From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Bright Eyes

Conor Oberst Survives The Hype By Living Up To Every Word.

by T.M. Shine

Conor Oberst has kept his promise. Every year, the media tosses around the names of a dozen new artists who have the potential to escape flash-in-the-pan status, acts who seem to have enough promise for the long haul, whose career we may still be following 20 years from now. Lauryn Hill comes to mind. Kanye West is currently holding us captive. But in 2002, Oberst, a.k.a. Bright Eyes, was the next next big thing.

That year, Oberst not only got everyone's vote for generating the most pretentious album title in recent history -- Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground -- but also received the rock 'n' roll kiss of death: People started calling him "the new Dylan." For an overly prolific apostle from Omaha, Neb., this was a curse worse than winning the Grammy for Best New Artist.

The attention even led Oberst's hometown paper, the Omaha World-Herald, to mock his surreal fame with digs such as "How do you show your Conor cachet over cocktails? Try this: Conor's nihilistic observations on postmodern society are a metaphor for the desolation of the human condition." With critiques such as that, he couldn't go anywhere without a backlash in tow. "Who wants to hear sad, sad songs about the day-to-day pathos of well-to-do suburban white kids?" a critic from the Riverfront Times in St. Louis asked.

But guess what: With the release of two new albums last week, Oberst has once again lived up to the hype. Both I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, released simultaneously on the Saddle Creek record label Oberst co-founded, perfectly capture the current moment in time, the place that finds us both numb and achingly hopeful. From the crying steel guitars and Emmylou Harris' backing vocals on Wide Awake to the methodical punch of Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner's playing on Digital Ash, these CDs are shoot-out-the-lights-lay-down-in-the-dark-
on-the-cold-hard-floor-and-just-soak-it-all-in-like-whiskey good. (See review below.)

Although the two albums are actually closer in nature than most siblings, Oberst has planned two distinct tours to mirror them. The I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning tour will arrive Thursday at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts in Miami. A couple of years ago, Bright Eyes -- composed of more than a dozen vagabond Omaha musicians, including a tuba player -- performed at Churchill's in Little Haiti before returning eight months later to a converted church in Little Havana with a different lineup of musicians, playing almost entirely new material. In these paralyzing, stagnant times, the evolution of Conor Oberst has been that fast.

So far on his current tour, Oberst has appeared as either a bored savant or a frustrated punk, toppling amps and flinging guitars in a manner that can be described only as a hissy fit, since it's hard to relay true anger while wearing a belly shirt. But when he rips into the song "When the President Talks to God" and sings harshly of the man's asking permission to "rape our women's rights" while wondering if President Bush "smell[s] his own bullshit," Oberst's spastic aggression is far from a pose.

Oberst knows we're "waiting for the explosion," as he puts it, whether it's in our personal lives or the airplane in which we make our escape. But directly addressing the president is actually an anomaly for Oberst. His work is not filled with Bush-bashing or shouted slogans like "The revolution starts now!" His work is personal. It's making love on the couch while a televised war is playing in the background. It's parents touting their religion to their kids while they sleep in separate houses. It's feeling lost with "the smoke coming out of our mouths on all those hooded-sweatshirt walks."

"I didn't really think about politics very much until they sort of invaded my life and kept me up at night, made me anxious and worried," Oberst says on an interview CD released by Saddle Creek. "If something's on my mind a lot, it usually finds its way into the songs. I prefer to focus on, like, how these things affect individuals in their lives … seeing the way it affects average people."

Even when Oberst fell prey to the media -- and even after he survived that other rock 'n' roll kiss of death, a brief fling with Winona Ryder -- his music attacked back, though not overtly so. There's only so far you can go with the "me-looking-at-you-looking-at-me thing," he explains.

Oberst relocated from Omaha to New York's East Village last winter and began spending his time intoxicated by either the city or shots of Jameson at the nearest bar. The experience became the catalyst for I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. "New York City is like a person: Sometimes, it's nice to you, and sometimes, it's mean to you," Oberst says -- hence, the album's weird mixture of distress and optimism.

Almost a perfectionist at being imperfect, Oberst sings in a voice that always cracks with emotion. Every time he reaches, he strains. How perfect is that? "I could have been a famous singer if I had someone else's voice," he rages in one song. "But failure always sounded better/Let's fuck it up, boys/ Make some noise!"

Oberst admits that at Lincoln's Presto Recording Studio, he and longtime producer Mike Mogis labor over the musical details. "We argue and obsess," he says. And when they just fuck it up and make some noise, the result is disarming.

On Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, his lyrics don't scratch and prick, they cut and slash ("I'm a single cell on a serpent's tongue") and make broad incisions ("the arc of time, the stench of sex, the innocence you can't protect"). But if the lyrics' precision is akin to needlepoint, the music on both albums, particularly I'm Wide Awake, is pure Play-Doh, merrily molding itself to follow Oberst's singing, even when he's "getting way down, way down to the bottom of everything."

To set up "At the Bottom of Everything," which opens I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning, a spoken intro begins with a gulp of water and ends with drowning in the deep blue sea. But along the way, there's "a wonderful splash" that the rollicking music can't wait to reach.

That's the genius of Bright Eyes, finding the beauty and the "yellow bird" of hope through all this. Even though Digital Ash is pretty much a death march, with the help of Zinner, it's full of surprises and frantic percussion.

