Bright Eyes

April 30, 2004. The spotlights are shining on an introverted kid, his hair falling into an emo fringe, an acoustic guitar slung over his shoulder. He's standing on the TV stage of Craig Kilborn's Late Late Show, just minutes after California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was a guest on the very same set. As the lights hit him, his guitar hammering out an insistent rhythm, the kid starts talking: “This song is for the Governor of California and the President of the United States. Two men I admire greatly, for their biceps and for their disturbing fascist agendas. One-two, six-six-six.” For a moment something stirs, and makes noise, before the flow of events silences it again.

That night, American households discovered a singer-songwriter. But even before then, if you knew how to pay attention, it wasn't hard to have already heard of him. For some time, word of mouth among journalists and listeners had lost no opportunity to paint Conor Oberst as the enfant prodige of the new American songwriting scene; a “new Dylan“, a child of the alternative Nineties. The story is well known enough: Oberst was born in 1980 in Omaha, Nebraska, and for as long as he can remember he's been breathing music and writing songs. His earliest demos, which can be found on YouTube, date back to when he was just thirteen. His first emo band, Commander Venus, which he fronted, took him on tour around the United States at fifteen. Then came the folk of Bright Eyes: a name, a simple artistic conceit, and it's the beginning of the legend. Bright Eyes isn't a mask to put on, just the name on the label. In the songs, it's the young Conor who sings, screams, suffers, confesses, lives.

From there the rise is swift and unstoppable: in '98, at eighteen, Bright Eyes debuted with “Letting Off The Happiness”, raw and searing, laying the groundwork for the first great album, which arrived in 2000 with the aching “Fevers And Mirrors”. Two years later, the sprawling “Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground“, moving between the sweetest ballads and vitriolic invective, absorbs every impulse and gives it back cubed: the songs grow very long, at times almost rambling. Oberst's voice, though, sings the truth, and his compositions carry a rare, authentic power. Crowds flock to his shows, records sell well. At just twenty-four, Bright Eyes is already an institution of the American independent scene.

The hype surrounding Conor in the early 2000s culminates in what could fairly be called an extraordinary event: on October 26, 2004, Bright Eyes release two singles that couldn't be more different from each other, one acoustic and one electric – in typical Dylanesque fashion. Far removed from commercial trends as they were, “Lua” and “Take It Easy (Love Nothing)” both land at number one on the Billboard Hot Singles Sales chart, tracking the best-selling singles in America. On the wave of that success, in January 2005 two albums are released simultaneously, one folk and one “electronic”, and both crack the top 20 of the album charts.

Conor Oberst's voice rises above the commercial pop landscape for a moment as brief as it is historic for indie music – a moment even immortalized in a line from the iconic series “The O.C.”, delivered, naturally, by resident geek Seth Cohen: “Ryan, do you realize? It's weird seeing the world catch up to my frequency.”

Of the two albums, it's the acoustic one, “I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning”, that will stand the test of time; unlike its electric stepbrother “Digital Ash In A Digital Urn”, which is urgent but somewhat softened by its digital trappings, it retains the raw, blood-and-guts sound of a true classic. Folk is where Conor comes from, and it's where he returns every time he delivers his best work. For the first time on “I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning”, Oberst's voice takes on the weight of experience: on previous records it was the voice of a kid singing feelings too big for him, now it's the voice of a man who observes and narrates with clarity, his timbre grown more mature, greying, rich with nuance. Take two songs like “First Day Of My Life” and “At The Bottom Of Everything”: it's the same voice singing them, but they spring from two different urgencies, reflected in the different shades of his delivery.

The first record with Nate Walcott as an official member of the crew (rounding out the classic trio alongside Oberst and trusty Mike Mogis, part of the project since its earliest days), and therefore the first work where it actually makes sense to talk about Bright Eyes as a band rather than as an extension of Oberst alone, “I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning” remains, to this day, the Omaha songwriter's masterpiece. And like every one of his albums, it opens with a spoken word passage:

And she looks at the man, and she says ‘Where are we going?’

