Sometimes it seems that artists really are on the verge of breaking through from the indie rock ghettos into something more substantial and potentially massive. So it would seem for Okkervil River. After releasing one of the finest albums of 2005 with Black Sheep Boy, the group – fronted by the literate, bespectacled troubadour Will Scheff – have followed it up with the instantly charming The Stage Names, an album that takes his masterful songs to a new level, adding nuances in sound and feel.

Where Black Sheep Boy was fairly intuitive in feel, with the group not playing the songs over and over before recording them, The Stage Names had a very different gestation, with Scheff guiding his band mates through the songs numerous times to get them – œjust right’ prior to recording them. However, the fact that the band had – at the time – recently inked a deal with EMI in Europe had little to do with the way the band recorded The Stage Names. Indeed, the band have already parted ways with the major.

“We were dropped,” he says succinctly. “EMI passed on the record – they didn’t want to put it out. We weren’t even on a major label for a year. In hindsight I don’t really give a shit – I look back at the job they did [when they distributed Black Sheep Boy and I don’t think they did a very good job with it. It feels good not to be on a major label.”

Will says in comparison with the recording of the songs for Black Sheep Boy the making of The Stage Names was far more linear and less intuitive. “When we recorded Black Sheep Boy we didn’t really rehearse the songs at all,” he explains. “We wanted there to be a raw quality to them, and in fact some songs that we played on that album we’d never rehearsed at all because we wanted them to have a sloppy, rough quality. But with The Stage Names it was the other way around – we wanted it to sound really different. We went in and rehearsed the songs for a month straight, every single day, just sitting in the studio and making the arrangements as sleek as we could possibly get them.”

Nevertheless, like all Okkervil River albums there’s a beating heart at the centre of The Stage Names, with Scheff’s poeticisms coming to the fore, particularly on tracks like The Plus Ones, where the line “What’s new pussycat is that you were once a lion…they cut your claws out” detailing his fine attention to detail.

“We wanted to make a record that was different,” he says of the different technique to come up with a final product. “I knew for this record I wanted it to accent the classic pop that we like, whether it’s Bowie or whether it’s Motown or whether it’s Bo Diddley or whether it’s the Stones or whatever – I wanted it to have that sound that sounds like fun pop music to me.”

The most startling moment comes on final track, where the drums subtly shift into a different time signature, and the track becomes an interpretation of Sloop John B, a song that Okkervil River have been covering in their live shows for some time now.

“I don’t think of that as a 1960s song, but I think of it as a folk song that happened to be covered by the Beach Boys,” he says of the track, which is a West Indies folk song, and has been covered a myriad of times since it was originally initially recorded by the Weavers in the 1920s.

“It’s a version that I love,” he says of the most famous interpretation of it by the Beach Boys, “but it was more that that song had something to do with the song that I was writing, and so it just popped up and said – œmind if I come into this song’, so the song introduced itself to the other song.”

Where Black Sheep Boy had a central concept based around the title track, an original song penned by `60s folk troubadour Tim Hardin, The Stage Names is more subtle in its approach to being conceptual. “I wanted it to be more something that flavours every little aspect of it,” Will says of the new album, “and not something that is the main course, so to speak.

“I just continue to be interested in that,” he says of making albums with a central focus that perhaps is inspired by other’s songs, but interprets it individually and uses it as a jumping off point for its own focus. “I like how back in the old days of folk music you could – œsteal’ someone else’s song or absorb a part of someone else’s song and stick it in your own song. Songs seemed to be something that was floating around in the ether and you could take them and re-purpose them, and that’s a very populist idea and a very artistically interesting idea, and it’s both post-modernist and post-folklorist, and I really enjoy it.”

This is a perfect indication of how Scheff operates as a musician – he’s not your normal, workaday songwriter but instead has his own approach. It’s what makes Okkervil River such an interesting group who operate outside the boundaries of how most other groups do, and helps make each of their releases so intriguing.

“I think maybe some people write lyrics before music or music before lyrics,” he says, but his own song writing approach is completely different: “I write them at the same time. Some people work on a groove with a band first and then write a melody to go over it but I come in with a song that’s already written. It’s like asking – œdo other people have sex like you’ – I don’t know, I haven’t seem them!”

Okkervil River’s fourth album, The Stage Names, is out now.