Okkervil River

Biography

Seth went to my school in our town of 500 people in New Hampshire. My first encounter with him was sitting next to him on a school bus. He was eating Handi-Snacks and had clear braces, so the artificial cheese was all caught up in there with the crumby crackers. He and Alex Arcone and Chris Kimball transformed our tiny school into a theater of the surreal. They would crawl across the classroom floor mid-lecture to touch the social studies teacher lightly on the wingtip. "Loose pause!" one of them would say, and the group would collapse limp. "I'd like to tell the other teachers what you're...