Love what you love.
and my long companionship with the music of Conor Oberst
If there's a soundtrack to my life, Conor Oberst probably wrote it.
I won't try to convert any fans (like I justifiably attempted when I wrote about Jon Batiste.) I once read a music journalist say that Conor Oberst was his most favorite poet and least favorite musician.
This is the kind of artist people love to love or love to hate. By that I mean: you really enjoy the music or you loathe it (that's if you've even heard of it.) You probably haven't. That's okay. I'll draw them out of relative obscurity for a moment and we'll just play it as it lays.
I need to do this for one purpose: to show you something I love.
There Is No Beginning to the Story
The origin is not interesting: a high school boyfriend introduced me to Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst's band. I can't tell you what song or album I listened to first, but soon after I heard what some would call their magnum opus (or best album), I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. I was hooked and I fell for the band personally, rarely ever again associating it with my ex-boyfriend. The music was mine.
I resonated with the lyrics: emotional, honest, brainy, poetic, angsty, nihilist, hedonist, protesting. I became attached to Bright Eyes. Not in the nerdy way that we do and know everything about the band or singer (I do this with other bands though.) I was attached to the songs themselves. They kept me company in the disorienting middle years between childhood and adulthood.
The band was first in the queue on long roadtrips to speech and drama tournaments throughout high school. I ran pirated burnt CDs ragged in my old Chevy Lumina. I piped it into the store when I made sandwiches and sliced onions at Subway. I made my first digital posters in art class based on the lyrics of Bright Eyes’ Classic Cars, before I knew I was meant to be a graphic designer.
I had hoped the music had a way to transcend life stages, so I packed up my Bright Eyes CD collection to take to college. My university years coincided with the years the band took a hiatus for members to pursue other projects, so they were all I had for a while. I rocked the mid-aughts records on repeat just praying they'd tour again so I could see them live in the city, but they wouldn't. My life had changed dramatically moving away to college to pursue a graphic design degree just as their time as a band came to a close.
Not too long after, Conor Oberst began releasing solo albums and eventually formed a band called Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band who wrote and recorded twangy, relaxed music in rural Mexico. Immediately following, a couple members of Bright Eyes, along with other indie singer-songwriter types, formed a supergroup called Monsters of Folk. I found myself liking these new bands even better than Bright Eyes, if that was possible.
I tried to wear the songs out, but I couldn't. The bands were putting out music faster than I could tire of any of it. In the age of the iPod with very limited storage capacity, I'd delete a lesser-loved album or artist when Conor Oberst put out new records.
It was an easy trade every time.
An art companion
Throughout college, I passed the time in 3- and 4-hour-long studio art classes jamming Bright Eyes’ back catalog of Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, Letting Off the Happiness, and Fevers and Mirrors. They served as true blue comrades – the lyrics brightened my imagination and the compositions drew me out of my mind into a subconsciousness where I could create my best work with inspired intuition. The music would open a door I could walk through with a brush or pastel in my hand where color and line and perspective and balance and value made sense to me.
Much like I expect you to care little or not at all about Bright Eyes music, my art school classmates had that in common. I can count on one hand the number of people I have ever known to truly love Bright Eyes. In some ways, I think that makes us feel special: to love something that we know is good and yet to be discovered or regarded by the rest of the world. Our juicy little secret.
I'm not sure that always works for us the way we want. An art professor I had, who was a self-proclaimed obscure indie music connoisseur, promised he wouldn't play music in class that we knew because he thought it would be distracting and show favoritism. I thought it was an ignorant thing to say, as I knew every band he ever played in class. I waited until he put on Owen to proudly admit that I knew all of the music he'd debuted for the entire semester.
He seemed to crumble when he realized his music tastes were not as unique as he'd assumed, since Owen in particular was as underground indie as they came, in the time before streaming. Ironically, I’d been annoyed he’d been playing some of my favorite music too, like it was supposed to be kept hushed from the mainstream. It struck me that neither of us really enjoyed how uncomfortable it felt for someone else to have the same exact music taste when we were both certain ours was exclusively and objectively the best and for sure the most cryptic and specific.
