Play that cover song again

There is something perverse and wonderful about opening a record by holding a funeral for the band that made it. “Okkervil River R.I.P.” is the first track on Away (ATO, 2016), and Will Sheff spends its seven minutes burying the project whose name is on the sleeve — gently, unhurriedly, and with the strange lightness that arrives only once you have stopped pretending a thing can be saved.

The record grew out of the years after The Silver Gymnasium, a stretch Sheff has described as a confusing time of transition in his personal and professional life. The band that had made the previous records drifted apart; his grandfather died. Rather than assemble a replacement and carry on under the old banner, Sheff started, in his telling, in an empty room, and thought carefully about what from the previous life was worth carrying back in. Very little was. What he brought instead were strangers — Marissa Nadler, Jonathan Meiburg, members of the chamber ensemble yMusic — and the result sounds less like a rock band than a wake with good musicians in attendance.

The song moves the way grief actually moves, which is to say sideways. It opens on tenderness — “Hey, my little baby / Pointing at the sky’s amazing” — then wanders into a roll call of the dead and a flat, devastating verdict: “It was a big waste / Brother, such a big waste.” The strings and horns never resolve into a chorus; they just keep unspooling, patient as weather. And then, near the end, the narrator goes to the skating rink alone, watches the children circling in the glittering air, and asks the band to play that cover song again. It is the smallest possible request, and it is the whole point. After the eulogy, after the accounting, what you want is not transcendence but one more turn around the rink to something familiar.

Sheff took the conceit all the way into the video, which he wrote and directed himself: Tim Blake Nelson as a firebrand priest delivering the eulogy while Sheff, dead and still singing, buries himself in a country cemetery. It should be unbearably arch. It isn’t. It plays as a man doing the necessary work of letting go, and then — because the singing never actually stops — quietly getting on with it anyway.