There Was Something Wrong With Me

Okkervil River “Famous Tracheotomies”

I think it’s a human impulse to look for commonalities between ourselves and other people, especially people we don’t really know. I’m very aware of every celebrity born in the same year as myself – Claire Danes, Aaliyah, Chris Pratt, Robyn, Heath Ledger, Aaron Paul, Jennifer Love-Hewitt, Vincent Kartheiser, Norah Jones, Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish – and of people who grew up in the Hudson Valley, and celebrities who are Leos, and anyone who was blogging in the early to mid ’00s. In “Famous Tracheotomies,” Will Sheff focuses on other celebrities who had tracheotomies when they were infants. It’s like he’s trying to make sense of this formative trauma, and figure out whether there’s more to this connection than just happenstance. That’s what this impulse really is, right? Trying to make sense of something that’s ultimately quite random. He’s looking at Gary Coleman, Dylan Thomas, Mary Wells, and Ray Davies and trying to figure out whether this life-or-death ordeal was as meaningful to them as it was to him.

Sheff’s lyrics are direct and plainspoken, and his voice is fragile but not melodramatic. There’s an immediate intimacy to this song, like you’re just there with him as he’s telling you something incredibly personal and it just happens to be set to music. The song gets a bit more groovy and gathers momentum, but the tone remains conversational up to the point it drifts off from Ray Davies’ story into quoting The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset.” I think that move could be cheap in some cases, but here it’s quite beautiful. It’s a moment where it doesn’t matter if there’s truly some greater significance to this random connection, it only matters that Sheff is finding inspiration in it.

Buy it from Bandcamp.