As the lead singer of the band Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst was always singing about nostalgia. But it’s one thing to sing about nostalgia when you’re 19. It’s another thing to sing about nostalgia at 40. What happens when the nostalgia you invented in your youth was somehow clairvoyant? Bright Eyes shows us that emotion prognosticated might indeed be quite similar to emotion recollected in tranquility. The thing is this: experience doesn’t need to invent imagery of babies drowning in bathtubs to evoke pathos. Life itself will do.
Bright Eyes’s new album, “Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was” returns to some of the band’s core themes, but with the wisdom of age. I’ve been a Bright Eyes fan since my teens and listening to the album felt like coming home, but knowing that it might be for the last time. There’s the same earnestness there always was, but it’s salted with firsthand knowledge of the power of the unspoken. In the balance between the confessional and the unsaid, Oberst has found poignancy, which he harnesses to stunning effect.
One of the beautiful things about having made art since you were a teen is that you can always go back and see how much of what you thought back then was true. Turns out you might have been right more often than not. Oberst discovers this in “Down in the Weeds.” The visions and revisions are delicious.
Oberst has been singing his angst since he was a teen. Time passes. You get older, but the same old wounds are always there, waiting to be re-opened. Oberst, who is now 40, brings the full force of his artistic maturity to the old themes of loss, loneliness, depression, and alienation, recapturing them in lyrics that are spare and less melodramatic than the material of his younger years, but just as biting. Looking back and forward are about the same. In “Forced Convalescence” Oberst sings: “I’m not afraid of the future / Have to suffer and repeat.” There’s an awareness that the demons never quite go away. We encounter them again and again, in the same old form, or in new form in disguise.
As Pitchfork notes, “the band deliberately ransacked aspects from their back-catalog.” Anyone who knows the Bright Eyes catalog by heart will find echoes of the old tunes, warped as if filtered by memory or time. Bright Eyes was always apocalyptic and Oberst was often criticized for this vein. But in this world of pandemic, climate change, and Constitutional crisis, I can’t help but think that perhaps Oberst was just paying better attention than the rest of us. The tremors of our lives now were always there, warning us; the big one has just finally hit.
In 2005, in Bright Eyes’s album “I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning,” Oberst sang in “Land-Locked Blues:” “…Laura’s asleep in my bed / As I’m leaving she wakes up and says, / “I dreamed you were carried away on the crest of a wave / Baby, don’t go away, come here.” Fifteen years later, Oberst is still looking at waves, but he’s not being carried away by them. He’s facing them head on. In “Mariana Trench” Oberst sings: “Look up at that big wave… Look down in that Mariana Trench.” In the old days, Oberst sang about dead babies and the imagery always sounded abstract. Now, he’s looking down at his brother’s grave and there’s nothing artful to extract except for that “formal feeling,” that comes when the grief is so intense there’s only numbness there to fill it out. The infant is there, but this one feels real, more like an unrealized child: “Little infant in a plastic box/ shedding incubator tears/ she doesn’t know yet what a comet does / You’re approaching even as you disappear.”
The brother comes back later in the album: “My phantom brother came to me / his backlit face was hard to see…” But the ghosts of family members past are replaced by the family members still present: “My aging mother steeled herself / against the gravity she felt / braced for another fainting spell.” Oberst’s longtime fascination with death and the memento mori is no longer an abstract concept. In “Tilt-a-Whirl” “Life’s a lonely love affair…It vanishes into thin air/ so suddenly.” For those of us worried about our aging parents and COVID-19, the song is almost too much. It’s a song about the premonition of loss, and the concrete losses that COVID-19 has brought us.
Oberst was always a singer able to draw from the collective conscious and unconscious, able to find the perfect image to capture alienation and loneliness. The imagery Oberst draws from in “Down in the Weeds,” revisits his same old themes, but these aren’t abstract images drawn because they are artistically correct; these have all the dirt of life still attached to them. The songs in “Down in the Weeds” are hard-earned songs, made of the raw stuff of life. In “Pan and Broom” he sings: “Is that blood on your hands / or chocolate and fruit?”
In “Persona Non Grata” we find ourselves with two estranged lovers. The bare simplicity of the song takes my breath away every time. Oberst is still wailing into the microphone, but he’s not veiling the grief behind the protection of his own cleverness. The spare lyrics reveal the raw emotion. And the rhymes are great. “Made a life of deception / and passive aggression” along with the implausible rhyme of “fallen leaves” and “West Village Halloween.”
“Comet Song” ends the album and I won’t give much away, except that it’s utterly devastating in the way something honest and true is utterly devastating. This is the music of divorce, of heartbreak. Oberst finally gave his heart away. The singer who once sang, “You can count on me to leave” has been left bereft. “Wish I could apologize and come in from the cold.”
All the songs of old lovers are gone. Now Oberst is just “dreaming of my ex-wife’s face.” There’s a perfect image for it that comes next: “Felt so hot in the parking lot / The car windows were all rolled up / Just a dog dying in a Chevrolet.” And it all could be so maudlin were it not for the fragility of Oberst’s vocals, that, like the Bright Eyes of old, tremor on the edge of nervous breakdown.
Oberst knows where his pain comes from now. And this is the wisdom we don’t get in his earlier albums, “What happens will be / Pain of my own making.” Maybe we all “catastrophize…turning forty.” But amid all the transcendence and pain, “there’s no escaping the housework.”
This not a Bright Eyes imagining love gone before it’s even arrived. This is the Bright Eyes that has loved and lost. Sometimes bands give up the ghost. Bright Eyes breathes it in in this one.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.