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Nov 28, 2017 Okkervil River By Christopher Roberts

Okkervil River have shared a new song, “What Friends Do.” It’s the theme song to Click, Clack, Moo: Christmas at the Farm, a new Amazon Prime Christmas special based on the children’s book series Click, Clack, Moo, by Doreen Cronin and Betsy Lewin, which is about farm animals who go on strike and send messages to their farmer via a typewriter. Listen below.

Okkervil River’s Will Sheff had this to say about the song in a press release: “When I was preparing to write the theme for Click, Clack, Moo I listened intently and repeatedly to my favorite kids’ songs by writers like Joe Raposo and Harry Nilsson. There’s something about writing songs tailor-made for kids, I noticed, that brings out something really tender and urgent in adults. You start thinking a lot about what the one simple and sincere message you’d like to pass on to a kid might be. In the case of Click, Clack, Moo, I had to work with already existing material, so my job was more to mine what was already there than it was to make up something extraneous. The original Click, Clack, Moo book, by Doreen Cronin, is about a bunch of farm animals who learn that by banding together they can get the farmer to provide them with better living conditions. So I thought I’d write a song that reflected that message - that if you stand together with your friends and if you stand up for your friends you’ll never feel alone and you’ll be able to get great things on behalf of everybody, stuff that would never be possible to do all yourself.”

Click, Clack, Moo: Christmas at the Farm is written by Will McRobb (The Adventures of Pete & Pete) and directed by Jennifer Oxley. It features the voices of Rachel Bloom, Pete Davidson, and Patton Oswalt. A press release describes the special as such: “It’s Christmas time and the farm animals have a problem: how to buy Farmer Brown the present of his dreams - a Tumbletron 300 clothes dryer. It’s a race against time for them, and for Duck who has his own problem - upping his ‘nice’ numbers for Santa to get off the ‘naughty’ list.”

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