A Personal History of Bright Eyes
At some point in or around the year 2001, my friend Liz gave me a burned CD copy of Bright Eyes’ Fevers & Mirrors. I only realise now looking at Wikipedia that it was more or less new at the time (and also that Saddle Creek was founded by Conor Oberst’s brother, huh). It starts with the typical Bright Eyes first track, mostly long meandering bullshit that you listen to once to see if it’s worth coming back to (and it isn’t, with the exception of I’m Wide Awake, but more on that later) and then generally consider the album to start on track 2. I really got into it, listened to it a lot. Something Vague made it into my teenage band’s live set a few times, to some extent because it was the easiest one to play and had a fun shouty bit. What I actually wanted to play was The Calendar Hung Itself but I could never master the strum pattern and singing at the same time, so there we were.
Sometime soonish after that, I took a step further back and picked up their first record, Letting Off the Happiness. This was even more raw, very dense with words, a lot of shouting. The two albums helped me realise that you could make music that was very wordy, and that you didn’t necessarily have to have the kind of voice that I was mostly listening to around that time (Jeff Buckley, Thom Yorke). Obviously, teenage me did not realise that Bob Dylan had probably proved this slightly earlier, but what can I say, I was culturally illiterate then, and probably only marginally less so now. I’ve listened to about two Dylan records in the 20 years since. Anyway, my girlfriend at the time wasn’t really a fan of the more tuneless shouting-type songs (looking at you, The City Has Sex), but it hit me in the right place, and I think The Difference in the Shades has really strong imagery and a musical progression that’s a bit shambling but really works. How can you argue, as an angsty 18 year old, with a song title like A Poetic Retelling of an Unfortunate Seduction, I mean come on.
I read somewhere that Oberst isn’t a huge fan of these first two records (he should be), and considers the first “real” Bright Eyes album to be 2002’s Lifted. Obviously, I got this not too long after it came out and there’s a lot in there. Yes, a first track that I listened to once or twice and then skipped forever, because it’s two people driving around lost or whatever, and there might be music at some point later, but it’s eight minutes long. The album goes for broke, throwing itself in every direction, full band singalongs, six-minute acoustic trembling-voiced self-hatred (Waste of Paint), a really lovely penultimate track that now, two decades later, is probably my favourite on the album and then a ten minute closer which is about four songs in one. It’s a lot.
This (and Elephant by the White Stripes) were my soundtrack for 2003. A year in which I was dumped by the girl in paragraph two, my college career (unrelatedly?) slow-dived into a paralysing depression in which I finished up for the Christmas break and didn’t go to another lecture until something like March. I lived at the time in a tiny apartment on top of a bar in the very centre of Dublin’s tourist district, completely unable to take care of myself to the point that I remember my dinner for three consecutive days being chicken nuggets and Kit-Kats because the latter were on sale in the shop around the corner. I dyed my hair jet black to the extent that it looked blue in a certain light, and realised that instead of mixing vodka with something like Coke or orange juice, you could mix with something that was also alcoholic. In the midst of this, my housemate Anna-Louise pointed out to me that I seemed to listen to that Bright Eyes record a lot when I was depressed, which at least meant there were times when I wasn’t.
I still love that album though. I come back to it every so often. Possibly when anxious.
As a side note, I did catch a show by them sometime in 2003 actually since I obsessively track and monitor everything, I can say with confidence that it was Whelans on November 9 2002, and I’m pretty sure I went with Ger and Liz who you may remember from the first sentence. It was a good show, you could see the Oberst cult members in the front row, vaguely goth-y girls with long hair, swaying around moon-eyed. I also got my ticket signed by Oberst (long since lost) when he tried to get into the venue by what he thought was the back entrance but was actually where everyone was queueing. He seemed a little put out. Remember going to gigs? I don’t even mean because of the pandemic, just back when I had that kind of time and freedom.
Anyway, things had calmed down somewhat by the time 2005 rolled around and I got my hands on the I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning/Digital Ash in a Digital Urn double album. A review I read at the time said that the latter was Oberst providing cutting edge hip cover for the former, which was the real folk-country singer he really wanted to be the whole time, and I feel like the rest of his career has borne that out to some extent. Digital Ash has faded out of rotation for me, but I’m Wide Awake comes back in semi-regularly. Even the first track, after the rambling story, actually has a really good song after it, so I will at worst fast forward or possibly even just put up with it. I have no trauma with this album, just fondness. It ends particularly strongly with the last two or three tracks.
I started to fade out around here with Cassadaga, and looking at the chronology, so did Bright Eyes. Oberst went off to do either solo stuff or supergroup stuff. I would probably recognise a few tracks off this album, but it’s telling that, by the time of this release, I was living in Japan with a vast unknowable void of time to listen to music and I can’t really recall any of it. As a side note, the two albums that I forever associate with that initial period abroad are Joanna Newsom’s Ys (still phenomenal) and the Decemberists’ Crane Wife (also still great), the latter given to me in MP3 form pretty soon before I left by Ger, who you may remember from two paragraphs ago. I listened to it a lot on the plane over and in the first few weeks, Shankill Butchers made it into my live set, similarly to Something Vague because it was pretty easy to play. And I saw Joanna Newsom play in a small cafe in Nagoya sometime around 2007 on February 16, 2007 which was just amazing. Digression over.
Then, at the beginning of the world being locked down, March 2020, I realised that the Bright Eyes name had been resurrected, and a new album had come out that January. It’s, yeah, pretty good. Probably won’t have the impact on me that it might have had in the early 2000s, but what will at this stage?