Google "lit-rock" and the first stories that pop up are about the Decemberists. Scroll through several pages and you'll eventually stumble upon the lesser-known Okkervil River. Although someone like Iggy Pop probably wouldn't take kindly to the term, "literate" is hardly an insult for a songwriter. And yet, Okkervil frontman Will Sheff has mixed feelings about it.

"My only objection to it is very simple, and that is ultimately it just doesn't seem very descriptive," he says. "Music is music; it's not literature. A pop song is a pop song; it's not a novel. And it always smacked a little of literature somehow being better or more noble than pop songs. I kind of resent that idea. I kind of resent the idea that anyone's going to want to say they're just slumming in pop music or they need to dress it up in a fancy coat and tails for it to go to the ball.

"It just seems pretentious to me, and I don't think it's the kind of thing I'd want to listen to. 'Oh, yeah, there's this band and they're totally like literature.' I'd be like, 'What the [expletive] would I want to listen to that for? You know, I'll read a book instead.' "

Sheff was on a creative writing track at Macalester College in Minnesota in 1998 when he decided to chuck that and head for Austin, Texas, where he formed Okkervil River with two high school friends, taking the name from a story by Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya. Songwriting was a good outlet for his literary ambitions.

After signing to Jagjaguwar and releasing records such as "Down the River of Golden Dreams" and "Black Sheep Boy," Okkervil River built a reputation as a smart, guitar-driven, indie-rock band with a frontman who has a quivering vocal style and painterly way with words.

The band's now hit a creative and sonic peak with "The Stage Names," its most cinematic record and one that Pitchfork said is "about the folly of popular music and its attendant lifestyles."

"I think that's part of it, for sure," Sheff says of that assessment. "When I was writing the record I was trying to have these two total opposite ideas in my head. One is that art is the saving grace of humanity. The other one was that art is complete bull ... I was thinking of these two things as like milk and vinegar. I wanted the record to have a curdled quality from these two things being mixed together -- that you should feel somewhat ambivalent about these things because I think that's the appropriate way to feel."

In the glammy "Unless It's Kicks," Sheff makes his case for art, singing, "What gives this mess some grace unless it's kicks, man/unless it's fictions, unless it's sweat or it's songs?" In one verse, he makes passing reference to "some mid-level band," as if talking about ... Okkervil River?

"Yeah," he says, laughing. "Well, it's hard to measure these things with the way the music industry is these days. With fewer people selling records, a band like Modest Mouse can be No. 1 on the Billboard charts. But I've always thought of us that way. I always thought that was a charming aspect of us. I think after bitterness and after frustration, you just go, 'Eh, so be it, every band has their own fate.' Obviously, I want the most people to hear our music as possible. I actually want everyone to hear it, and most of them can hate it, and a couple can maybe enjoy it, but at the time of writing that song I was trying to take a self-deprecating stock in where we are."

Okkervil River didn't land near the top of the charts like Modest Mouse or the Arcade Fire, but it has been compared lately to the Canadian band -- which it happens to predate by several years.

"I've noticed it," Sheff says of comparisons to other indie bands. "Sometimes I can't tell if it's in my brain or if it's real. I try to tune out a lot of indie rock. I listen to a lot of different music. I don't listen to a lot of indie rock. It drives me crazy, not because I don't like it, but because I don't want to be influenced by it."

For Sheff, this mid-level band has been something of a struggle to maintain. The two friends he started the band with have both exited, and now Okkervil has lost guitarist Brian Cassidy after two years, replaced temporarily by the Wrens' Charles Bissell.

"It's really frustrating," Sheff says, "but I never have objected to their reasons. In the case of Brian Cassidy leaving, he and his wife are expecting a child. I don't think it's appropriate for him to spend nine months out of the year with a rock band when it's the first year of his baby's life. It's not right. The people who left earlier in our career, they had been touring for years, working and working, and we weren't making any money and people were watching the money drain out of their pockets and their ability to maintain a relationship reduced to zero. I don't begrudge anyone in the band for feeling that wasn't the life they wanted. It's been a sacrifice for me in a whole lot of ways so I understand completely where they're coming from."

And is the sacrifice paying off for him?

"I would never want to sound ungrateful. I do what I love and what I always wanted to do, and I manage to squeak by doing it. For that I am unbelievably lucky. Yeah, I could get grumpy about this or that -- like being broke more times than not -- but anything like that is secondary to the fact that I have essentially what is my dream job. It's stupid to ask for more than that."