Similar taste and preferences should bond people, rather than having "popular" or common musical alignments feel unsettling and low key humiliating. Why didn’t it? It can be difficult for some of us to feel ordinary.
I responded to the encounter by creating a 9-part polyptych inspired by the under-appreciated Bright Eyes album, LIFTED or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (which I just had to copy and paste because it's a ridiculously long name that I never committed to memory.) The LIFTED album premiered the band's bluesy folksy sound era–a little country, a little rock, and a little bizarre–with riveting imagery. I was particularly obsessed with this album, and as it turned out, so was my professor.
The piece was inspired not only by the lyrics of LIFTED but my own indignation to rail against the pretentious (myself included) who think they "own" music or any genre of art. It served to assert my loyalty and declare my love for what I loved - which you can love or hate or feel however you want about. I believed then and now that music and books and food and stage performances and street art are shared arts, an experience that we get to have together. And I continue to reject the idea that I can only like something if only I like it.
I'm measuring my enthusiasm with care for you, I swear, so I won't publish any song lyrics for you (besides, there are likely copyright issues with that) but the polyptych below and the other art in this post are all pieces I made about and to Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst music over time.
A travel companion
If Bright Eyes' music is the ideal soundtrack for making art, Conor Oberst's solo and collaborative albums are even more fitting for a roadtrip or long walk at night or wandering wherever life takes you.
I listened to Moab on long drives across the American West, where Oberst croons that there's nothing that the road cannot heal, from Albuquerque to West Texas to Grand Junction, each by way of the desert towns of Utah and New Mexico.
I captured the feel of Temazcal and Get-Well-Cards when I lived on a slow, remote island in the Azores. On oceanside walks and late nights on the rooftop patio, songs of life with nature and searching for meaning connected with me then. I happened to be shaping my life to feel more like the breezy, Americana Cassadaga or Mexico album whose cover art is a black and white photo of Oberst napping peacefully in a hammock, rather than the riotous highbrow drunk and depressed Bright Eyes material I loved in high school and college. I'd moved on and evolved.
I learned to run to the tracks on the Monsters of Folk self-titled album, running circles around the South Side Lions Park Lake in the San Antonio heat to dancy Losin' Yo Head, Whole Lotta Losin’ and on the nose Ahead of the Curve. I have to live without running these days, but the best songs are still on both my "angry yoga" and upbeat workout playlists because I can’t help but move when I hear them.
Something Vague and Neely O'Hara are old songs from Bright Eyes that still land on my winter playlists. They tend to trend dark and moody with the weather and my mental state around February or March after I retire A Christmas Album for the season. Pessimistically apocalyptic but bright jammy tune Mariana Trench from the latest Bright Eyes album streamed all along the Oregon coast on a roadtrip while Maddison and I tried to outrun COVID and wildfire smoke.
I am pricked by nostalgia and longing when I hear Gold Mine Gutted and Tachycardia, both about midwestern, small town life; born out of Oberst's upbringing in Omaha, Nebraska. Or maybe I seek out those songs when I want to feel nostalgic, or feel anything, because I think that's what good art does with us. Makes us feel. It's what this music has always done for me.
A constant companion
With no other willing or available friends to join, I dragged my husband to see Bright Eyes live at The Mission Ballroom with me last week. I'd seen Conor Oberst play at The Blue Note in Columbia, Missouri, in 2009 or so, but I wanted to see the "reunion" tour since Bright Eyes has all but promised to not stay together and tour forever. There were a few highlights.
At the start of the show, Lane and I were next to two kids who were probably 17 or 18. They were taller than me, but the markered "X"s on their hands gave their minority status away at the club. They had swoopy bowl haircuts and saggy jeans and old, hi-top Converse. They looked exactly like all of my high school friends. I wondered about them as the show started and they bopped along. How did they get into Bright Eyes – was it their new album? Did one of their parents listen to them 20 years ago and pass it on? Did they go digging up old indie folk stuff on Spotify and come across this band with a 30 year repertoire of albums? I’m not sure why I cared about the experience they were having. Maybe I saw myself in them.
