Okkervil River have seemingly come from nowhere in 2005 to release one of the records with their third album Black Sheep Boy. All of a sudden, William Sheff’s band are in high demand, with great press and a suddenly devoted following.

“Sometimes if you get a good thing going,” he reckons, “and you’re working on this thing, you can really work something over. We don’t try to reinvent the wheel with every record, but at the same time I think this record is subtly and markedly different to the last one. It just does some things that we’ve been wanting to do for a while, and I think it does them more successfully than we’ve ever been able to do before.

What was it that you wanted to do differently?

“I think mainly we felt like some of our records in the past have been a little bit too slick and little too finished,” Williams says, “and this one is a little bit more raw, and a little bit more off the cuff. I think that it’s an interesting thing to go from…typically the progression for an artist is that their early albums are the ones that are raw and then later on they get a little bit more staid, and for me it was an interesting idea to make a record that was a little bit more less composed.”

There’s no doubt that a lot of that rawness comes through primarily in Sheff’s vocal performance – it’s a very emotive one, full of nuance and differing shades.

“Believe it or not, my vocals are probably stronger on this record than on the past records!” William utters with a chuckle. “I don’t really think about it too much, but it’s just the way that I sing. In my mind I can’t separate what singers are emotional and what singers are reserved from the way that I feel it when I’m singing it. I find that if I try to sing it one way or that way [reserved vs. emotional] I find that I feel that the performance is too mannered, so I really try to focus on what I’m spontaneously feeling when the mic is in front of my face.”

Part of the stunning appeal of Black Sheep Boy lies in the lyrics – they appear to be more about telling stories rather than simply singing a song; Coldplay this is not.

“I’m trying to write songs but I have a tendency to want to figure out who the character is in a song,” he says humbly and by way of explanation of how intricate his lyrics can be, “and where these lyrics are coming from, and that leads me to thinking about who they are, and what’s happened to this character, and what they want, and that leads to a sort of a story that happens in a song, and who it’s happening to and why that matters. So to me it’s not so much telling a story as I feel like the characters in a song should be really rich, and it’s just something I’ve really responded to in a song in knowing who these people are and feeling a certain level of compassion for them.”

Black Sheep Boy opens with a cover of the Tim Hardin song of the same name. Whilst Hardin’s version is directly about Tim Hardin, as he wrote that song when he went back to Eugene, Oregon after living in New York City and having increased his heroin addiction to the toxic levels that would eventually lead to his non-productive musical career and eventual death, with Scheff singing it it becomes the jumping off point for the rest of the album, and the direction of the story of the half-sheep half-boy Black Sheep Boy.

“I really like the idea of taking this character of ‘Tim Hardin’ and taking it into the idea of a literal creature of a sheep-child, and that was interesting to me in the James Dickie poem is in there as well I guess, and taking it into this more raw psychedelic thing rather than just a song about Will Sheff, because to me those songs are sort of boring. I don’t see why anyone would be interested in Will Sheff – I like to take the idea of songs about characters rather than about me.”

Everything about Black Sheep Boy is very composed – from the artwork by regular Okkervil River contributor William Schaff to Sheff’s lyrics and the intricate music, it’s patent that a lot of thought gone into the making of the record.

“It was very much planned out,” Scheff agrees, “but not in too compulsive of a way. I can be an obsessive-compulsive planner, but I felt that if we planned it out too much it might be a little too pat, it might be a little bit too ‘clever’ or coy, so I just wanted to plan it and make it all tie in but still leave the ‘X’ factor and the mystery in there, and even a mystery to me, so that’s why I didn’t try to hard to have a story arc and really define who the Black Sheep Boy is. I really wanted to leave the mystery in that element of it. I knew we had certain images that we wanted to use, we had certain language we wanted to use, and imagery in the artwork, and I wanted it all to be united – even down to the video. The whole thing was conceived as a whole project.”

Okkervil River have been so busy this year that Sheff is now just trying to live his life, otherwise he won’t have anything to write about for the next album. Whilst he admits that he would love to write a really happy record, he doesn’t feel particularly carefree so needs to have the opportunity to feel inspired to write a new record. He’s one of those artists who doesn’t want to force anything – there’s too much rudimentary art out there, and it’s clear that when he makes something he wants it to be something special. If it can be as beautifully crafted as Black Sheep Boy (which came two years after sophomore album Down the River of Golden Dreams), the world will be a better place for it.

Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy is out now, with the band planning to tour Australia in December.