And he looks at her, and he says ‘We’re going to a party

It's a birthday party, it's your birthday party

Happy birthday, darling

We love you very, very, very, very, very, very, very much'

And then he starts humming this little tune

And it kind of goes like this…

(“At The Bottom Of Everything”)

A plane plunges downward, sinking into the blue of the sea. Instead of panicking, the passengers sing cheerfully. The meta-narrative device breaks, and it's “At The Bottom of Everything” itself – the song already previewed months earlier on the Late Late Show – that opens the record in a jaunty folk strum of guitars and mandolins. The music is lively, but the words Oberst sings push with anger and bitterness deep into the dark heart of Bush's America, torn apart by resentment and contradiction. A country where bigotry and violence lurk everywhere: “While my mother waters plants/ my father loads his gun/ he says that Death will give us back to God/ just like the setting sun/ is returned to the lonesome ocean.”

Just as the previous “Lifted Or…” closed with the torrential protest song “Let's Not Shit Ourselves”, “I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning” opens under the sign of anger and denunciation. It's a thread that resurfaces throughout the songs that follow, as in the closing “Road To Joy”, which borrows the melody of the “Ode to Joy” to sing lines like “when they ask you to fight a war for nothing/ better to side with whoever's going to win”, before erupting into a clatter of screams, horns and percussion.

The social commentary, though, is constantly paired with personal narrative. Oberst is a son of this burning America, and his own feelings burn along with it. In singing about the world, the songwriter sings about himself. So in the soft waltz of “We're Nowhere And It's Now”, bewilderment at hypocrisy (“if you say there's no such thing as truth then how come you say it like it's true?”) finds comfort in a diner, in a waitress's smile before meeting up with a friend, in a small gift carried in a pocket like a charm. Pain, meanwhile, becomes shared experience in the romantic, defeated epic of “Old Soul Song (For The New World Order)”, the story of a day spent hand in hand as photojournalists documenting a riot, an unease, and then back home, in the darkroom, nervously developing the slides: “You dipped the paper in the water/ and everything began to bloom.” Yeah, they went wild.

We made love on the living room floor

With the noise in the background from a televised war

And in the deafening pleasure, I thought I heard someone say

If we walk away, they'll walk away

(“Land Locked Blues”)

Voice and life also throb through the breakneck country of “Another Travellin' Song”, another song “about the billion highways and the cities at daybreak”, as well as through the ballad-paced “Train Under Water”, and turn into pure poetry in the lyricism of “Land Locked Blues”: we hear a great circular melody, quintessentially Oberstian and embellished by Emmylou Harris's vocal harmonies, over which unfolds a song of lactic acid and hormones, of love and war, of moons and dawns. A wandering through life, chasing an escape that may not exist. “I'm leaving, but I don't know where to”, Conor sings in closing.

Because in the end, what is there to hold onto if not poetry? And it's precisely when the tone rises that Bright Eyes shine brightest: there's the boundless tenderness of “First Day of My Life”, perhaps the closest thing to a perfect love song; the boundless anguish of “Poison Oak”, of feeling like a single cell on a serpent's tongue, when it's the sound of loneliness that offers comfort; and the boundless melancholy of “Lua”, a masterpiece if there ever was one, simply the most beautiful and saddest of goodbye songs.

And I’m not sure what the trouble was

That started all of this

The reasons all have run away

But the feeling never did

It's not something I would recommend

But it is one way to live

‘Cause what is simple in the moonlight

By the morning never is

("Lua")

Being Conor Oberst. Make no mistake, "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" is a work that chronicles the scars of living in post-9/11 America - the disorientation, the itches, the needs. And how a kid who left Omaha, Nebraska in '80 became, twenty years later, the most important singer-songwriter of his generation.

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08/05/2022