Will Sheff had a cozy upbringing in Meriden. His parents were both teachers at Kimball Union Academy, the prep school at the heart of the village, and Sheff had the run of the campus, then was a student there.
When he moved away, though, he struggled. St. Paul, Minn., where Macalester College is situated, was a big place to negotiate after Meriden.
While he didn’t return to the Upper Valley, Sheff did seek solace in the company of his social circle from KUA. He talked one friend, Seth Warren, into moving to Austin, Texas, where another friend, Zach Thomas, was living, and the three of them formed a band, Okkervil River.
That was around 25 years ago, and the band has been through many permutations since then. Thomas and Warren, now known as Warren-Crow, left to start families and get steadier jobs.
Sheff, who now lives in Los Angeles, still thinks of the Upper Valley as home. On Friday, he’s bringing a bunch of his high school friends and former bandmates back together for a benefit concert at Whaleback.
“It really is kind of a homecoming for a lot of us, and an opportunity to play in this landscape that inspired us,” Sheff said in a phone interview.
Warren-Crow and Thomas will join Sheff, as will other musicians they played with at KUA, including Lise Micheline (Lise Johnson during her school days), Alex Arcone and Christopher Kimball. Shamus Good, a Hanover native and fan of Okkervil River who learned later on of the band’s local roots, will join on guitar. Western Terrestrials, the Vermont-based country band from outer space, w ill open.
The show is a benefit both for Whaleback, the nonpr ofit ski hill in Enfield, and the Upper Valley Land Trust. Advance tickets have sold out, but there will be tickets available at the gate, as the weather will allow the outdoor show to accommodate more attendees.
“It’s just a lark,” Sheff said of the show. “It’s a way for us to raise as much money as possible” for the two nonprofits, and to pay tribute to the Upper Valley.
The group of friends who played music together in high school were, in the way of all high school things, at once cohesive and competitive. This was in the early 1990s, so they made tapes on four-track recorders.
“Lise made this tape of her own songs and it was so much better than what I was doing,” Sheff said. Rather than try to outdo her, he tried to recruit her. For Friday’s show, at least, he was successful.
A clutch of kids who love music, art and theater can transform the high school experience. Friday’s show will be a chance to revisit that teenage energy, Sheff said.
“Some people are lucky enough to get into a little vortex of that with their friends,” he said.
The show isn’t the first foray Sheff has made into his childhood homeland. Okkervil River’s seventh full-length recording was titled “The Silver Gymnasium,” named for Meriden’s Charles Lewis Silver Memorial Gym. Sheff made a short film in Meriden to accompany the 2013 recording and brought it back for a screening in 2015.
That was his last artistic endeavor in the area. He and his partner, the musician and writer Beth Wawerna, moved from New York to Los Angeles in 2018 for greater creative opportunities. “The pool of musicians is kind of staggering,” Sheff said.
Sheff’s last recording, released in 2022, was his first solo output, and Okkervil River is still on hiatus. Over the past several years, the band had become more of a vehicle for Sheff anyway. Friday’s show does not augur a return, he said.
It’s been enough for Sheff, who’s now 48, to have a career in music. “I’m like a fisherman who subsists on a lot of little fish,” he said. “I don’t mind not having a family or not having security. … I think it’s been a good path for my soul.”
He’s able to visit the Upper Valley, where his younger sister spends time and where he still has many friends from elementary and high school. His parents left KUA and the area for other jobs when Sheff was 19, which helps explain why he was a little lost at the time.
“To me, the Upper Valley is a spiritual home,” he said. “It’s like holy ground to me.”
Welcome back.
For more information about Okkervil River’s show at 5 p.m. on Friday at Whaleback Mountain, go to whaleback.com.
If an artist is bringing to this neighborhood something called “The Illuminated Atramentarium Sympathetic Medicine Show,” chances are it’s at White River Junction’s Main Street Museum.
That’s the case here. On Friday evening, Thomas Little, a self-described alchemist and proprietor of A Rural Pen, talks about the process by which he turns guns into ink. I don’t generally like to quote from artists’ bios, but Little’s is a cut above: “He gathers threads from alchemical imagery, chemical phenomena, and mystic observations to incorporate them into a holistic synthesis theory of art-science-magic. Through operations in the chemical theater, he hopes to encourage excitement and dilate the mind to the wonders of the psyche and the cosmos that reside in the humble inkwell.”
The program starts at 6 p.m., Friday, and before and after David Fairbanks Ford, the museum’s resident gremlin, will operate its player piano, as is his Friday night custom. Admission is by donation, but no one is turned away for lack of funds.
It’s a good thing the Okkervil River show is outdoors. COVID still walks among us.
The bug bit Parish Players last week. Two members of the cast of the Thetford theater company’s production of Sam Shepard’s “Buried Child” came down with the novel coronavirus. As a result, the company had to cancel the final weekend. The performances have been rescheduled for Aug. 30 and 31 and Sept. 1.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
