(Note: There are two errors in the Don't Fall in Love packaging: Brian Beattie's web address is no longer
www.newimprovedmusic.com and Will Schaff's is actually
www.fortunate-accident.org/samsa)
The new Okkervil River record is called Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See. We started work on it around July 2000 and finished it in August 2001. In between that time we consumed bag upon greasy bag of potato and cheese breakfast tacos, accidentally broke a vintage mellotron, slaughtered invading rats (via poison - it had to be done), were leapt on by yard fleas and hacked and gasped at the copious billows of potsmoke blown heedlessly in our faces by Brian Beattie, producer, engineer, and owner and proprietor of what came to be called Yacht Club Fantasy Studios (basically a dark shed with a single bare lightbulb and a cracked cement floor).
We decided to work with Brian (who’s produced records by Daniel Johnston, Kathy McCarty, Sincola, Brenda Kahn, and his own band Glass Eye) after an heartpoundingly intense bidding war between him, the guy who had done our last record, and a hypothetical rented four-track. Once the decision was made, I started in earnest sending him long rambling e-mails about how I wanted us to sound like Al Green. Even though our first record, Stars Too Small To Use, was a stark and stripped-down affair (essentially a document of how we sounded live at the time), we’d always nursed dreams of making that kind of really lush record. Brian did an amazing job and changed the way we play music.
We recorded the basic tracks for Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See (then tentatively titled The Indescribable Tenderness in Bob Schneider’s Majestically Beautiful Face) live, just like we’d done with Stars..., but then we called in friends to play every instrument we could think of, which included violin, pedal steel, mellotron, banjo, string and horn sections, and a lot more, excluding the kitchen sink but including (as an add in mastering) a bathroom air conditioner. Brian also played Hammond organ on most of the songs and our friend Alice Spencer come in to duet with me on “Kansas City.” We also – miracle of miracles – managed to get one of our heroes, Daniel Johnston, in for another duet. I drove down to where Daniel and his parents reside in the Texas countryside and spirited him up to Austin to sing with us and buy comic books.
We added two new members during the recording process. The first, Jonathan Meiburg, plays almost nothing on this particular record (due to his late addition) but does a hell of a lot for us live, including playing Wurlizer, accordion, and banjo, and waving his head from side to side with a blissful expression on his face. The second, Mark Pedini, was so late added that he plays absolutely nothing on this particular record and was brought on board mainly out of our disturbingly acute shared admiration of his beard (groomed immaculately and with cool precision).
While up in my native Northeast for Mark’s wedding (matters of the heart are easily understood by a man with a
well-groomed beard – cf. Marvin Gaye), I made the acquaintance of William Schaff, best known for illustrating
Godspeed You Black Emperor!s magnificent double album Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
and enlisted him to design and execute the cover art for Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See.
It looks thoroughly awesome. We were lucky enough to sucker Indiana’s Jagjaguwar Records, the sister label of
Secretly Canadian, (and the home of Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair as well as Julie Doiron, Manishevitz, Oneida,
Richard Youngs, the poet Robert Creeley, and other commercial powerhouses) into putting the record out. If
all the members of Okkervil River got run over by a bus, this record would be good enough to represent us after
we’re gone. If we were all trampled by rabid stampeding circus elephants, though, it would probably be
overshadowed by the horror and indignity of the circumstances. In that case, though, our gruesome deaths
might have a decent chance at charting somewhere in the murky lower 40s on VH-1’s “Most Shocking Moments in Rock,”
so every cloud has a silver lining.