Conor Oberst interview

Published on Friday 15 August 2008 11:34

Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes went up a mountain in Mexico and returned with a sparse new sound. JON PARELES hears the story

WHAT HAPPENED TO BRIGHT Eyes? For the last decade the songwriter Conor Oberst has released the vast majority of his songs under that name, working with groups small and large. Dipping into styles from folk-rock to punk to country to electronica, Bright Eyes relied on Oberst's sometimes painfully candid songs about romance, songwriting, politics and the porous boundary between art and life, always questioning his own honesty as he blurted things out. He could sound as tormented as the emo rockers, who ultimately turned sensitivity into self-parody, but he also harked back to the 1960s, with tunes that baby boomers could appreciate.

Bright Eyes has been an indie rock success story, progressing from home recordings to a Top Ten album (I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning in 2005) without a hit single or a major label. But this month Oberst released an album under his own name, titled Conor Oberst, the way that many songwriters do in order to signal a new start. But over a vegetarian burger in New York's Lower East Side, Oberst tells me it's not as weighty as all that.

Still boyish and introspective at 28, with the slight twang and unfailing politeness of his Midwestern upbringing, Oberst talks about his music and career with a mixture of humility – he takes pains to credit collaborators and friends – and something like curiosity.

The change in billing, he says, arose because Mike Mogis, whose instruments and production have increasingly defined the sound of Bright Eyes, isn't on the album. He was busy with the studio that he and Oberst recently finished building in their hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. Mogis wanted to spend time in the studio and with his four-year-old daughter. But he still mixed Conor Oberst, and the other full member of Bright Eyes, Nate Walcott, played keyboards.

So, there's no rift, but while Mogis stayed in Omaha, Oberst, typically, was restless. "I didn't want to twiddle my thumbs. The way my life's structured I don't stay in a place for more than a couple months."

He had a batch of songs and a plan to simplify the Bright Eyes sound. Their most recent album, Cassadaga, was a painstaking, sprawling project, wrapping elaborate orchestral arrangements around Oberst's songs about break-ups, rehab, spiritual quests and life as a musician. Released in 2007, Cassadaga took a year to complete, in multiple studios. And the results were mixed: the spontaneity and unguarded tone that Oberst's fans cherish were often sacrificed.

For his new album Oberst decided to set limits: a few musicians, a short time. "A lot of what happens is, for me anyway, a reaction to what came before," he says. "I really wanted to hear space in this music and not have it become too bloated with instrumentation, and to keep the essence of the song." He's not striving for a hit single; his goals, he says, are "freedom and longevity". The hit, like Neil Young's Heart of Gold, might turn up sooner or later.

"A lot of people who achieve a certain amount of those two things, freedom and longevity, I think they inevitably at some point have a height – a song or an album that gives them a little leverage to do what they want. Sometimes I think, 'Well, do I need that to happen to me?' But I don't know if I do. It doesn't seem to be affecting anything.

"My friends who are in the next tier of celebrity, what they have to deal with – it doesn't look like any fun at all."

The last time he released albums as Conor Oberst, from 1993 to 1996, they were on cassettes. His first songs were home-recorded and strictly lo-fi, with the teenage Oberst – before his voice changed – unveiling all his insecurities on a four-track tape.

After a few years in Commander Venus (alongside musicians who would end up in two other Omaha bands, Cursive and The Faint), Oberst started working with various musicians as Bright Eyes. His lyrics, sung with quivering immediacy, revealed every one of his growing pains. Like his albums with Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst is a collection of songs about love, mortality, the state of the world and the lure of the road. But the lyrics are more imagistic than narrative. And unlike many of Oberst's previous songs, they rarely leave a listener wondering who the real-life people were behind the lyrics.

One song that does, Danny Callahan, is about a boy dying with "bad bone marrow". The song is about a boy Oberst met for a moment. "I don't know if that was his last name," he says. "I know it was his first name. When you write a song, the goal is not to convey the details of your life. You should write a memoir or something if that's what you're going to do. The idea is to get to a truth that is apart from the person who created it, something that anyone can look at and find something that resonates as being true – not true in the factual sense, but true in the more universal sense, a truth that you can see."

