The Rough Guide to Conor Oberst
It’s a few hours after closing time at the museum, and Oberst is sitting at the bar of an upscale Mexican restaurant off Central Park West, drinking a Negra Modelo and talking about when he decided his own act at the margins of the pop-culture freak show was getting tiresome. In 2005, Bright Eyes released two albums at the same time, the electronic-rock Digital Ash in a Digital Urn and the folky I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning. His avid cult scooped up enough copies of the singles from each record, “Lua” and “Take It Easy (Love Nothing),” to lodge them at the No. 1 and 2 spots on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles sales chart. Bright Eyes mania was at its peak. But after the year of constant touring that followed, Oberst “wasn’t dealing well,” he says. “I wasn’t really feeling comfortable in my own skin, able to concentrate on things.”
That was the moment the Conor Oberst Journey of Personal Discovery commenced in earnest. In early 2006, he took a couple of long trips to the Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp in Florida, also known as “the psychic center of the world.” He got a reading, soaked in some mysticism, grew his hair—and cleansed: “The main reading, I was in there with this woman for two or three hours. She told me, ‘You think you’re on the wrong path, but if you stick to what you’re doing, things will work out.’ It might not sound all that ‘psychic,’ but I think the point is that I believed her.”
The next Bright Eyes album, 2007’s Cassadaga, was a searing spiritual colonic. It had a song about rehab (not Oberst’s), another about an abortion, one that some read as a Ryder kiss-off and one about a musician “turning tricks” instead of making art. Its high point was “Four Winds,” an astonishingly great fever spiel about religion, politics and the apocalypse, unfolding under the watchful eyes of a spray-painted portrait of a Mexican girl. “Well, I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet!” he near-shouts. “Like a newly orphaned refugee, retracing my steps/All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead/They said, ‘You’d better look alive.’”
Staying alive meant staying in motion. Oberst can’t abide being in the same town for more than three months; the result, no doubt, of touring since he was a teenager. He keeps an apartment in New York, records in Omaha and doesn’t think of either as home. In Tepoztlán, he and his ad hoc group of musicians—the Mystic Valley Band—enjoyed a dorm-style communalism. They slept in a cluster of small houses tucked into a mountainside. They ate in a shared outdoor kitchen, went on hikes, watched the sun set and generally lived off the grid. “It was off in its own universe,” Oberst says. “Since there weren’t really hours to the day and no one had to leave, we could operate at a natural pace."
What’s most interesting about Oberst’s escapism is that, at heart, it isn’t all that escapist. His border crossing allowed him to get a new perspective on American politics, specifically the immigration debates that have been roiling Midwestern cities like his hometown. Being out of the U.S. only deepened his commitment to “what America’s about—inclusiveness, diversity, the idea that we’re better than the sum of our parts. This idea of building a wall, it really saddens me.”
Conor Oberst is the first album he’s made under his own name since a series of cassettes he self-released during his early-’90s puberty (“back when all the songs were about video games”). The decision to go solo, as it were, might seem odd to the people who’ve always assumed that Bright Eyes was merely a recording guise—the way Chris Carrabba is Dashboard Confessional. And it may seem odd because Oberst dispelled just that notion by officially declaring Bright Eyes a band in 2007.
“There’s something nice about starting from scratch,” he says.
That line could be his mantra. Bright Eyes has always mutated to fit Oberst’s momentary needs. Lifted credited 22 musicians, a five-member drum corps, a seven-member choir, a four-member “country choir” and a “drunk choir,” consisting of “everyone that was drinking at Duffy’s and O’Rourke’s that night.” On Digital Ash, he was backed by Omaha eyeliner-new-wave revivalists the Faint. On Wide Awake it was a spare folk band that included guest vocals from country-rock great Emmylou Harris. The only constant is 34-year-old Mike Mogis, who has served as musical director for Oberst’s Mobius-strip creative style.
“My role is pretty amorphous,” says Mogis, who didn’t make the trip south (Conor Oberst is also Oberst’s debut as producer). “Sometimes he plays me something and I build around it. Other times he has a more defined idea of what he wants. He might come in with an acoustic song, and pretty soon it’s turned into a dance-rock song. This time he wanted to make a record by himself, to see what it’s like having complete control.”
An Oberst song might begin when a melody or some chords or a line from Yeats or the Bible pops into his head, maybe in the shower or while reading. Over the years, his songwriting has become more focused. Early Bright Eyes albums were first thought/best thought introspective outpourings. These days, he revises and tightens, and he’s more interested in impressionistic-image tangles than heart-rending autobiographical directness.
“Every line doesn’t have to be understood by everyone,” he says. “I absorb things, and they kind of emerge. That’s how I find inspiration. Something affects you, but it takes a while to work into your subconscious and come back out through that weird creative process.”
In other words, this incredibly prolific songwriter—who has basically recorded an album a year since he stopped needing a babysitter—is nearing his 30s with time to burn. He’s waited until he’s more than 14 albums into his career to release a self-titled solo CD—the kind of indulgence few artists get in an era where careers rise and fall like market bubbles. One of the tags Bright Eyes got saddled with in the early ’00s was “new Dylan,” despite the fact that, as Oberst notes, “it sounds nothing like that.” Yet, like Dylan—maybe the only rock artist whose output will definitely be around as long as those colossal heads—Oberst works on his own cosmic schedule.
This is what he sings about on Conor Oberst. It’s a dusty folk-rock album about the mystic power of travel and restlessness—he watches red rockets glare over Cape Canaveral, has sex in a moving van, contemplates surfers on golden beaches and makes pit stops in New York; Moab, Utah; and Sausalito, California. One song, “Valle Místico,” is just someone blowing a horn.
“Victory’s sweet even deep in the cheap seats,” he sings, using displacement and distance to find community, not sink into isolation. It’s a vision anyone who has ever turned an ignition key can get into. Literally, anyone.
“I love freedom,” he says, chuckling. “I guess that’s one thing George Bush and I have in common.”
