Fri Oct 18, Showbox, $13/$15.
What age were you when you started writing lyrics?
"I guess I was about 11 or 12."
So what was your motivation? When I was 11 or 12, I didn't even have conscious thought.
"I didn't really take too much time to think about whether I should be doing it. I just felt like I wanted to. Even before that, I had been into writing stuff down, making up stories, singing to myself. It started off as catharsis. Now, it's more about finding a common thread between myself and the other humans walking around [me]."
Do you have a problem with the humans walking around you?
"No... well, I have a problem with some of them but...."
What type?
"Just the hateful, ignorant types that do stupid shit, you know?"
(My interview with Conor Oberst, March 2002)
Emotions become hyper-real during the formative years. Life is a giddy swirl of sensations that you frequently wish you could stop. She didn't speak to me, cast her eyes in that jerk's direction for a few seconds, fuck, what should I do? Kill myself? Pack a snowball full of stones? Find a road to pull off of?
"The spinning never stops," Conor Oberst laments on "Nothing Gets Crossed Out" from the new Bright Eyes album, Lifted. "Like when I fell under the weight of a schoolboy crush. I started carrying her books and doing lots of drugs. I almost forgot who I was but came to my senses...."
Child prodigies freak the shit out of me. Where do they draw their inspiration from? What tragedies could they have experienced to imbue their art with such resonance? Listening to Conor Oberst (a resident of Omaha, Nebraska) freaks me out. When I saw Bright Eyes over a year ago in Brighton, England, Oberst scared me with the depth of his angst, like Leonard Cohen trapped within a young buck's body and given access to some of life's complexities: shoulders rounded like a future suicide, shaking from his seat, screaming out the intricately patterned words to his beautiful, poetic songs. How can you sing the blues when you're in your teens? Maybe it's the only age you should: Life has a peculiar opaqueness and brilliance and luster that become dulled with the onset of age.
Oberst has released at least seven albums--the first two as Commander Venus, four with Bright Eyes, and 2002's Read Music/Speak Spanish with his punk rock pals Desaparecidos--and he's still only 23. He jokes morbidly; the way only Walter Matthau should. He invents imaginary friends and deaths and confuses them with real torments. He's like a cross between Calvin (the sweetly psychotic boy with the stuffed tiger from the Bill Watterson cartoon strip), Calvin (Johnson, retarded sex God of Olympia), and a Calvin I've yet to meet, but who would be worrying me with his manipulative skills. He has very wide eyes.
"I never hated everything," he says. "I just hated certain things. I hated myself a lot. I always received a lot of love, but never felt like I deserved it."
"I knew a woman: She was dignified and true," sings Oberst on "Waste of Paint" from the new Bright Eyes album, subtitled The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (it comes with a 32-page booklet of his lyrics, all of which read well as stories). "Her love for her man was one of her many virtues. Until one day, she found out that he had lied and decided the rest of her life, from that point on, would be a lie...."
I saw Oberst play a solo show in San Francisco earlier this year, in front of a (too) reverential crowd best left comparing the sequence of notes on the latest Godspeed You Black Emperor release. It was marvelous to hear his words unadorned, funny and mental, ridiculously overwrought in places and rooted in the deepest wallows of privileged American self-pity (like, How Much Shall I Pay My Therapist This Month to Indulge My Ego), but I missed the full-on rock experience. There are too many poets. There aren't enough places to dance. If I want poetry, I'll cruise 17-year-olds' gothic websites with everyone else.
I rate Conor Oberst above virtually every singer/composer/poet I've heard in many years. He'll be playing Seattle with a full orchestra. I'm in Brighton. I really envy you.