Is it because I see the next generation loving what I love? Is it the fact that I'm secure enough now to share my loves rather than keep them to myself for fear of judgement? Is it because I see myself in them, loving old music in new ways? Is it because I never outgrew Bright Eyes? Is it that I'm so glad we get to go to concerts again at all that I automatically love everyone there just because we get to share a live music experience together?
I’ve been in an intense work season of creative output. To rest in an activity based on creative input rather than output was the remedial and mental break I needed to get through this stretch. I’ve missed live music. I’ve missed sharing it with others.
Another highlight was the huge symphony ensemble backing the band. And though one of the core band members was out sick with COVID for the Denver show, the band was full and effortlessly in sync. I always kept an eye on Miwi La Lupa. He’s not in the core band, but he tours with Bright Eyes. That night with the guitarist and keyboardist out, Miwi was on vocals and handfuls of instruments (electric guitar, trumpet, keys (keyboard, Moog, organ… the whole stack), melodica, steel guitar, various percussion, and others.) The guy could play anything and you could see the joy of music on his face.
Love what you love. And to the boys next to me, love what you love too. Grow with what grows with you.
We drifted apart as the show rolled on. I wonder now if the boys knew all the songs. I didn't. I don't know all of the newer stuff, only a few tracks. I strayed a while ago to the side projects and didn't keep up with Bright Eyes like I could have.
I wonder if the band played the boys' favorite songs and which ones are they? What the band played weren't Conor's favorite songs because he said so. They played a handful of my favorites (Old Soul Song (For the New World Order), Four Winds, Something Vague, and Bowl of Oranges), and missed dozens of others, including many of their so-called "hits".
The thing is, Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst have three decades of music, with hundreds and hundreds of songs on over 30 albums, not including side project bands, compilations, collaborations, and live recordings. At the Denver show, they played on average two songs per studio album, which is realistically an entire night of live music. Truth be told, I've loved Bright Eyes and Conor Oberst's music for so long, it would be impossible to satisfy my want to hear every song I've loved. Or that meant something to me. Or that I could point to and say hey, now I've got a story about that one. Just so I can feel that I love what I love.
Bright Eyes has created some of the best music of my life. Conor Oberst is a brilliant songwriter, and his art has served my life for a long time now. It has literally formed me. I can see the trail behind me now.
I’m not who I was when I fell in love with Bright Eyes music in high school, or even in college when I saw Conor Oberst play live for the first time. Standing in the crowd gone wild feels like a homecoming, forward momentum, and reaching back all at once.
It’s like traveling back to the same place twice. Something’s always different. I don’t return to the place the same. The experiences and the time between them leaves me changed, my heart and spirit shaped and reshaped in new ways, so that when I return again, I’m different. Visibly, holistically, authentically grown and reaching back:
To 18 year old me at the show in her hot pink Converse. To the girl who used music to express herself. To the girl who found solace in liking something dark and weird that most people hated. To the girl burning rubber on Highway 63, with clove cigarette smoke and Poison Oak rolling out her driver’s window. To the girl learning to read tabs and chords to Lua and Time Forgot. To the girl who still uses music as a thread, piecing together the best and hardest seasons of life. To the girl who uses art to stoke the fire of her own creativity. To the girl who uses music to feel at home in the world and herself in the midst of all this wandering.
To what’s always been more than a setlist or discography can share.
Love what you love, is what I'm saying.
Maybe you love knitting or rock climbing or reading the most random non-fiction books you can find. Maybe you love sports and your teams, and you can nerd out on that like I can with music.
I needed to show you what I love, what's inspired me all these years, what's never left my playlist in over 15 years. It's highly unlikely you do or will love Bright Eyes or Conor Oberst, but you love something. What is it?
Will you tell the world about it, that beauty you've found? Because we need more. Find beauty in what you find beauty in. Care about what you care about. Grow with what you grow with. Love what you love.
There is nothing as lucky, as easy, or free,
P.S. This playlist contains a collection of songs or bands mentioned in this post.
You can check out other Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and Monsters of Folk music on Spotify.