What ends up being so interesting about The Silver Gymnasium then, is that it isn't so much an album about Sheff’s childhood experiences as it is an album about remembering those childhood experiences. All of the things that happen to you as a kid probably aren't that compelling, in and of themselves, but they become that much more meaningful when you add in the context about how those events have affected you throughout your life. And maybe even more important, is how the memories of those events have affected you. The events themselves are in the past. They can’t touch you. The parts that stay with you are only in your head, and they’re unreliable, and prone to distortion, and often out-of-order. Sometimes you’ll probably find that you don’t even necessarily “remember” an event, you only remember yourself remembering the event.

It’s down this rabbit hole (or down this deep river) where Sheff finds the framework for the narrative of The Silver Gymnasium. It’s not really a straightforward “story,” and perhaps that’s appropriate because memory doesn’t really work that way. If you were to think about something like a single year from your childhood it would probably look less like a historically accurate account and more like a jumble of feelings, where you identify some key events and then get detoured when you think about how you currently feel about those events, and then drift off and start thinking about what may have led up to those events, and then realize something else, seemingly unrelated, that also reminds you of those events.

In that sense, The Silver Gymnasium is less a chronological sequence of occurrences and something more like Benjy Compson’s narration in the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury. It’s lucid and emotional and a bit confusing at times, but you get a distinct feeling for what’s important to the person telling the story and also get some rather vivid depictions of particular events in their past. 

The music on the album seems to follow this game plan as well. The songs are the usual pop-folk-rock hybrid that Okkervil River has been playing for over ten years but with perhaps a bit more emphasis on melodicism. There are definite 80s’ touchstones (see: saxophones, synthesizers, guitar solos covered in corn-syrup) but there’s also an overall sheen of what can only be described as “joyousness,” which seems compulsively applied to even, what would otherwise be, the darkest songs on the album. On almost every Okkervil album to date, there’s been at least one “slow burner;” a late-night song not necessarily designed for foot tapping. Here, it seems primed to be “Lido Pier Suicide Car” before three-quarters of the way through the song the band explodes into the sonic-equivalent of a victory parade. It’s as if even the hardest of memories are required to be strained through filters until they come out in the present looking tolerably cheerful. Sheff’s vocals meanwhile, which usually run the gamut from forlorn to furious, are reigned in to somewhere between wistful and determined.

All 11 songs on the album seem to subscribe to this basic musical format, though interestingly, the two vinyl-only bonus tracks, “Do the Crawl” and “From a Cutlass Cruiser,” have a much different tone. They’re conceptually related to the rest of the album but they’re definitely outliers; much darker, much more straightforward, a realistic feeling of menace lurking beneath the surface that doesn’t seem to penetrate to the rest of the album. (Appropriately, the fourth side of the double-LP containing these bonus songs has a black inner-circle while the three sides of the album-proper are white.)

Given the emphasis that The Silver Gymnasium has on the effect of remembering the past, just as many songs on the album seem to take place in the present day, or before/after 1986, as they do during that year. However, Sheff does appear to have identified ‘86 as being especially significant.

Sheff was born in 1976 and so would have turned 10 during the summer of 1986. The lyrics to the album appear to contain some explicit references to events that may have occurred during that year, but the artwork included with the album might supply further clues. William Schaff’s amazing map of Meriden, New Hampshire covers the entire gatefold of the vinyl album. (If you compare it to a real map of Meriden, it’s rather accurate. Kimball Union Academy, where Sheff’s parents both taught, takes up most of the town’s real estate.) On the map there are numbers with circles around them, clearly representing each track on the album. Some tracks have as many as six marks, seemingly indicating that the action of the song takes places across multiple locations. One might think this guide could help to reel in some of the more difficult to parse out songs but honestly, it often creates more questions than it answers.

Additionally, there’s a recurring theme of “seasons,” both in the lyrics of the album and the artwork. Schaff’s map is separated into sections of spring, summer, fall, and winter. The corresponding colors for each of these seasons then adorn the lyric booklet from left to right (though I’m not entirely sure that the song themselves are meant to be categorized as falling into one of the four seasons). The idea of “seasons” passing, re-visiting seasons through memory, and seasonal language is heavily present through the album. Seasons, perhaps, as the most easily identifiable periods of time that we collect and store away on the mental timeline upon which we place our potentially unreliable memories.

The following is my best attempt at briefly identifying how each song on the album might either narrate a particular event from Sheff’s past or describes his present-day feelings about his memories of those events, the collision of which might take place in the "Silver Gymnasium" itself.

1. “It Was My Season”

Map: a mark on Plainfield Elementary School and a mark on Chellis Road leading out of town to the northeast.

This song appears to be about the narrator having a great deal of affection for another person, revealed in a slight-twist ending to be another male, named Jason. Their childhood engagements seem extremely dramatic and important to the narrator at the time but as he states toward the end of the song, he “hardly thinks about it now.”

