This article originally appears in the January/February 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.

Despite naming a song on Okkervil River’s recent LP “Don’t Move Back to LA,” Will Sheff turns a page and heads West on a spiritual journey informed by his recent interests in meditation, mystical Christianity and psychedelic micro-dosing.

Will Sheff is driving through the high desert outside of Madrid, N.M., deep into a cross-country road trip that will launch the next chapter of his life. The Okkervil River mastermind is relocating from Woodstock, N.Y. to Los Angeles—a pilgrimage of mental clarity and spiritual renewal that included a visit to his longtime New York City stomping grounds, as well as layovers in Washington, D.C., Chapel Hill, N.C., Louisville, Ky., Nashville, Hot Springs, Ark., Tulsa, Okla., Amarillo, Texas and Santa Fe, N.M.

“My partner finally got a really sweet job, and I’m driving out to meet up with her,” Sheff says of the trek. “I just got back from a five-week tour in Europe, landed in America, cleaned the last remaining stuff out of Woodstock and then hit the road. It’s been a long, slow road trip, and I’ve been taking my time.

“It’s been great,” he adds. “I find myself in a weird position because I have a song called ‘Don’t Move Back to LA.’ And now I’m moving there. But in reality, that’s a character song on some levels. If you listen to what I’m saying about Los Angeles in the first verse, it’s pretty positive. It’s about someone who’s marinating in their New York City misery and doesn’t want their friends to leave for sunnier [LA]. It’s not really as contradictory as you’d think, but I haven’t come up with a snappy way to explain it to people. I’m trying to leave behind my whole New York life bit by bit and go slow. I’m trying to turn a page on something.”

Sheff ’s been turning a lot of pages lately. And his almost-comically expansive car ride feels like a metaphor for his profound personal growth in recent years: Through the use of meditation, mystical Christianity and psychedelic micro-dosing, he’s evolved from drug dependency and disassociation toward a more centered sense of self. That optimism radiates throughout the grand arrangements of his ninth LP, the colorful In the Rainbow Rain—from the Bruce Springsteen-ish sax solo and choir on the epic “The Dream and the Light” to the chiming piano and sweetly sighing guitars of “Family Song” and the gleaming New Wave groove of “How It Is.”

“I wanted there to be ear candy throughout,” Sheff says. “I wanted it to feel like the album was giving you a hug. Growing up when I did, a lot of the music that was played in my home was this soft, hazy, radio-friendly, blue-eyed-soul singer-songwriter stuff. That, to me, sounds really warm and fuzzy because I was a little kid being taken care of by my parents when I was hearing music like that.”

Despite its gleaming surfaces, In the Rainbow Rain is still classic Sheff—flaunting his uncanny knack for marrying existential observations with literary detail (like on “Famous Tracheotomies,” in which he connects his own childhood surgical procedure to those of other artists like Mary Wells and Ray Davies). That’s been his M.O. since founding Okkervil River in 1998. But after almost two decades of coming across like the biggest hipster in your post-grad poetry class, he finally decided to embrace his “corny” side—a nakedly sunny exterior—for the sake of spreading positivity. And that mindset arose, somewhat ironically, from darkness—including his disillusion with the record industry and the rise of President Trump.

“Certain people felt there would be a lot of great protest art coming from Trump’s election, but other people take exception to that—it feels a little glib, like it’s cold comfort,” he says. “Like, ‘We got screwed, but we got some good punk-rock out of it.’ My thoughts on the time after the election are bound up in my own personal experiences. Over the last few years, I was heavily interrogating my own reasons for making music. The music business is in complete and total free fall and there are corrupt corporate elements strong-arming everyone. It’s a rotten time for the actual business. In light of all that, I was trying to articulate to myself why it is I make music. I started to get closer to this understanding of trying to make the world prettier and trying to put more beauty in the world. There’s something about beautiful music that can be healing and comforting and restorative and regenerative and kind and empathetic. And when I look back through all my work, even the most dark and aggressive parts of it, it has that goal in mind, no matter how it gets there.

“I also had this desire to only do what I wanted in music,” he continues. “The record we made in 2016, Away, a lot of people think of as a sad record because it’s contemplative and mulling over a lot of things. But I felt it was liberating. At that time, I was letting go of a lot of things I should have let go of. That’s a good thing! Away was getting back to something passionate that’s at the core of who I am as a musician. When I got there, I felt happy and restored to a certain degree. Right around that time is when Trump was coming up. He’s representative of a certain current of hate and intolerance and petulance and shallowness and mindlessness in the world that was rising as I was feeling more deeply engaged, and it was an odd contrast. Like a naïve, privileged white person, I didn’t actually think he was going to win, which is on me. When I woke up and realized that it had happened, there were a million feelings coursing through me. I was trying to think about what it was I wanted to say and what I wanted to hear from art. The message of ‘We’re all fucked, and the world is a garbage fire’ is not what I wanted to say or hear. I tried to think about a way in which this fallen quality we’re experiencing could pave the way toward a renewal.”

Okkervil River performing at Austin’s Historic Scoot In during SXSW 2018 (photo by Mallory Turner)

Sheff crafted In the Rainbow Rain with the same band—guitarist Will Graefe, bassist Benjamin Lazar Davis, keyboardist Sarah Pedinotti and drummer Cully Symington—who accompanied him on the Away tour. And they built on the regenerative momentum of those live dates, working on new material in various bursts. Graefe helped co-write two tracks, fleshing out the Americana-synth anthem “Love Somebody” and crafting the drowsy drum machine ballad “Shelter Song” (which uses unadopted animal shelter dogs to represent Sheff’s own feelings of inadequacy).