In interviews, Oberst rattles off his musical influences as if he's raking up a pile of leaves: Louis Armstrong, Tom Waits, The Pixies, Fugazi, Neil Young, Pavement, The Replacements, Bruce Springsteen, Superchunk. But it's the bands he has championed through the halls of Saddle Creek that need to be highlighted: Azure Ray, Cursive, Rilo Kiley, Mayday, Sorry About Dresden, The Good Life and electro-rock band The Faint, which will back him up when he tours behind Digital Ash later this year.

When Lifted was released, Saddle Creek was a two-person operation. Today, it is an internationally renowned label with offices stretching from its home base in Omaha to Europe. "It's been a gradual process from making cassette tapes and 7-inchers," Oberst says modestly.

Since Oberst started performing at 13, everything but his talent has come gradually. But the leap Saddle Creek has made, which he has carefully orchestrated while sitting back and harvesting talent from Omaha and abroad, is remarkable. "I wouldn't have the confidence in what we're doing if it wasn't based out of love and friendship, and that's incredibly unique in the music world," he says. "At the end of the day, it's awesome for me to know that the people promoting my music are my friends, and they're doing it because they love me and I love them and we've just been doing this since we were kids. … We all want success and we all want to sell records, but that's not why we're doing it."

Coming from anyone else, all that love talk would be nauseating. But it's worth embracing in Oberst's case. Perhaps too precious in the past, Oberst presently removes the corniness from the concept of peace, love and understanding -- something of which few artists are capable and we are very much in need.

Although Oberst might believe in all the people living life as one, to paraphrase another of his primary influences, his songs are instead filled with realistic moments: passing a flask on a train; waiting to see who falls down drunk first; suffering the unadvertised nightmares of uplifting medications; admitting, "The love I sell you in the evening by morning won't exist." Clearly, Oberst doesn't sing about love the way Lenny Kravitz sings about love.

Stretching our tolerance for him, Oberst has created a new recording label based in New York called Team Love. Saddle Creek has not only gotten so big that it kicked itself when it lost out on signing one of the few breakout bands of 2004, The Arcade Fire, after a demo got buried in paperwork, but it has also become a label by committee. For Oberst, it just takes too damn long to release an artist's music, especially when it's music he "loves," such as the joyous Tilly and the Wall, the soulful 20-year-old Willy Mason and Omaha's homegrown rapper Mars Black.

An outspoken advocate against Clear Channel Communications and its radio monopoly, Oberst has issued a mandate that all music released by Team Love will be made free to download once it's available on CD. And he doesn't just mean a song or two but entire albums. "Bands have to think the way we do to want to do that," he explains.

All the words written and spoken about Oberst during the media blitz of recent weeks may outnumber his sales. But he may also prove that you can have longevity, make a solid living and keep your integrity. In some odd way, his success is relative to ours.

Oberst was one of the few new artists last fall to be called up for the Vote for Change Tour. "Michael Stipe of R.E.M. sort of brought it to my attention and said it would be a great way to participate," Oberst says. "And to me, I thought it had the best chance of affecting the outcome [of the presidential election]. … Obviously, the outcome was tragic. But I don't regret participating."

Participating is key, whether it's standing up and singing in front of 20,000 rabid Springsteen fans who don't know who the hell you are or getting out of bed every morning not knowing where you've been or where you're headed. On Lifted, Oberst sang, "The future's got me worried, such awful thoughts/My head's a carousel of pictures/The spinning never stops/I just want someone to walk in front/And I'll follow the leader."

This time out, the world has made him "dizzy again/You'd think after 22 years, I'd be used to the spin/And it only feels worse when I stay in one place/So I'm always pacing around or walking away."

Yet Oberst is no longer looking to follow anyone. In fact, there is no one for him to follow. Like the rest of us, he has realized that we are without a leader. But here he is, that rare troubadour we can faithfully buy into, right up till that "wonderful splash."

Bright Eyes will perform 7 p.m. Thursday at the Gusman Center for the Performing Arts' Olympia Theater, 174 E. Flagler St. in Miami. Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter and Neva Dinova will open the show. Tickets cost $22. Call 305/374-2444 or visit www.gusmancenter.org.

Oberst's best

Bright Eyes takes two big steps forward with I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.

As if it were any surprise, the prolific Conor Oberst hasn't taken long to follow up 2002's acclaimed Lifted or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground with two even more rousing efforts, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. I'm Wide Awake is the Americana fusion album at which Oberst has been hinting for a few years now. Woozy jamborees such as "Train Under Water" and "Old Soul Song (For the New World Order)" stand tall alongside saloon stompers such as "Another Travelin' Song," which features Southern belle Emmylou Harris' wonderful backing harmonies. While Ryan Adams' albums have all the spontaneity of an awards show, I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is a drunken yet finely crafted free-for-all that should add a country fringe to Oberst's growing fan base.

Oberst explores new avenues on Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. A Kid A-like chronicle filled with processed beats sputtering and crackling under dreamy synth banks and new wave affectations, it's a bold move for the sensitive songwriter, as his wistful words are somewhat lost amid all the studio fiddling. But with the aid of Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner and The Postal Service's Jimmy Tamborello, tracks such as "Arc of Time (Time Code)" and "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)" ensure that Oberst's ambition outshines his inexperience. While I'm Wide Awake is easier to digest, Digital Ash demands more of your patience, its rewards uncovered after repeated listens.

Although Oberst could have released a single bloated effort ripe for disparagement, neither of his new CDs feels overstuffed. With both albums' first singles executing a Billboard coup by debuting at No. 1 and No. 2, and his status getting a major boost from last fall's Vote for Change Tour, Oberst has evolved from a modest revelation into a one-man revolution.

-- Kiran Aditham