2. “On a Balcony”

Map: a single mark on what appears to be a motel leading north out of town on Rt. 12A.

This seems to be one of the songs that is about “remembering” more than it is about any particular event from Sheff’s childhood. The language is largely mature and seems to reference the paralyzing effect that memories can have on your present well-being with the line: “they say you’re living off something-and-soda, some fine wine from 1983.”

3. “Down Down the Deep River”

Map: a mark on Colby Hill Road leading over Bloods Brook at the north end of town, a mark near Raynis-Ford Cemetery stating “…and I’m so sorry,” a mark near the woods stating “where I last saw Frankie”, a mark on the road leading to Plainfield Elementary, a mark on Main Street, and a mark at the “home of the solid ghost.”

Here, there are explicit references to childhood events: the narrator camping out in a tent with a friend (possibly Jason?) talking about the kinds of things that kids talk about. There are also references, however, to a seemingly tragic event: a rescue team, the narrator inconsolable, the narrator’s father providing comfort. On top of all of that, there’s the present-day consciousness of needing to travel down the “deep river” of one’s memory to even see these events unfold and the realization that you “can never go back,” you “can only remember.”

4. “Pink-Slips”

Map: a mark on what appears to have been Sheff’s home from 1976-1984.

This song is similar thematically to “On a Balcony” in that it switches back to a largely mature perspective and the narrator’s thoughts on how his past has shaped his present. The line that “only happy until the age of ten is still a gift” seems to indicate that something tragic did, indeed, happen in 1986, and the restless, drunken “laureate of the Granite State” described near the end of the song seems to be the result.

5. “Lido Pier Suicide Car”

Map: a mark near the “creepy physical plant” (this seems to be very close to the actual location of the “Silver Gymnasium”) and a mark in the sky near what looks like an Imperial Shuttle.

This song seems to be an extension of “Pink-Slips” where the same despondent narrator finds himself crashing a vehicle into the ocean and ending up in the “stars.” I’m guessing here, but it’s probably a metaphorical description of the way that someone might act in an extreme or rebellious fashion in order to try to outrun their past.

6. “Where the Spirit Left Us”

Map: a mark in the parking lot of the motel, a mark near the “bird sanctuary” and a mark on what appears to have been Sheff’s house from 1984-1991.

Here, the narrator appears to be going back and addressing himself as a child after whatever tragic event occurred in 1986. He has the present-day hindsight to see “where the spirit left [him and his past self]” but isn’t able to do anything about it but re-live the experience over and over.

7. “White”

Map: a mark on the cemetery and a mark at the “Lake of the Strangled Crane.”

“White” looks to be one of the songs that flashes back to 1986 where the narrator is again addressing Jason (see: the reference to his father and sister mentioned in the first song) and the feeling of invincibility that children have during the “summer” and “spring” months of their lives. By the end of the song, however, “fall is here, and the leaves all go down” and “winter’s here, and it’s too cold to drown” (which is an ominous statement about what might be the unspoken tragedy lurking in the background). 

8. “Stay Young”

Map: a mark at French’s Ledges and a mark at Sheff’s first home.

This might be one of the most apparent songs on the album that speaks from a present point-of-view on how to process and deal with the memories of one’s youth. Though the events themselves are gone, there are apparently still lessons to be gained from innocence and exuberance and sincerity.

9. “Walking Without Frankie”

Map: a mark at the Lake of the Strangled Crane, a mark at “Soucy’s,” a mark “where I last saw Frankie,” and a mark in the sky near the moon.

“Walking Without Frankie” is full of references to locations in Meriden while the narrator seems to re-trace steps that he might have walked at one point with “Frankie.” He then mentions the last time that he saw Frankie before he “shot five thousand feet up into the grey sky,” possibly indicating here that “Frankie” has died, as the narrator ends the song with the repeated refrain that “he wants Frankie.”

10. “All the Time Every Day”

Map: a single mark on Rt. 12A.

This song is actually set up as a call-and-response, though it’s difficult to tell without looking at the lyrics. Each verse is actually a convoluted question that essentially amounts to: “do you feel weak and powerless and crushed under the weight of your past?” and each chorus answers: “all the time, every day.”

11. “Black Nemo”

Map: a mark leading out of town on Rt. 12A, a mark on Bonner Road near some VHS tapes, a mark near Sheff’s second home.

The last song on the album appears to be Sheff coming to peace with his re-visiting Meriden, and the memories contained therein, as well as an acceptance of the “seasons rocketing past him… a little more every day, all the time.” The song ends with Sheff, again, seemingly speaking to his past self, looking him in the eye, and saying goodbye:

“I know you think you knew him, but you were passing through him. Light as air he’s leaving. There… he’s gone.”