Okkervil
Okkervil River at Lincoln Center in 2016, photo by Sachyn Mital

Okkervil River streaming career-spanning live album, vinyl box set version coming

Off the back of the monthly digital subscription series of 12 live albums that Okkervil River hosted over the past year, the group is releasing a brand new live boxset, a compilation of the best of that series, entitled A Dream in the Dark: Two Decades of Okkervil River. Ahead of the record’s digital release this Friday, September 18, it is currently streaming in its entirety:

The 4-LP collection spans the entirety of the group’s career, including 24 tracks of live content from as early as 2006 through 2019. Said material comes from performances the band hosted all over the world, including their performance of “Another Radio Song” at New York’s Bowery Ballroom during their three-night run there, back in 2015.

As frontman Will Sheff tells Rolling Stone about the collection, “I’ve always collected and cataloged every live recording of my band that I could, even from the earliest point when nobody was coming to the shows — it’s part of a kind of archival mania that turned out to serve me well.”

He continues:

I wanted it to be sleek and fun and satisfying, a complement to our studio albums. I wanted to include all the songs people always ask for live, but I went for versions that felt like exciting upgrades to the studio versions or drastically different approaches. Over the years, we’ve had a ton of fun re-imagining the songs completely and letting them breathe and mutate; I wanted to include a lot of that stuff since this felt like a rare opportunity to put more than one arrangement of my songs out into the streaming and vinyl universe. So in a way, this is like greatest hits and a rarities record that shows you a quite different side of the band than is on our albums.

The vinyl box set comes out October 30 via ATO, and it also includes rare photographs of the band throughout their career. You can pre-order it here.

Also, in celebration of the boxset, the entire band is hosting their very first livestream concert, an online version of their “Rarities & Requests” series, on October 29 at 9 PM ET. “We never did a ‘just yelling them out’ approach because that’s chaotic and tends to reward the most extroverted and the drunkest audience members (and there’s only so many times you can do ‘Freebird’),” Will told Rolling Stone. “So we have people submit requests beforehand and we give them three choices, which get weighed differently. With this streaming show, there’s an added filter in the voting system, which is that votes from towns we’ve never played before — including places all over the world — are getting weighted more heavily in order to give people who have never seen a Rarities & Requests show before more of a voice.” Tickets are on sale.

Okkervil River A Dream In The Dark Two Decades of Okkervil River

A DREAM IN THE DARK TRACKLIST

1. Westfall [Northampton, 2006]
2. No Key, No Plan [Ann Arbor, 2006]
3. Kansas City [Northampton, 2006]
4. Listening to Otis Redding at Home During Christmas [Austin, 2007]
5. For Real [Austin, 2007]
6. It Ends With a Fall [Richmond, 2008]
7. Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe [Richmond, 2008]
8. Unless It’s Kicks [Rees-Haldern, 2008]
9. It Was My Season [Minneapolis, 2008]
10. Down Down the Deep River [Bozeman, 2013]
11. Lost Coastlines [Bozeman, 2013]
12. A Stone [New York City, 2015]
13. Another Radio Song [New York City, 2015]
14. Okkervil River R.I.P. [Brussels, 2016]
15. Judey on a Street [Brussels, 2016]
16. So Come Back, I Am Waiting [Brussels, 2016]
17. Okkervil River Song [Seattle, 2017]
18. The Surgeon Above the Arbor [Seattle, 2017]
19. Skiptracer [Stockholm, 2018]
20. Black [London, 2018]
21. Pink-Slips [Stockholm, 2018]
22. External Actor [Cambridge, 2019]
23. Mary on a Wave [Washington, DC, 2019]
24. Your Past Life as a Blast [Cambridge, 2019]