Okkervil River – Down the River of Golden Dreams

Once upon a time there was man who went by the name of Will Sheff. He lived in a dingy, depressing shack in mid-America somewhere between Neutral Milksville and Bright Eyes Creek. Because he had a Mr. Twit style beard and pungent body odour, neither of these local towns would let him live within their boundaries, so he created his own homestead on the banks of the Okkervil River. He invited his buddies to come and stay with him and together they decided to make music.

This was not the everyday music of the era however. They made music that wasn’t quite country, wasn’t quite rock and wasn’t quite folk. Sadly not many people wanted to listen to the dark, dirgy, folky concoction and Will and the band went largely unappreciated. This state of affairs remained unaltered for many years.

Until one day the Evil Witch of Dirge looked into her mirror. ‘Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the dirgiest of them all?’

‘I’m not quite sure,’ said the mirror, ‘It’s a toss up between you and that band near Okkervil River.’
The witch went a strange green colour and roared ‘I am PJ Harvey, the Evil witch of Dirge, and nobody produces a worse dirge than me!’

She gave their album ‘Down the River of Broken Dreams’ a listen and found that it was nowhere near as dirgy as her Godforsaken output. Some of the songs were indeed dark, but actually had a level of interest and melody that was always missing from her own terrible output. In fact ‘The Velocity of Saul at the Time of his Conversion’ was an absolute cracker, so there was no contest really.

The evil old bag PJ Harvey smashed the mirror to smithereens for his mistake and cackled, ‘No-one on this planet can produce the boring, dirge-fest of an excuse for music and still sell records like I can! Sorry Will Sheff, but you are not in my league so I will let you live. Mwooaaahahahahaha!’ And that’s exactly what happened. The end.