopped at the first gas station at the bottom and demanded Funyons which I feared I would never again partake of. At Toledo we had to be efficient with our single dinner so we had my wife’s favorite (and maybe mine, sure) pizza: Original Gino’s. One of my sisters was there with two more cousins to play with; she was back from Chicago with both great popcorn from Garrett (if you have a chance to try that, do it!) and a tip for great popcorn to come at a rest stop in Indiana here, which turned out to be okay.

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The next morning we had a last family meal at a pancake breakfast at St. Joe’s church in Maumee and then my wife and I started toward Chicago on our own. That’s where the next post picks up.

Things I Like: Okkervil River (part 2)

< Part 1

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Sleep and Wake Up Songs (Amazon iTunes), Black Sheep Boy Appendix (Amazon iTunes), Golden Opportunities Mixtape (download link), The President’s Dead (iTunes), and Mermaid (iTunes)

By now my like of Okkervil River was enough that I sought it out and didn’t wait for fate to intervene. I bought all of the EPs and singles above in one binge before another trip to Toledo, except for Golden Opportunities Mixtape which is a freebie. I burned all of them but Golden Opportunities to a CD (only because it pushed it over the size limit) and that disc has occupied a permanent spot among our van’s six slots ever since, the only disc with this honor besides Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs (though Imagination Movers’ Juice Box Heroes had a nice run).

Sleep and Wake Up Songs

Sleep and Wake Up Songs is more Down the River of Golden Dreams. That’s a good thing . The last song, “No Hidden Track” is really good and cleverly named I guess.

For all of us and all of you
There are some things we can't see into
Cause from the other side no light shows through
I hope that there's a hidden track
It feels like there's a hidden track

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It segues nicely with the first real song (after an awesome theme-setting introduction track) on Black Sheep Boy Appendix: No Key No Plan:

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which has such excellent verses about making sense of our world (or not trying to):

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There is no key there's no plan, I discovered that
And truly I don't think you'll find a happier man

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I was really disappointed to read here that this song is about grifters. It’s about everyone!

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We're gonna just float up high
And it isn't a sin
And there isn't a hell where we'll be sent
There's only now, there isn't then
So just breath it in

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The song even calls out my blog, from six years in the past:

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Moralize all you might like
I don't believe in it

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Black Sheep Boy Appendix

Hey!

The other three songs on Appendix are among my favorites as well. At one point each of the four has been my favorite Okkervil River track, and I imagine they will continue to rotate. Like I said in part 1, the definitive edition of Black Sheep Boy is the first album I would pick up if my collection self-combusted.

The President’s Dead:

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The President's Dead

is a fun song to pay attention to the words of, easily made out since they’re clearly sung/spoken for two straight minutes before anyone but Will Sheff gets to play their instrument. I like to watch the other guitar players in this video.

If my collection self-combusted the second thing I would buy is the single Mermaid:

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Mermaid

which is just a great song. If you’re able to stop what you’re doing (since you’re reading this blog I’d imagine you can; listening to Mermaid is more important than reading this), I’d encourage you to put headphones on and do nothing but take it in. Then listen again and read along with the lyrics here. Am I right?

The B-side of the single is also excellent. These songs were recorded at the same time as the new album but are not included on it. They and the album track Wake and Be Fine which was/is available for free made me very, very, very, very excited for the album’s release. We’ll get there here, but first there was one more album I had to pick up.

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Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See (Amazon iTunes)

is the first Okkervil River record. Again, there’s no interesting story for me: I went to Amazon and in 4-5 business days it was mine.

From reading reviews one might think that it’s of average quality, but I’ve found it to be essential to have. The first song, Red, is a perfect first song for an album, let alone a first album:

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The fifth song, Westfall, is a perfect middle song:

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(and another with exceptional lyrics to pay attention to). And the last track, Okkervil River Song, is the most fitting closing song I could imagine. No embed for that since I chose it for a spotlight post here.

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I Am Very Far (Amazon iTunes)

Finally! This is the newest album, released on May 10 this year. Pictured is the deluxe edition which my wife and I bought. Inside a wooden box (ours came cracked , gonna glue it up ) are versions of the album on vinyl and CD, a hardcover book of lyrics, a letter signed by Will Sheff, and a metal outline of the cover art that you can put in front of anything to make it cooler.

