In a bit of a drunken haze one evening last year, I was hanging out with a friend of mine from my university. We had been staring intently at the visualizations on our media players for a good hour, probably a good deal more engrossed in the experience than our level of sobriety indicated. All of a sudden, my friend remarked, “This song sounds like a cat.” This was the beginning of a strange and wonderful system of musical classification.

The song (admittedly I have no memory of what the song itself was) did not sound like a cat in a normal sense. There were no meows, no yowls or hisses. No, it reminded us of what a cat meant in a holistic, vaguely emotional sense: fickle, feminine, and slightly aloof. We immediately identified a host of other categories. By the end of our binge, we had a codified, solid system of animal-music comparisons. Dogs, cats, mice, frogs, snakes, and birds formed the backbone of our system. It was a fleeting inside joke, but it allowed me to reflect upon the transcendent power of metamorphosis in literature, culture, and especially music. Acknowledging an animalistic interpretation of art is an intriguing path to travel down, considering that art is supposed to be one of those things that separates us from the cruel and callous natural world. Much of our modern existence revolves around distancing ourselves from nature, building up walls of brick and concrete. Nature is to be confined to small spaces on sidewalks and boulevards. But somewhere in the deep black of the subconscious instinct, the animal calls to us. From Ovid to Kafka; the innate primal urgency of the man-to-beast trope is unavoidable.

Okkervil River’s Black Sheep Boy is a multifaceted jewel of a record, one that appeals to me not only on the basis of its dark and brooding folk influence or the quivering emotional fragility of frontman Will Sheff’s voice, but also on the metaphorical power of the images drawn throughout the album. This figure of a black sheep boy, not original to Sheff but admitted by him to have come from the Tim Hardin song of the same name, is quite literally a cross between man and sheep. I was charmed by this tortured protagonist. The pain of isolation, the furious and oddly powerless rage against the emptiness of unrequited love, and the quiet desperation with which the eponymous hero trudges through his dimly lit existence was both heart-wrenching and uplifting.

No song on the album conveyed this odd paradox more than “So Come Back, I’m Waiting,” a nine-minute climax to the crescendo of the album. In this space, Sheff packs a full transformation; a transcendent change from black sheep boy to black sheep man. “A black sheep boy grows horns, breathing smoke through his microphone,” Sheff cries, conjuring up the image (also drawn eloquently by the nearly-identically-named album cover artist Will Schaff) of a social pariah, doomed by his own fantastical appearance and the agony of his situation to be cut off from all others, doomed to be alone. The one good thing in his life is a woman who loves another, a stone who does not love her back.

Throughout the album, the dynamic of the black sheep boy, the woman, and the stone is drawn in a perverse triangle, with no true connections being made. She loves the stone, but the stone is using her. The black sheep boy lusts after her, setting her above all others as a queen. Slowly, it drives the black sheep boy mad, resulting in obsession and violence. Sheff shows us this degradation of humanity, this descent into animal madness with images of the black sheep boy embracing his animal nature, maturing into a full metamorphosis. “He lifts his head, handsome, horned, magisterial,” Sheff calls out, his voice nearly to the breaking point. The black sheep boy has grown, filling out his fleece. Sheff’s voice does break in later in the song, as he screams, “I am waiting on hoof and on hand, I am waiting all hated and damned. I am waiting—I snort and I stamp.” He is ready to truly become one with his nature, to wait calmly for his lamb to return to him. He finds peace in the acceptance of his nature, rather than fighting against it as he does throughout the rest of the album. Clinging desperately to his humanity only resulted in confusion and heartache, pacing feverishly for a woman who does not love him to come to her senses and run away with him into the grey woods. Now, however, as a black sheep man, a towering mythical statue, he has reached his metaphysical peak. He is man the animal, consumed by the primordial sludge of the bestial mind. There is perfection in the simplicity, the totality of this transition. I cannot help but be transfixed by this gem of an album, of a song, of, most importantly, a story. Neither, hopefully, will you.

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