#365songs (34 / 365)

I got into Okkervil River with Black Sheep Boy, which will probably come up again sometime this year, and eventually worked my way back through their first couple albums. This one, Don't Fall In Love With Everyone You Meet, is kind of rough. Lead singer Will Sheff's singing is pitchy in places, and the whole thing feels a bit ramshackle. One song features Daniel Johnston, outsider artist and exemplar of ramshackle-sounding music. But "Westfall" is pretty fully formed, with a catchy melody and an equally catchy mandolin counter-melody, a stab of some kind of feedback or something at precisely the right moment, and a proper rock'n'roll outro.

It's a murder ballad, in a way, which is not a category of song I really have any interest in, but it's kind of a first-person anthropological character study too, which makes it intriguing. It's loosely based on actual events, but not in any way that really matters, and the "story" of the song is nearly nonexistent, and we learn precious little about the character Sheff's inhabiting or why he would commit murder. It's all in keeping with the last verse — the crux of the song — which has the singer/"protagonist"/murderer looking at people scrutinizing him, "looking for evil, thinking they can trace it" only to conclude that "evil don't look like anything." As the worst bedtime storyteller in the world would say: The end! No moral.

Or, if there is a moral, it's for artists who'd write a song like this one, not for the characters inside it. In an interview 14 years after "Westfall" was released, Will Sheff spoke about the progression that led him to drop it from Okkervil River's live set:

We have this song, 'Westfall,' from our first album, that was about this awful series of murders, the Austin Yogurt Murders. The song was this attempt to project myself into what kind of person does something like that. In a non-judgement way, almost like, ‘Let me see how you can get there in your mind.’ And we started to play it live, and the more we played it, the more it would get rocked out, and we turned it into this anthemic thing. In my mind, I was doing this Johnny Cash let’s-let-people-feel-this-uncomfortable-feeling of rocking out to something that’s creepy. What happened was we started getting these crazy cheers for it, dudes screaming, ‘Play the song about killing the chicks!’ So, we don’t play the song anymore. [...] I tapped a thing I didn’t mean to tap, and it was immediately frightening ... There’s something about laying bare the ugly truth, and it can be healing, and it often is, but sometimes you lay bare the ugly truth and people are like, 'Yes! Let’s be ugly! Let’s be truthful and ugly!'