Savannah Smiles

Will Sheff discussed this in his interview with Pitchfork on August 20th, which is where I assume everyone go this info... Everyone's summed it up, but anyone who wants a direct quote:

"Pitchfork: With these ideas of personal identity and transformation in mind, I'd like to ask you about "Savannah Smiles," a song that deals with the life and death of Shannon Wilsey, a young woman who took the name Savannah when she entered the adult film industry in the early 1990s. This is a person who became so subsumed by her new identity that she committed suicide after becoming disfigured in a horrendous automobile accident-- with such injuries, she no longer felt that she could be the beautiful adult film star Savannah. What drew you to Shannon's story?

Will Sheff: I guess I could relate, or something like that. I'm really interested in pornography, because there's all this meaning that gets attached to pornography that has nothing to do with what pornography is. Because pornography is pretty much the simplest art form there is-- there's not a whole lot to it. There's not a lot of meaning there. But there is so much meaning that floats around it. I'm really interested in the way that people talk about actresses and actors-- but more with actresses-- in adult film, they are extremely condescending. Often times you either get that this person is some sort of worthless whore, or you get this "poor girl, she must have been abused" kind of thing.

The case of Savannah is interesting because-- while not particularly special-- her parents blamed the adult film industry while the adult film industry blamed her parents and nobody really knows what the hell happened. And that's sort of the point of "Savannah Smiles"-- you don't know. There's sadness about her story that you cannot boil down to a TV movie-style explanation ….Ultimately, I also feel that indie rock and hipster culture seem to me to be very phobic of sexuality. There's a fetishizing of childhood-- like you can see it in Wes Anderson movies and in twee music, and the ways in which these grown men dress like children. I feel that there's a fear of sexuality, and one minor goal that I have with Okkervil River is that the songs are sexual. Not to say that they are about sex, but that they have an adult sexuality to them. That's what rock and roll is supposed to be about, right? It's supposed to be about sex….

Pitchfork: Yet Savannah was impregnated by Gregg Allman before the age of 17, and she went through a series of short-lived relationships with rock stars like Slash and Billy Idol….

Will Sheff: Yeah, she was a groupie.

Pitchfork: So is this the relationship between rock and roll and sexuality that you wish to explore in your work? How do you reconcile the obviously exploitative nature of this state of affairs with perhaps a healthier understanding of the place of sex in the world of music?

Will Sheff: Being a groupie is, in some ways, just an extreme form of fandom. I think that everyone has experienced, on some level, the emotion that motivates you to be a groupie. Groupies are also regularly disrespected, but all it is is somebody who loves something so much that they get involved with it sexually. Or maybe it doesn't even have to do with sex. I have felt a sense of fandom for things that I have loved that is so intense that it starts to bleed into spirituality, bleed into sexuality, and bleed into all kinds of areas of your life that love for a simple rock album should not be occupying. So with the groupie thing-- Savannah was involved with Slash, with Allman, and she's in the Tom Petty video for "Don't Come Around Here No More", as Alice [in Wonderland]. And the ending of that video, it's really beautiful and freaky. She's being eaten as a gigantic birthday cake….

Pitchfork: Yeah, I was 10 or so when that video came out, and I think it permanently warped my ideas of women and sexuality.

Will Sheff: When I was writing "Starry Stairs", which was meant to be a sequel to "Savannah Smiles" [The Stage Names was originally conceived as a double album], I kept coming back to that image of her lying on the table-- and she's underneath the stage, as it's obviously a fake birthday cake body-- totally immobilized. She couldn't move if she wanted to in real life. And here is this rock band devouring her body. If there was ever a better image for the tragedy of the groupie-- that's it right there. So I was kind of thinking about that, too. "