Words by Sean Moeller // Illustration by Johnnie Cluney // Sound Engineering by Patrick Stolley and Brad Kopplin. Every so often, you’re sure, no matter where you’re from, to run across an offering in a local newspaper – for it’s the venue for the majority of all question-and-answer pieces with normal, everyday people – that will ask the subject being probed whom, living or dead, they’d like to have as dinner guests. It’s an open-ended postulate that is supposed to reveal something intriguing about the person being asked, when, in another estimation, it should be seen as a way to give cool points and worthiness to the minds and personalities of those chosen to break bread and ladle soup slurpingly with. Many choose dignitaries – Winston Churchill or Albert Einstein – obvious choices for obvious reasons. Those who keep a Bible close to or on top of their nightstand will inevitably tab Jesus or the big G for one of their imaginary, hypothetical calligraphic invitations. Those full of athletic memories will take Mickey Mantle or Johnny U – perhaps even Rocky Marciano or Wilt Chamberlain for tales of tragedy and sluttiness, not all that typical of fare for a roundtable meal. For the musically inclined, defaults are Lennon and Beethoven, maybe not in that order. Hendrix and Jim Morrison, while awkward and out-of-place at a fanciful five-course dinner party that would be attended by big shots and dreamers, would make for some fascinating conversation and the after dinner mints probably would be bypassed for something stronger. The question can be answered an infinite number of ways and taste preferences obviously infiltrate the process individually and specifically. For those of you out there needing an answer to this question now or will some day in the future, let us suggest another candidate for your consideration – one Will Sheff, the lead singer of Okkervil River. Sheff would make you proud over a filet mignon and a couple bottles of expensive as hell wine. He’d work his intense intelligence – vivid and cleverly, quietly demonstrative on the near classic album Black Sheep Boy and the band’s latest The Stage Names, a dressed up picture of life that occurs interestingly enough predominantly outside of any spotlights and confetti yet maintains a Hollywood-ish template, albeit one involving original thought. Sheff and his delicate, yet husky and weathered tales of the tattered remains of cheerlessness or breath-taking exasperation (all of the same measure and dose) have the same tincture of amber and grey – the light falling upon them just so and casting them in an apt candor, for those are the colors that do it, those of the drab afternoons when nothing much is happening and the very beginnings and ends of the day’s sunlight. Aren’t they when the soul feels most revealing? Sheff, who cuts the figure of a man hard at work thinking and contemplating things that you and I are not, uses his eyes and his head as one giant lens, scanning his surroundings, milking the details for all of their nectar and the bitter aftertastes. He then sees things and people out in spectacularly lively and provocative scenes that needn’t set designers or grips to hold hovering microphones or cue the action. Those that he puts into his incisive lyrics are fully thought out and – were this a novelist – would be the results of countless drafts and rewrites, sleepless nights, cartons of cigarettes, way to much bourbon or other choice hard stuff, depression and time – minutes, hours and days just laid out with nothing to fill them. These people are real and fictional both, conceptualized and yet bearing all of the requisite traits needed to be considered genuine and real – of flesh and bone. The personalities wear like the smattering of different ones that we sometimes invoke ourselves. It’s not dress-up because the personalities are more mirrored than that, less staged and less propped. It’s a proper introduction to the spirits that bang out the hollow pangs of grief and longing inside those red inner walls, not the “fake masterpiece” that comes “serenely dribbling” from speakers in Okkervil’s debut single from the new record. Sheff acts, directs and inspires – he’s the guy choosing the camera angles, giving motivational-this-is-how-you’re-feeling-at-this-point advice and then ripping off the headphones and tearing out onto the soundstage himself, like Max Fisher putting the popcorn down and suddenly becoming the wrestler. He’s the consummate songwriter, who writes what he knows and just as importantly writes what the rest of him and all of his surrounding costars teach him. Sheff at a dinner party is a full house, just roll sound. For more free Okkevil River daytrotter session MP3s as well as hundreds more sessions, please vistit http://www.daytrotter.com