This is my favourite Okkervil River song, indeed, one of my fav songs full stop. From the Black Sheep Boy Appendix album (the same sessions as 2005's Black Sheep Boy, their best album imo), 'No Key, No Plan' sees Will Sheff at his impassioned best. He uses his gift for narrative to imbue his characters with vital relevance full of implication as to how to live our humble everyday lives. In this case Sheff uses the persona of a destuctive criminal hell bent on "crash land(ing)", to represent the adrenalin of living for the moment. Of carpe diem. "Back on the road again, with maybe 13 grand", the song then flips to "a rich young sophisticate", who, like Sheff, is "doing what I really like, and getting paid for it". These worldly pleasures are elevated and justified in the song's transcendent finale where Sheff screams with that cracked voice, of how "There is only now", no hell, thus no use in inhibition or morality: "just breathe it in."
This song always gives me comfort when I think of the essential senselessness of what we are doing, why we are here. Existing. It is so urgent, compelling a listener, if not to go out and pull a heist like the character in the song, at least to go out and truly live. This is your only chance.
Sheff seems to revel in this lack of a higher meaning. And obviously the song is very meta, (as with all Okkervil River). It's a song about itself, about being in a band, the rock and roll myth, and making art for art's sake. At once cerebral and fiercely visceral, Sheff transmutes the futility of life in a post religious age into something glorious, through an exaltation of hedonistic excess.
I don't know how much hard living Sheff does- he's always a couple of steps removed from his characters- but he sure has put a cogent and passionately argued case for going out and getting wasted. Or at least doing what you want.
Conspiracy theory or not, today will be a day to remember. The day Obama declared Osama no more.
It made me think of an Okkervil River song which quite beautifully captures the "what were you doing when" moment that events like these inevitably produce. So out of the blue and seemingly portentous, yet ultimately, just one insignificant life.
What Will Sheff, songwriter for Okkervil River, does brilliantly in "The Presidents Dead", is to capture the microcosm in an event of magnitude (the macrocosm). The songs narrative zones out from the present to the narrator's future self looking back on this day in "lets say 30 years" on, noting accurately and beautifully what the human memory really records: sensory experience. No lumbering political message or diatribe; just the "eggs on the plate and the bacon hissin' ", with "spring on the wind." It's the sights and smells that really shape our experience and how an event is recorded in our minds. And it is events like these that, I feel, give our lives shape, or at least the semblance of it.
I mean, who didn't flinch today with the 'news' that it was nearly 10 years since 9/11. Ten years..... God! So regardless of their political significance, or lack of, these events serve as kind of pesonal bookends and landmarks. As, indeed, do songs. So in a way its a kind of meta-song; a song about itself.
There is also the unexpected empathy for the individual; the man, not the president. The life lost no matter how misspent that life was. "The early obits say he was a good man, and you cant argue with that, not today you cant." This is where todays events aren't obviously relevant, (who can label, from a western perspective at least, Bin Laden "a good man"!), but nevertheless, a man he was. I think Sheff was envisioning a presdent like Bush or Nixon being assasinated, and these sentiments are spot on. It takes a cold hearted person to rejoice at another humans death.
Anyway its a fantastic song, and its worth checking out the lyrics too. See it performed live along with "Black", probably their most accesible song, in quite shambolic footage here.
