Earlier today Okkervil River’s tremendously talented leader Will Sheff announced that he had gone underground.  Literally.  Sheff explains:  “In the early part of last year I finally got a dedicated recording space. It was something I’d dreamed of having for my whole life but I had never really been able to make it work until then. It’s located in Brooklyn, in a basement down by the East River, a dingy but high-ceilinged room at the end of a long, damp hallway. In the late 90s a writer named John Wray had lived in this one room and he wrote his first novel there, sleeping inside a tent to keep out the rats. I think that story clinched it for me when I was looking at it. I liked the idea of so much thinking happening there. I started going in [to the space] and working every day of the week there, just shutting the door and writing until evening. I decided to do a project there I’d wanted to do for years and years, which is to make an album by myself and for myself, an album that doesn’t owe anything to music I made before. When I finished the album I decided I’d give some the songs away for free since it cost almost nothing to make.  The name of the project is Lovestreams.”

With Lovestreams, Sheff has gone Postal (Service) and taken a page out of Ben Gibbard’s electronic book (although Sheff’s is a solo side-project).  Today Sheff has released new song Shock Corridor under the Lovestreams moniker.  And now we can’t stop hitting repeat (at eleven, and not holding) and re-reading the song’s lyrics.  Once again, Sheff has combined a scintillating soundtrack with carefully honed, cutting lyrics, and destroyed us.  Sheff has done so for years in the primarily guitar-driven Okkervil River, but the new machined-sounds mesh perfectly with the word-alliterati on these basement-tapes.  There are few in music writing lyrics as incisive as Sheff’s (only John Darnielle, John K. Samson, Conor Oberst (say what you will, haters), and Leonard Cohen immediately come to mind).  Anyone writing lyrics as stirring and penetrating as the following deserves your undivided attention: “A pictorial of you alone in your room, fighting off suicide furiously, with the Astronettes bootleg and a bent-back spoon,” and “A lie for a single pageview[Lefort–don’t we know], courtesy of the assailant-who-loves-you,” and “So punch the day in the face and charge through a haze of gorse [Lefort-nice gisduise], behind you, your own mother’s living ghost tears her hair out.”  Pick out your own favorites below.  We can’t wait to hear more from Sheff and Lovestreams.   Listen to this great song below and can go HERE to download your own copy.

Shock Corridor

A life lifted off a news page.
A pictorial of you alone in your room, fighting off suicide furiously, with the Astronettes bootleg and a bent-back spoon.
A bus tour through drab poverty.
I came over and you offered me the guest room.
A lie for a single pageview, courtesy of the assailant-who-loves-you.
Advice for the heartsick clergyman.
The snake in the grass and the ghost at the feast, the jack of all asses and the last of the least are all flown, first-class, to the team retreat.
The inventor of anger.
The perfector of being distracted when someone is talking to you, but just slightly – super slightly.
She said, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were – you can’t look away from the Shock Corridor.”
So punch the day in the face and charge through a haze of gorse.
Behind you, your own mother’s living ghost tears her hair out.
It’s freedom – don’t you want it?
A light haze of rain dark-flecks the grey slate.
The actor can’t escape from his cold oval.
Blazed-out hours, rolling, cold and (relatively) sober, as she says, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were – you can’t get away from the Shock Corridor.”
When there was nothing left to talk about, we talked specifically about a white-hot penny plunging through the concrete and hissing into that buried river.
Or cutting into the earth’s red-hot sobbing heart.
And I’m sorry I was a shit.
I didn’t know why I was doing it.
I’m not needed, and why would you really want to hear my voice even?
I’m the light from a star that deserved to implode, and did, six million years ago.
I’m the Orange Crush can, crumpled in the woods, when the kid who tossed it is going through his third divorce.
I used to lie back in my teenage bed and feel love – so much heart-busting love, just this surge of love for everything, everything, everything…
Now I lie on the couch with my brains bashed out and my tools and my toys all lying around, and I wish I could feel that way about really anything, anything, anything, anything…
Still, she says, “I don’t care who you are and don’t care what you were.
You can’t get away from the Shock Corridor.”