OKKERVIL RIVER

Black Sheep Boy Appendix

Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy Appendix is not just a companion piece to their critically-acclaimed 2005 release; it’s also a condensed, alter-
nate vision of that record’s imagery and themes, with the ultimate intent to exhaust and destroy both. This ambitious mini-album rounds up
and reworks the band’s favorite unfinished songs (tracked for the Black Sheep Boy full-length) and then punctuates and bookends them in
brand-new compositions; in the process, it shows songwriter Will Sheff and company both revisiting themes from their past and shooting off
in some startling new directions. “Missing Children” entombs an unnerving fairy tale monologue in an arrangement that recalls The Marble
Index or Tilt; its melody is reprised twenty minutes later in a frenetic and jangly rocker that might have been hatched from the side of Love’s
“A House is Not a Motel.” In between is everything else; suffocatingly lush string instrumentals, skittering found sounds, lean rockers, deafen-
ing epics, the rhythm section interrogating the lead singer, and “Black Sheep Boy #4,” which messily dispatches the Black Sheep Boy character
in a lurid crime scene high on a plateau of hallucinatory, cinematic folk.

Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy is one of 2005’s best-reviewed albums. Writing in the New York Times, Kelefa Sanneh noted that “Will
Sheff, leader of the Austin indie-rock band Okkervil River, writes like a novelist. His songs are full of elegant phrases and unexpected images
that tell—or don’t quite tell—stories of characters trying to figure out if they need each other…The marvelous new Okkervil River album
Black Sheep Boy should advance his cult further.” The Chicago Tribune’s Allison Steward added that “Wordy and dense, prone to murder bal-
lads, full of soft strings and Wurlitzers, [Black Sheep Boy] manages to be both violent and bookish; it’s a striking, woebegone work that offers
up its charms slowly…The album winds down with the nine minutes-long “So Come Back, I Am Waiting,” one of many Okkervil River songs
that plays out like the strangest Cocteau movie you’ve probably never seen,” and Stephen Deusner wrote in Pitchfork that “Sheff never over-
plays his hand and always maintains control, which…makes him at once heartbreaking and somewhat humorous—more self-aware than
Conor Oberst, more serious than Colin Meloy, more legible than Jeff Mangum.”

This Appendix is Okkervil River’s most adventurous and eccentric work so far. Working deliriously long hours with Black Sheep Boy collabo-
rator Brian Beattie, Okkervil River recorded Black Sheep Boy Appendix entirely on spare days and weeks off from their recent tours with the
Decemberists, Rilo Kiley, and Earlimart, holding to a self-imposed schedule that left no room for second guessing any decisions. Instead of
choosing to keep things simple, though, the band took the opposite approach, trying out any and all production ideas without any time to
second-guess them. The resulting work shows the full freedom and playfulness of a band working too fast to wonder and what they’re doing
and having too much fun to care. Black Sheep Boy Appendix is a wild, sloppy 35-minute rip through a fantastical Technicolor landscape that’s
crumbling into pieces as it unreels, a last footnote on a strange and dangerous universe before the band departs for points as yet distant
and unknown.

Missing Children • A Garden • No Key, No Plan • Black Sheep Boy #4 • Another Radio Song • A Forest •

Last Love Song for Now

Selling Points:

1. Okkervil River is Jagjaguwar’s highest selling and hardest working band.

2. This EP is the companion piece to their best seller Black Sheep Boy, released in April 2005.

3. Headlining tour in the USA and Europe will commence this fall. Past tours with the Decemberists, Rilo Kiley, Azure Ray, John
Vanderslice, Swearing at Motorists have earned Okkervil River the reputation of being a killer live band.

4. Extensive domestic and foreign publicity and extensive domestic college radio promotion builds on the already numerous accolades
that their previous work has garnered.

Okkervil River “Black Sheep Boy Appendix”

on JAGJAGUWAR, catalog no: JAG089

Release date: November 22, 2005

Format: CDEP and 12” (VINYL NON-RETURNABLE)

List: $10.98

CD BOX LOT: 25 units

LP BOX LOT: 45 units

CD UPC: 656605208923

LP UPC: 656605208916

[phone] • www.jagjaguwar.com • [e-mail]

6

56605 20891

6

6

56605 20892

3