As for the album itself… you tell me because we’re saving the first listen for a drive we’re starting this weekend to a new life. In the Things I Like series this move came up here, here, here, here, and literally here. Maybe these posts were subtly cathartic. Without getting into it too much, the lives we want to have are different than the ones we had a year ago, Okkervil River wasn’t known to us when the change began but it and The Suburbs have become the soundtrack of this year of transition, and the artwork to I Am Very Far will be hung prominently in our new living room as a reminder of this journey. Unless it sucks.

Besides my thoughts about I Am Very Far (which are mandatory to share publicly, it goes without saying), I need to write about my first time seeing Okkervil River live which is also in the future: agony at news that they were playing in Raleigh, NC two weeks after we move was replaced with relief that they’re playing in Portland, OR on June 21. I bought our tickets several months before we signed a contract for a place to live . So stay tuned for Things I Like: Okkervil River (part 3) after that.

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I’m going to retire Things I Like for awhile, but hope to get back to it later. Thanks for reading!

Okkervil River Song

One more of these. Like I said in my revisiting here, this is the last song on Okkervil River’s first album, Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See.

One morning shortly after I picked up the CD I was listening in the car and planned to take the disc in to the office to loan it to a friend for… evaluation?… purposes. This song came on as I entered the parking lot and I did one of those things (admit it) where I parked and stayed in the car until it finished. Then I got the lyrics booklet out (you don’t have to admit this) and played it again. I decided that as dorky as it might be, my friend had to have these words with his music, so I made a copy of each page in the printer room and put a star next to this song and Westfall. It just seemed really, really important to do that.

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Down by Okkervil River, slow, silent, think and black
I stared into the water, and the water it stared back

The night it fell from tangles of the branches on the shore
As it had on Okkervil River before

Down by Okkervil River, cigarettes and rusty tires
We made ourselves an alter, we lit our nightly fires

And the smoke lay thick and smothered all the skunk cabbage and vines
Where gods were born and gods lay down to die

With your hand inside my pocket you whispered in my ear,
"We've come from ugliness to find some refuge here

With this bracken for a blanket, where these limbs stick out like bones
We have found a place where we can be alone"

And I tried to tell you as I kissed your hard, dry lips
All the things I dreamed of and I touched your bone white hips

Far away our parents slept in as we watched our fire burn
They dreamed of nothing and got nothing in return

And the water slipped on slowly past our bodies in the weeds
Pulling plastic wrap and razors on its current through the reeds

And I woke up one cold morning, felt an absence at my back
Then I searched and stared but only the river stared back

Things I Like: Okkervil River (part 1)

I had a hard time deciding on a topic for this second to last Things I Like for now. I’d always planned for the last week to be a long-ish post about Okkervil River. This one was going to be Breaking Bad, my favorite TV series that’s on the air. But like last week‘s comments about How to Train Your Dragon, I don’t know what a post should look like. I just like it, ok?

Then I was going to do 24. It would have been fitting to have the two TV posts be Lost and 24, since those were my two favorite shows for a while. I even made something I’ve had finished in my brain for years: a chart that tracks my rating of 24′s varying quality over its eight seasons. I posted that chart tomorrow and the shockwaves of embarrassment were so profound that they traveled backwards in time and made me rethink my choice. If anyone leaves a comment with the exact text “I want to see the 24 chart” they will get their wish.

So, instead of one long-ish Okkervil River post it seemed better for you and me to have two not-so-long-ish ones. Let’s

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begin.

Okkervil River is a band from Austin, Texas. They’ve released six albums, the most recent being I Am Very Far this week. I only found out about them last Summer but I’ve bought every album and EP, giving each in turn my careful attention before picking up another.

I wish I could say that the journey began in 2002 when I was talking to these interesting people in a local record store. It actually began in 2010 when I was in my cubicle checking Facebook for some important research. This guy who probably did hang out in a record store in 2002 had found out about Okkervil River and was taken by it enough to share a link:

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The way he discovered the band as I was told later is interesting: he was on vacation with his wife and two kids and stayed up watching TV after those three went to bed, flipping eventually to Okkervil River on Austin City Limits. If he’d just gone to bed with his family, or something else caught his attention before he got to that station, or if he’d decided not to post a music video link which few people actually click on, I would have missed out on this music that inspired the blog that you decided to read for whatever reason of your own.

