{"id":53139,"date":"2021-02-25T06:43:38","date_gmt":"2021-02-25T06:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/02\/conor-oberst-bright-eyes-interview\/"},"modified":"2021-02-25T10:22:59","modified_gmt":"2021-02-25T10:22:59","slug":"an-interview-with-conor-oberst-of-bright-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/25\/an-interview-with-conor-oberst-of-bright-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"An Interview With Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

Legendary indie singer-songwriter Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes talks to Jacobin<\/cite> about the Iraq War, protest music, and what a more egalitarian music industry would look like.<\/h3>\n\n\n
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\n Conor Oberst speaking with Scott Goldman of the Grammy Foundation on October 7, 2014 in Los Angeles, California. (Duffy-Marie Arnoult \/ WireImage)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Conor Oberst is one of the most prolific singer-songwriters of the last twenty years. Best known for his work with Bright Eyes<\/a>, Oberst has also collaborated with Flea<\/a>, Jim James<\/a>, Alt-J<\/a>, and Phoebe Bridgers<\/a>. His most recent song, \u201cMiracle of Life<\/a>,\u201d featuring Phoebe Bridgers, raised money<\/a> for Planned Parenthood and opposed Donald Trump\u2019s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett<\/a> to the Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Oberst sat for an interview with Jacobin<\/em>\u2019s Garrison Lovely this fall. <\/em>They talked a bit about politics (Oberst made public stances against the Iraq War and supported Bernie Sanders\u2019s presidential runs) and a lot about music. You can listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview on Lovely\u2019s podcast, The Most Interesting People, <\/em>here<\/a>. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

<\/h2>\n
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Garrison Lovely<\/dt>\n \n

How are you doing?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Conor Oberst<\/dt>\n \n

With COVID and everything, it feels like you can’t really win, but I\u2019m just trying to keep it positive. Just stay on the sunny side of the street as much as possible, I guess.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Garrison Lovely<\/dt>\n \n

It’s funny hearing that coming from you, based on your music. I don’t know if people associate Conor Oberst or Bright Eyes with \u201cstay on the sunny side of the street\u201d . . .<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Conor Oberst<\/dt>\n \n

Yeah, and these are tough times for optimism. Never in my life have I known so many people on unemployment. I have a roof over my head, I have food in my fridge, but there’s just so many people that, on top of all the health scares, are completely terrified about what they’re going to eat or if they’re going to lose their apartment. So I can’t imagine having the stress of the pandemic and then to have that financial stress on top of it. That’s enough to break a lot of people’s spirits.<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n \n

Garrison Lovely<\/dt>\n \n

Yeah, and [Mitch] McConnell just adjourned the Senate until after the election, so there won’t be any additional relief.<\/p>\n

We’ll get into politics in a bit, but I just wanted to start off with a story of, I think, the first time I really connected with a Bright Eyes song. I was doing acid with a friend of mine in college, and we were in a park, and \u201cAt The Bottom Of Everything<\/a>\u201d came on. We were having a conversation, and the spoken word intro took over, and we both stopped and just listened to this song straight through. And it’s this incredible, bizarre story of these people on a plane. There’s a massive mechanical failure, and then there’s this apocalyptic folk rock anthem. Could you just tell me a little bit about what your mindset was when you wrote the song and what you were trying to do with it?<\/p>\n<\/dd>\n \n

Conor Oberst<\/dt>\n \n

We have, I guess, a tradition, you could say, for all the Bright Eyes records, of starting them with some kind of slightly pretentious either sound collage or, in that case, it’s just me telling a story. We just have always done that, and, to me, it’s sort of like it’s setting the stage for \u2014 okay, they all thematically tie into what’s going to happen on the record, but also, it’s a way to, I don’t know, test people’s attention spans and be like, “Okay, if you can kind of walk through this weird doorway with us, then there’s going to be all this music on the other side and a whole record to . . .\u201d Hopefully, it’ll put you in a better mindset to absorb whatever.<\/p>\n

So, for that one, since the whole idea of that record<\/a> was to make what we would consider a \u201970s folk rock album. And it’s definitely the album of ours that the most people know or whatever. It’s the most commercially successful, and some people just think that’s what our band sounds like, and all the other things we’ve done are weird side experiments, and it’s really not true. It was conceptually intentional to make something we hadn’t done before, which was a very traditional-sounding record, and let’s get Emmylou Harris to sing on it and let’s make whatever, our weird version. Of course, with all these things we try to do, it never ends up being what we set out to do, which I think is also cool, that there’s always an element of kind of failing at what you’re going for, so it doesn’t sound like a Jackson Browne record or a Joni Mitchell record or whatever, because we’re kind of weirdos, and we couldn’t do that if we wanted to or we tried.<\/p>\n

So I guess the reason the story is told like that is that it seemed like an organic way to have that intro quality, because a lot of the other records are more sound collage and weird effects that wouldn’t probably have fit on that record.<\/p>\n