![]() "That approach of blending mundane things with more fantastical or supermacro broad philosophical concepts is interesting to me," Oberst says. Reckoning with lost love, new love, endings, illness, and death, massive abstractions are cut with quotidian action-after all, even in the face of apocalypse, someone still needs to cut celery for soup. Saying he’s "obviously not the only one with these ideas on my mind," Oberst believes he’s tapped into a collective consciousness "where maybe because of certain advances of the world, we’re all kind of dreaming the same dreams and having the same thoughts to some degree." While the album was recorded pre-COVID, its dystopian bend aligns uncannily with our present. Read More: I Love You Far Too Much: Bright Eyes' 'Fevers And Mirrors' Turns 20 The band wanted to ensure that after their time away, Down in the Weeds fit seamlessly into the Bright Eyes catalogue-as it stands, it could easily be a marriage between Fevers and Mirrorsand Cassadaga. Whether it’s capitalistic reanimation ("This old town looks empty but we knew it wouldn’t last/Behind bulletproof windows they’re still wiring the cash"), or more literal apocalypse ("This world went down in flames and man-made caves"), we’re in a strange world, made all the more disorienting by sudden, interruptive conversations and Mogis’ producing. ![]() Long considered eerie, surreal, or apocalyptic, Bright Eyes' wary-eyed paranoia is discomfittingly prescient for a COVID-era listener. Named after a now-abandoned poem/flipbook that Oberst was making after his brother’s death, Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was finds them searching for what’s left among ruins. "It creates a world for the songs to live in that isn’t just a straitlaced studio situation."Īfter a nine-year hiatus, Oberst, Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott have returned with a new Bright Eyes album. "I’ve always loved the idea of putting the music in a world that is outside of a sterile, cold, studio sonic environment, so the little sound collages and all the field recordings and bits of sound, that’s all throughout the record," Oberst says. ("We’re kind of shitheads like that," he laughs.) Oberst and his bandmates consider the dissonant opening track to be "what makes a Bright Eyes album a Bright Eyes album," calling it a "pay-at-the-door situation": if you’re willing to step through the oddities, then you make it to the songs. ![]() These conversations are spliced with snippets of a recording from Oberst's home, a three-hour conversation between him, his mother and his ex-wife Corina Figueroa Escamilla (the Spanish-speaking announcer) after they all took psychedelic mushrooms. The bar "audience" received pre-written potential topics, phrases, or conversations on cue cards you can hear those recordings throughout as Pageturner pianist Dan McCarthy plays and Bright Eyes member Nate Walcott joins on trumpet. Recorded primarily in Pageturner's Lounge, an Omaha bar co-owned by Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst, every line is deliberate. If you don’t speak Spanish, you’ll still catch when she names the composition’s theme: "Your most vivid nightmares."įrom there, "Pageturner’s Rag" dissolves into a ragtime overlapped with conversations at first, it feels like you're sitting in the crowd.īut of course, the song is far stranger than that. In Spanish, a woman welcomes the crowd warmly, preparing them for the song ahead-at the end of a hallway, they’ll open the door of forgotten memory. An announcement cuts through barroom chatter.
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