Anyways, I really liked the song and had a lot of respect for the tastes of that guy (accusations of a man crush would be hard to deny), so I went to Amazon to order the album. I’m always a sucker for the alluring “Add just $xx.xx more to receive Super Saver Shipping on your order” so I had to pick out a second CD. A quick check at Wikipedia revealed that

The Stage Names (Amazon iTunes) and The Stand Ins (Amazon iTunes)

"The Stage Names" and "The Stand Ins"

were two parts of a double album that were released in 2007 and 2008. They share a common theme which is to adopt the persona of a modern musical performer or actor. Some of the songs are sung with this overconfident swagger that is off-putting to me at least, but it’s intentional irony. The artwork on the albums can be put together to form a picture.

What stood out after a short time with The Stage Names and remains my favorite thing about Okkervil River in general is the quality of the lyrics. Every song is written and sung by the same person: Will Sheff. The words are sung with enough clarity to make out for the most part in a single listen, but there hasn’t been a song I haven’t enjoyed more after I read along with the lyrics which are presented in increasingly beautiful form in each album’s booklet. On more than once occasion (here is a new example and and here’s is an old one) I’ll be listening to a song that I don’t love, catch a line that piques my interest, listen again with the lyrics in front of me, and come away with a new favorite song.

Even though it has some songs I don’t really like (yet?) and is probably my least favorite album, The Stage Names has a few of my favorite Okkervil River songs: Our Life is Not a Movie or Maybe which is embedded above, Unless It’s Kicks:

and John Allyn Smith Sails which is based on the suicide of real poet John Berryman:

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By the second verse, dear friends
my head will burst, my life will end
So I'd like to start this one off by saying: live and love

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Right now I like The Stand Ins more, though it took several listenings to get to that point. This blog is named after my favorite track:

Others are Blue Tulip:

and Pop Lie:

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By the backroom the kids all waited to meet the man in bright green
who had dreamed up the dream
that they wrecked their hearts upon
He's the lier who lied in his pop song
and you're lying when you sing along

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Black Sheep Boy (Amazon iTunes)

Black Sheep Boy

At that point I hadn’t liked what I’d heard enough to go straight back to Amazon, but at the same time I had a vague desire to pick up this album which had been mentioned in a comment on the infamous Facebook link by a person I don’t know but imagine to be legendarily cool. My favorite store in Raleigh is Ed McKay Used Books & More, which I used to go to to buy NES games before I realized that I wasn’t playing them for more than a few minutes. They also sell movies, books — if you have kids you need to see their kid’s section: bedtime stories for less than $2 galore — and CDs. My like of Okkervil River was enough to make me flip through the O’s with the hope of finding Black Sheep Boy, and inexplicably there it was: the only Okkervil River CD on the shelf. This wasn’t Green Day’s “Dookie” or Nirvana’s “Unplugged in New York” I was looking for, so I still think of this find as more than coincidental somehow. I was so in awe of this CD’s journey to my home that I gave it to someone who was going through a hard time who had heard it in our car and liked it (it had been imported to iTunes, of course). Let’s hope its journey continues, wherever it is going.

I agree with that friend of a friend: Black Sheep Boy is an amazing album; one of those that’s complex and has more to reward you with each listen. Like The Stage Names/The Stand Ins, there is a unifying theme/concept, this one based on an eponymous folk song (read up about it if you want — I’m glad I’m not a music reviewer who has to write their rewording of this kind of stuff all the time). The tone is mostly somber. The lyrics of several songs describe different aspects of the black sheep boy, a mythical creature who steals children and takes them to a secret garden. Sometimes the singer identifies with or is him and sometimes he talks about slaying him. It’s like a puzzle to piece together, except I’m not sure if it all comes together as a nice picture or is supposed to, so the enjoyment is in the constant piecing. An EP with more songs, Black Sheep Boy Appendix, that was released after the album is probably my favorite Okkervil River release. It will come up in part 2 of this post.

My favorite songs include For Real:

A Stone:

and The Latest Toughs, which is about the perils of blindly following anyone without thinking for yourself:

In the middle the music dies down and the lyrics are spoken:

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And I don't know what notes you wanna hear played
Can't think what lines you'd like me to sing or say
Not sure what subjects you want mentioned
So just pause and add your own intentions

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In the liner notes the line “pause and add your own intentions” is written as “write your own intentions” with several blank lines to write them right there. When the band’s website had lyrics to every song — now it’s in new album mode and only has tourdates and store links; I hope the old site comes back — the line is changed to ask that your intentions be emailed in. Just something cool.