His songs have often been called confessional, but he doesn't like the term. "I'll always draw from my experiences because that's the material that's most readily available. But I don't make any bones about drawing from other people's experiences. Also, when I write a song, the pronoun is really not important. I'll even forget sometimes and sing the wrong pronoun, whether it's she or he or it or I or you. Because they're all interchangeable. It's what comes after that, the rest of the line – that's where the truth is going to be."

Lately, he says, his songs have become more opaque. Facing larger audiences he is exposing less; the diaristic details are still there, but they mingle with Dylanesque enigmas. At first, he says, "I was writing for myself, for my ten friends that I knew were going to listen to it, and that was it. Then you can't deny that there's other people, strangers, that are not only going to be hearing it and absorbing it but judging you. That's always a weird thing to realise."

Still, there's nothing detached about the new songs. He's still looking inward, as he does in Eagle on a Pole: "It's such a long way back to all the fun I had / When nothing ever seemed to bother me."

The sound of the music is sparse and rootsy, a straightforward recording of a handful of musicians making down-home connections to folk, country and the 1960s rock of Grateful Dead and The Band. It's a world away from Top Ten radio formats, but disarmingly natural. The songs can be jaunty or sorrowful, bruised or optimistic, and often all at once, from the gallows humour honky-tonk of I Don't Want to Die (in the Hospital) to the quietly haunted fingerpicking and disillusionment of Lenders in the Temple: "Something so wild turned to paper / If I loved you well, that's my fault."

He made the album with a few friends in an out-of-the-way place, a small mountainside resort hotel overlooking Valle Mstico, in Tepoztln, Mexico, a well-known place for UFO sightings.

Oberst has a penchant for the paranormal – Cassadaga was named after a century-old community of spiritualists in Florida. "I really believe in the way the energy can consolidate in certain geographical spots," he says. "You can find it in a lot of different places, beautiful natural spots, or if you look at Islam or Judaism or Christianity, these ideas of holy places. With Cassadaga, so many minds focusing on the same concept in the same place really reverberates in the air and everywhere. Any place where people are praying and meditating and tuning their minds for one reason, I think you can feel it. I know that sounds a little hippy-dippy."

Oberst and his musicians spent five weeks in Tepoztln. Their equipment was hauled up narrow roads by pickup truck; the piano wouldn't fit through any doorways and stayed on a porch, where it "got more and more out of tune". The musicians included Walcott, from Bright Eyes, and other familiar sidemen. The album was recorded on 16-track tape – "the first record I've made in probably five years that hasn't been inside a computer at some point," Oberst says. And the microphones captured not only the instruments, but crickets and the thud of fireworks – a frequent occurrence – from the valley below.

One drunken night the musicians cajoled Oberst into calling Janet Weiss, the drummer from Sleater-Kinney, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks and, in 2007, Bright Eyes. He casually invited her to Mexico; she went down for a weekend and added a backing vocal. "You can't say no to that guy," she says. "He's like the kindest person you ever met. And so much fun. You know something good is going to happen when you hang out with that crew.

"You couldn't get away from the fact that you were in natural surroundings. There were spiders and birds and bats. It was very organic, the exact opposite of a typical studio. I think it's really important for him to be transported into some sort of zone, some sort of creative space where something's going to happen, and it's not going to feel like work."

Oberst has a year of work lined up without Bright Eyes. He's touring with the Mystic Valley Band – the musicians from the new album. He's also working on an album with guitarist M Ward and Jim James, the singer and leader of My Morning Jacket.

"One of the recurring themes in my life, and I think on the record too, is just the optimism of changing scenery," Oberst says. "It's escapism in a sense. But it's not running from something so much as it is: 'I wonder what's ahead. I wonder what better thing I can find in the next place'."

&#149 Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band play the Hydro Connect Festival in Inveraray on 30 August.