“We picked a Ron Wood or Dire Straits thing and then jammed on that chord progression,” Graefe says, detailing the latter track. “Will’s brilliant with words. It’s like this faucet, and when he gets it going, he’s so fluid. It’s incredible to watch. We were working on this song, and he quickly had this full-fledged idea about this dog in a shelter and how it relates to this person growing.”

The tracks piled up as Sheff’s tonal vision crystalized, and his personal maturation—particularly the meditative focus he found from attending Quaker meetings—was crucial in that process.

“I was raised Catholic, and it meant a lot to me as a kid,” he says, reflecting on his spiritual quest. “I had a strong sense of God that felt really intuitive. It didn’t feel like something I’d
been taught; it felt like something I was experiencing. The more that I started to interrogate Catholicism and its attitudes toward sexuality and women—the authoritarian qualities of it—the more I became quite disenchanted. Before that, I entered into an apocalyptic Catholic phase where I thought the world was going to end and my friends were going to hell. That wasn’t something I could support. I couldn’t hold the burden of that any longer. I threw the baby out with the bathwater and said, ‘I’m going to stay an atheist.’ And what I recently started to experience is that I still had this sense of the divine.

“I think the word ‘God’ is a really limiting word because it makes us think of a being,” Sheff continues. “The idea of believing in a giant, invisible being seems completely irrational and stupid and childish. But the idea of the divine is that there’s some mysterious oneness that underlies everything, that there’s a richness and a divinity and a beauty to the present moment, that there’s a little bit of whatever animates me in a hummingbird. [When I stopped believing], it was like the richness had been drained out of my life. I got interested in Buddhism, and it felt like cultural or spiritual tourism to me. It didn’t feel familiar. I started to read more about Gnosticism and I started to understand that there’s a mystical side to Christianity. You don’t have to believe the received wisdom about Christianity the way they want you to believe it. You can have your own understanding of it. I started coming around to the idea that Christianity can be like working out at the gym. It’s something that helps me focus my sense of wonder and empathy and gratitude. When I started going to Quaker meetings, what appealed to me was the lack of bullshit. Silence is a huge part of it. It’s not about people telling you what to believe. It’s about sitting in silence and closing your eyes and just being present with these people. And I wanted to become more disciplined in how I use spirituality. I think it makes me and other people happier, and it makes my work better.”

Sheff, who acknowledges he’s “always had a little bit of an issue with drugs,” has also tried in recent years to readjust his use of psychedelics in a way that illuminates the more creative and compassionate parts of his personality. The vehicle for that change was James Fadiman’s regimented “Microdosing Protocol.”

“I’ve always had a strong tie to the concept of the disassociated consciousness, that Arthur Rimbaud idea that you become an artist by the derangement of the senses,” he says. “My friend has a cabin in Upstate New York in the Catskills, and I do a lot of writing up there. I was up there around the end of the recording of [2013’s] The Silver Gymnasium, and there was a massive snowstorm. I took a huge dose of mushrooms, and it was a life-changing experience. Everything I do now comes from that in a lot of ways. I just have some clarity. So much of it was tied to the idea that I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to do. That sounds really simple, but that was a tormenting thing for me. I really loved that experience and I continued to go out into the woods and take mushrooms. But I got curious about micro-dosing. It’s an attempt to bring these heightened and deepened states of consciousness into my work in a way that’s more healthy and sustainable and real, and not synthetic.”

Sheff structured In the Rainbow Rain with its own internal arc, building from a “mournful and afraid” state to a place of practical sweetness and comfort on “Family Song.” And that ending point is key: Instead of projecting endless angst into the world, he’s focused on a “solution.” “Slowly over the course of the record,” he says, “I try to take these feelings and slowly metabolize them into something that’s a little strengthening and heartening, rather than coming from a place of panic and fear.

“With [2005’s] Black Sheep Boy, there’s an atmosphere of dread and cynicism and fear that was very much influenced by the Bush administration,” he continues. “And if you think about [2011’s] I Am Very Far, that record is influenced by the extinction of the human race—having 10 years to stem the worst consequences of climate change. We’re still in that space, but I just don’t have, from an artistic standpoint, any more cries of dread and terror that I feel like issuing out into the world. With those two albums, I worked through a lot of those feelings. There’s a tremendous opportunity for the transformation of the human soul that people can personally undertake, and I want to be part of the solution by showing people that’s within their grasp, as opposed to running through the streets screaming, ‘The sky is falling!’”

At this point, Sheff enthuses that he’s in a “different phase.” His new California life is still a work in progress, and he’s happy with that freedom. (His next move: a “really, really large, career- spanning live release project” set for 2019.) But Okkervil River’s future, whatever form it takes, will almost certainly carry an aura of kindness.

“I’m not an angry young man in the same way that I was,” he says. “And I’ve exhausted some of my desire to be dark and brooding and scare people and make them feel uncomfortable. I would like to be more of a helpful person at this point in my life, and the music has started to reflect that too.”

This article originally appears in the January/February 2019 issue of Relix. For more features, interviews, album reviews and more, subscribe here.