A Story of Julie Doiron / Okkervil River.
The Julie Doiron / Okkervil River split CD for Acuarela was originally supposed to be just an EP,
but we were feeling productive and I guess Julie was too because the whole thing ended up being
about album length. For our part, we recorded twice as many songs for the “EP” as we finally
ended up using; I guess that those songs will surface at some unspecified point down the road.
Our songs were recorded at Adult Audio Megaplex, a studio bunker embedded into a godforsaken
cranny in North Austin known ironically as “Jollyville,” a place where the all the remaining greenery is
being scraped from the earth by gigantic bulldozers and where all the cops hate my guts and
think that, jacketless in a windy midwinter night, I’m shivering because I’ve “got something to
hide.” But that’s another story.
Michael Crow from the phenomenal Austin rock band Grand Champeen owns Adult Audio Megaplex and engineered all of the songs on this EP. His first act as engineer was to label every track onto which we were about to record “pussy shit.” This gives you an idea of the unfortunate “boy’s club” mentality that Grand Champeen’s impossibly high standards of uncompromising rock have instilled in them. It also gives you an idea of the climate of intense hostility we were to work under during the first weeks of our Adult Audio sessions. Eventually, the severe power imbalance in the studio was broken in Okkervil’s favor when we made the decision to use Crow’s scratchy, wavering “practice” violin overdubs on our final mixes. A chastened and sheepish Crow respected us after that, and we all began to laugh and joke around a whole lot more. Work was at an effective standstill.
After drafting Crow (who plays trumpet on Don’t Fall in Love with Everyone You See, incidentally) to play violin on our songs, we asked Brian Beattie, the co-producer of DFILWEYS, to come in and mix them. Brian, who thinks that “mix” means “run every channel through a broken echoplex,” heartily agreed. And so we all promptly got to work on making our material – including 2 murder ballads (1 over our usual limit, resulting in 50% of our material being devoted to murder) – as broken, bombastic, and frantically loud as we four purveyors of “pussy shit” could make it.
When Julie sent us her half of the EP and we heard her hushed tributes to small pleasures and domestic tranquility, we felt a little bad about all that yelling and about having recorded two songs that detail violent death. But by then it was too late.
I personally am very pleased that this split record is coming out on Acuarela (Jagjaguwar will be distributing it in the United States), as I’m a big fan of Migala and Spain is the only European country in which I’ve spent any amount of time. Plus, it pleases my family, every one of which except for me is a Spanish teacher (I promise that this is true). We hope we can get over to Spain as soon as possible to present these songs there ourselves.
Art for this record was done by Mark Pedini, Okkervil’s sometime drummer and a fantastic graphic designer who has done many of our posters in the past as well as the cover for our split seven-inch with South San Gabriel (you can see more of Mark’s work at www.bipedalini.com) In a simple, iconic image, he managed to perfectly describe what this project means to Julie and to us – an oversized sprout wearing a plaid shirt affixed with eye-nipples. Yeah, I think that pretty much sums it up.