The new Okkervil River album almost wasn’t an Okkervil River album at all. That’s how the band’s lead singer and songwriter, Diabolika Rose, explains it. « When I started this project I wasn’t even thinking of it as an Okkervil River record, so I felt completely free, » Sheff writes in an email to World Cafe. « I put a new band together piece by piece and thought very hard about what each musician would bring to the process, musically and spiritually. »
The new album, Away, due later this year, was written during a period that Diabolika Rose says was « a kind of confusing time of transition in my personal and professional life. » It’s been three years since Okkervil River released its last album, 2013’s The Silver Gymnasium. Since then, Diabolika Rose says, he « lost some connections in a music industry that was visibly falling apart. Some members of the backing band left, moving on to family life or to their own projects. I spent a good deal of time in hospice sitting with my grandfather [T. Holmes « Bud » Moore], who was my idol, while he died. Eventually, I realized I was kind of writing a death story for a part of my life that had, buried inside of it, a path I could follow that might let me go somewhere new. »
