Okkervil River‘s I Am Very Far is one of the growers of 2011, an album that creeps steadily into one’s system, a little better with each visit and a little dearer as the tunes unlock. This is the latest video from this record, and bandleader Will Sheff observes:
“The lyrics to ‘Your Past Life as a Blast’ deal with a lot of different things and in a kind of disarranged way, but it felt to me like it was the sweetest moment on the record, a moment of nostalgia and tenderness and sunnyness. When I was writing the lyrics, certain images flashed in my head, and some of those images were specifically from my childhood, or of the way I remember earliest childhood feeling to me.”
“Like many kids of the late 70s and early 80s, my dad was often hovering around with a Super 8 camera, filming my mom and me and – as time passed – my younger brother and sister. I remember him projecting these movies on a bare wall and, eventually, the movies becoming as much a part of my memory as the original events he had filmed. I thought it would be cool to use actual footage of those memories in the video itself, to make a really personal kind of rock video.”
“For the ‘Your Past Life as a Blast’ video, I worked with the editor Alan Del Río Ortíz to turn my dad’s home movies into a short condensed film of someone’s childhood, a little home-movie music video, about moms and dads and kids, and how it felt.”
Okkervil River will be on tour in October with dates in Australia and Europe, including stops in Perth, Sydney, Glasgow, Manchester, and London as well as a solo performance by Will Sheff at The Toff In Town in Melbourne. The band will also be making an appearance at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin on the Orange Stage.
Your Past Life As A Blast from Okkervil River on Vimeo.
