The Line of Best Fit captured Okkervil River’s charming recent performance (in a dry-docked wooden sailboat no less) of their heart-wrenching and masterful song, Love to a Monster (a bonus track off of 2007’s “The Stage Names” album), at The End of the Road Festival in Dorset, England.  Check out the performance below and the well-wrought lyrics after.

“Lover, now that you’ve left me, I’m glad you’re unlovely.
‘Cause if you could take all the heat in your heart and just hang it from you,
I wouldn’t be able to bear the way you cannot love me.
It’s much easier of me to make a monster out of you.

And so here I go, substituting the glow from your temples,
all our sighs and our trembles, and each last letter sent you
from the cheap little pen of this weak little man
the one singing – out his jangling, ringing
and hopefully stinging attack upon you.

Yeah, so here I go, just exploding the hope we’ll be speaking
some day, years from now, seeking friendship and understanding.
Yeah, I hope you get angry, and hurt, and have the hardest of landings.
And I hope your new man thinks of me when he sees what a number I did on you.
Come on boys.

I grow tired of this song. Turn my eyes
to the blonde in the bleachers.
She’s a lovely young creature.
I think she’s seeking adventure.
I think she’s ready to see that the world ain’t so sweet nor so tender.
I won’t break her, just bend her, and make her into my new ringer for you.

I stay in the same comfy town, write the same old songs down, drive the same streets,
seek the same sense of dull peace, whisper the same sweet words to the chippies.
The same walk by the road where the same muddy snow’s finally leaving,

But I’ll fight off the spring; I don’t want lovely things,
I don’t want the earth new.”

For obvious reasons, the performance above reminded us of Lyle Lovett’s great song, If I Had a Boat, which you can check out below (as introduced by John Prine).

And here’s another version of Love to a Monster on A Takeaway Show segment filmed on the banks of the Seine River in Paris:

# 6.2- Okkervil River-Love to a monster by lablogotheque