If I were going to buy one Okkervil River album, it would be the “definitive edition” of Black Sheep Boy that includes the Appendix songs. [As of this writing, the MP3 versions of all of the albums are only $5 on Amazon. At this price the Black Sheep Boy definitive edition is the best $5 you could ever spend on MP3s.]

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Down the River of Golden Dreams (Amazon iTunes)

Down the River of Golden Dreams

Another album, another purchase motivated by something on Facebook. I’m trying to go to that site less, I promise . This time I didn’t see something about the band, but saw a mention that it was Support Your Local Business Day. We were in at my parents’ for Thanksgiving and that day happened to be the best one for that most glorious of perks when you have kids and visit your parents: the date night. After dinner at The Olive Garden — in retrospect we probably could have chosen a more appropriate local restaurant — I stopped at Allied Record Exchange on Reynolds Rd. in Toledo. I’m going to call it the Toledo Ed McKay minus books plus more new items. Same drill as before: I went to the O’s and there was one Okkervil River album which happened to be one I didn’t have. If you thought I was making too much of my Black Sheep Boy find, how do you explain this?

Down the River of Golden Dreams is one album earlier than Black Sheep Boy and one later than their first record which I’ll get to next week. Besides having some of my absolute favorite tracks, I enjoy its overall simpler arrangements — often there’s only a piano, a guitar, drums, and vocals of course — compared to the more elaborate songs on later albums. There is a series of four songs in a row in which each is so good that I can’t believe it was made. I won’t reveal where this begins so not to spoil their discovery.

Favorites are The Velocity of Saul at the Time of His Confession which is about dying:

The War Criminal Rises and Speaks which is about living in a world that has evil, which I couldn’t find a video of that’s nice to listen to — if you’re still reading buy the album yourself

and Seas Too Far to Reach which I like enough to give it its own post.

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Part 2 covers the first record and the EPs and singles that were released between the albums. I also talk around the newest album and explain what that means.

Seas Too Far to Reach

I wasn’t going to do any more of these song + lyrics posts, especially for Okkervil River. The last thing I’d want to do is rob someone of their chance to listen to these songs with an open mind and decide which are their favorites for themselves. But, as has happened with several other OR songs that I’ve listened to over and over again, I played this song at the right time today and actively listened to what was being said and it struck me as extremely moving, to the point that I wanted to share it quickly. It’s also a thematic cousin to Lost Coastlines itself, down to the analogy of sailing paired with death and life and ultimate conclusion of “la la la”. However off base my interpretations might be, I don’t think these la’s are ever meaningless vocals, rather nouns to be interpreted with the rest of the lyrics.

I used to think this song was about having sex. Later I realized that it was about finding a way to deal with the cycle of constant suffering that’s built into the human condition through sleeping and dreaming, the act of sex being a means to the end of going to sleep. Then I decided the song was about having sex again. In any case, it’s sex in it’s most beautiful, opposite of dying form, not trivial or pornographic. Or maybe meaningfully trivial and more beautiful for it. While I piece this together press play and follow along and give it a try for yourself.

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The ladies in my dream are so obliging
They come on down to do the things I need
Whether skies are calm or cut apart by lightning,
they're always there to minister to me

And at break of dawn they're sweetly shining
or at quiet of midnight, cold and dim,
they say, "Don't harm him"
When I wake just as their eyes are crying,
I see that bed and I just want to climb back in

But let's gather up your friends and drive up to that country inn
We can stay there, feeling water warmly wash across our skin
Giving back all of our tears so that we can cry them again

You want to tell your dad you cant believe he's dying
but let's just walk on down the hall and shut our mouths
The AM radio is broken down and crying
as on this hour drive we're silent to ourselves

Let's go back up to your house and take our clothes off
and just push and pull ourselves until we're deep inside of sleep
With your body next to me, its sleepy sighing
sounds like waves upon a sea too far to reach
But I'll gather up my men and try to sail on it again
and we'll walk and quietly talk all through the country of your skin
made up of pieces of the places that you've dreamed and that you've been
and we will sleep outside in tents upon this unfamiliar land
In the morning we'll awake, yeah, as a foreign dawning breaks
my men and I will all awake. Let's try again

La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la...

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