Will Sheff shares his thoughts on the new Okkervil River video for Your Past Life As A Blast.

“When I was writing the lyrics for I Am Very Far  I kept fixating on the idea of being new, specifically memories of being very little and being conscious of the fact that I was a new person, that I hadn’t existed before. I kept thinking about the way the brain works when it’s not trying overly hard to put ideas or thoughts in order, either because it’s new or maybe because it’s dreaming or maybe because it’s been disarranged in some way.

The lyrics to “Your Past Life as a Blast” deal with a lot of different things and in a kind of disarranged way, but it felt to me like it was the sweetest moment on the record, a moment of nostalgia and tenderness and sunnyness. When I was writing the lyrics, certain images flashed in my head, and some of those images were specifically from my childhood, or of the way I remember earliest childhood feeling to me.

Like many kids of the late 70s and early 80s, my dad was often hovering around with a Super 8 camera, filming my mom and me and – as time passed – my younger brother and sister. I remember him projecting these movies on a bare wall and, eventually, the movies becoming as much a part of my memory as the original events he had filmed. I thought it would be cool to use actual footage of those memories in the video itself, to make a really personal kind of rock video.

For the “Your Past Life as a Blast” video, I worked with the editor Alan Del Río Ortíz to turn my dad’s home movies into a short condensed film of someone’s childhood, a little home-movie music video, about moms and dads and kids, and how it felt.”