2008 Music Recap, Day 10-Will Sheff is not a douche bag or maybe
Click to viewMaybe I caught him on a good day, maybe it’s because I indulged his rant about Internet leakers, or maybe the guy just gets a bad rap, but I had a very pleasant chat with Will Sheff. I didn’t bring the best set of questions from the interview, but he was so generous and forthcoming with his answers that it didn’t matter. When I brought up Shannon Wilsey, the ill-fated subject of “Starry Stairs,” Sheff steered the discussion toward artistic self-delusion, of which he said “Believing in yourself sometimes requires fooling yourself. Somebody like Marc Bolan, what people really responded to was his unbelievable cockiness - the sense that he was on par with Beethoven - that he had about himself. Now of course that’s utter bullshit. But if he hadn’t believed it, he wouldn’t have had that cockiness at all, which is his essentially charming feature.” I think that sense of unbelievable cockiness is what makes some people hate Sheff the person-the indulgent, dozens-of-words-per-verse style of Sheff the songwriter probably doesn’t help. But I believe it when he says he cares for the real-life figures (living and non-living) who make their way into his songs. He’s a respectful creator, which, according to what I’ve heard from Sean O’Neal, is more than can be said about Sheff’s time as a chatty video store clerk.
At Lollapalooza, Sheff told Laura Leebove (Venus Zine monopolized his time this summer) that he’d been listening to a lot of old soul records, which got me really excited to see how that seeped into The Stand Ins. I distinctly remember driving down Airport Drive on an early August evening at sunset, listening to the record and thinking, “Come on. Where’s the soul?” Then the first horn hits happened in “Starry Stairs” and I was like “Ah, there’s the soul.” (It was a few days later that I realized the bassline in “Lost Coastlines” was lifted from “Can’t Hurry Love.”)