The Rough Guide to Conor Oberst
He's six feet tall, 3,000 years old and weighs about 15 tons. He does not look entirely pleased.When the Olmec people of ancient Mexico were carving massive basalt images of their warrior kings, they didn’t scrimp on the terrifying details—unforgiving walnut eyes, fearsome down-turned mouths, pouty-tyrant-way-past-his-bedtime chins. The beast in front of us looks ready to rise up at any moment and chomp poor 110-pound Conor Oberst like a Fruit Roll-Up.
But the 28-year-old singer-songwriter stands his ground. “Hmm,” he says, sizing things up. “One of the oldest and largest of the giant stone heads.” Oberst and his band Bright Eyes went on tour in 2004 promoting the presidential candidacy of John Kerry, so he knows a thing or two about giant stone heads. This guy, however, is in another league—a real look on my works, ye mighties, and despair kind of customer. It’s enough to get a young man thinking old-man thoughts, about life and death and legacies. Or maybe not: “That’s awesome."
The slight, sweet son of Omaha, Nebraska, is walking the hushed halls of the Mexican and Central American wing of the American Museum of Natural History on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, wide-eyed amid the jade jaguar statues and Mayan weaponry. He didn’t come here on this rainy Friday afternoon just because his shoes were getting wet and he couldn’t find a good anarchist bookstore to dry off in. The indie-rock bard is positively loco for all things related to our neighbor to the south. He recorded his new solo album, Conor Oberst, at a makeshift studio set up in a mountain villa called Valle Místico, near Tepoztlán, a small city almost two hours outside of Mexico City, known for its Aztec pyramids and frequent UFO sightings. If it weren’t for all that Mexico City smog, he’d think about relocating permanently.
His wanderlust runs deep. In the past year or so Oberst has been outward-bounding all over the place—from Nashville to the Moab desert to Malibu, California, to Idaho, where he went rafting on the Lower Salmon River (“the most outdoorsy thing I’ve ever done”). There’s something Huck Finn expansive and Bob Dylan chameleonic about Oberst’s travels—he’s finding himself by losing himself: “I don’t want to live in a box. I’d like to never have any idea what a box is. I know some people who haven’t seen one in 20 years. That’s really cool, to be so … unconfined.”
Oberst can get away with that kind of talk without sounding like a stoner. He’s part hey, whatever ’90s indie-rocker, part questing ’70s singer-songwriter, with a taciturn aspect and a drifty high-plains drawl, like the withdrawn, spacey roommate in a Richard Linklater movie. He’s wearing a wide-brimmed black hat (his “rain hat”) that’s practically a canopy over his slight frame, giving off a dark-sider frontiersman vibe.
He walks over to a full-wall Aztec calendar and points to the watchful visage at its center. “I think this is like the mouth that eats the world,” he says. He then pushes aside the sunglasses dangling in front of his gray sweater to reveal a medallion-size version of the same ancient artifact.
The notion of Bright Eyes plunging into the mouth that eats the world is definitely not in keeping with what most people assume to be the Bright Eyes way. For a little less than a decade, Oberst has dealt with being regarded by fans and detractors alike as the preeminent beautiful worrier in hipster rock, an ascending “voice of a generation” (or at least its shut-in subset) since 2002’s folk-rock orgy of emotional tumult and dislocation, Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, hoisted him out of the Omaha music scene he’d helped spawn and into the national spotlight.
He was a new thing under the sun: an indie-rock heartthrob. His voice quavered with reams of angst and torrid desire, like SOS messages floated across a stormy ocean on torn tissue paper. His raven eyes peered out from behind a flop of even raven-er new-wave hair. He was so thin, it looked like a strong wind might blow him into the next ZIP code. Someone needed to feed this poor boy a bowl of soup—stat. And tens of thousands of over-read, vitamin D–deficient waif babes would’ve ripped one another’s Q-tip arms out to administer the first spoonful.
Not such a crappy situation for an anxious 22-year-old to find himself in, assuming you know how to work it. But in the hallowed tradition of just about every “voice of a generation” before him, Oberst wasn’t all that stoked with the media myth that encircled him, even if he’s way too Midwestern aw shucks humble to make a big stink about it.
And there was plenty to make a stink about. In 2005, satiric weekly newspaper The Onion ran a story headlined, NATION PLANNING SURPRISE PARTY TO CHEER UP CONOR OBERST. In 2007, Radar posted a less amusing humor piece on its Web site, a tongue-in-cheek rant blaming Bright Eyes’ songs of isolation and anger for a shooting spree in an Omaha mall that claimed nine lives—a la Marilyn Manson and Columbine.
Then there was his rumored romance with alt-rock’s favorite home wrecker, Winona Ryder. Suddenly, a guy who got his start doing teenage punk-rock van tours and saving up summer-job money to put out records was a tabloid target.
“I don’t ever think about it,” he says of l’affaire Winona and its attendant peril. Then he sighs with vague annoyance before recovering his sanguine self.
“But I will tell you a story. We played The Tonight Show last fall and went across the street to this Mexican restaurant. The place was swarming with cameras. Britney Spears was eating in the other side of the restaurant. The way people treated her was the saddest, most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. It was like the Elephant Man, like the circus. I couldn’t shake it for a couple of days. I’d never want to be near that kind of celebrity.”
