Oberst never found out how it went over in middle America, but on the internet, the clip of his performance flew around the left-leaning reaches of the blogosphere — as did a subsequent free download of the song offered on iTunes. It generated some backlash, in the form of angry e-mail messages to “pretty much everyone associated with me, from our publicist to our booking agent to the label.”
It also earned him a new coterie of admirers, but the ardor was somewhat short-lived. Having made his statement, Oberst didn’t feel the need to keep making it over and over. “I think since then I’ve managed to disappoint the activist contingent of our fan base, or the people that thought I was going to be that full-time, all the time,” he says.
Cassadaga has its share of topical asides, but asides is mostly all they are. Oberst’s concerns on the album seem both more personal and grander than any particular politician or war. The songs are about searching for insight, or connection, or a place to call home. They are pretty sincere. But Oberst’s seriousness is easy to overemphasize. He isn’t averse to a little rock ‘n’ roll insouciance. On the rollicking “Hot Knives”, he sneers, “Oh, I’ve made love/Yeah, I’ve been fucked/So what?”
BRIGHT EYES MYTH #5: THE MYTH OF THE BAND
The tendency is to talk about Oberst and Bright Eyes interchangeably, as if the band is more an alter ego than a separate entity. Until recently, he was the only official, full-time member. But with Cassadaga, he finally has permanent partners in his longtime friends Mike Mogis and Nate Wolcott. Mogis, a multi-instrumentalist who has served as engineer and producer on most of Oberst’s recordings, has also produced much of the Saddle Creek label’s output. Wolcott, a horn and keyboard player, handles the band’s increasingly sophisticated orchestral arrangements.
The result is expansive and varied, with washes of strings and shivery female voices emerging at unexpected points. “Make A Plan To Love Me”, possibly Oberst’s most adult bit of seduction, has pillowy Bacharach-like production. The album sounds big and full but rarely chaotic, a balance Oberst credits to Mogis.
“Even on some of the smaller band songs, it’s not even that there was a lot of multitracking or layering,” he says. “It’s just the tones that Mike was getting were just so fat, all the acoustic guitars and everything.”
Mogis’ work with Bright Eyes and other Omaha bands has made him something of an in-demand producer, for bands including Rilo Kiley and Sweden’s Concretes. “He’s just become a really amazing engineer,” Oberst says. “Not to get all nostalgic, but it is funny to think back to Letting Off The Happiness, 1998, his eight-track in my parents’ laundry room, working out these songs. We tried our best and everything, but just to see how far the whole thing has come is cool. I’m really proud of him and all the work he does outside our band.”
Oberst’s sturdy melodies get a lot of other assistance on Cassadaga, most notably from new collaborator Anton Patzner, a violinist whose plangent playing recalls Steve Wickham’s spirited fiddling with the Waterboys. Other guests include former Sleater-Kinney drummer Janet Weiss, Tortoise percussionist John McEntire, and Oberst’s close friend M. Ward, who came along on a short Bright Eyes tour earlier this year.
And then there are the ubiquitous David Rawlings and Gillian Welch. Although Welch appears on only one song, the honky-tonkish “Classic Cars”, Oberst says they recorded other things together that he hopes to release at some point.
Welch and Rawlings left him in lingering awe. “They’re like encyclopedias with the songs they know,” he says. “They know every single song that’s ever been written. They stayed at my house for like a week once; we just did some shows and hung out. And they really will wake up in the morning and they’ll start playing music. If you could ever imagine like, ‘Oh man, Gillian Welch is singing in my kitchen,’ that’s the way they are. They live and breathe it.”
NEW BRIGHT EYES MYTH #1: THE MYTH OF MATURITY
Cassadaga reaches its thematic payoff on the penultimate track, with the plainspoken title “I Must Belong Somewhere”. On the chorus, Oberst sings, “Everything must belong somewhere/I know that now, that’s why I’m staying here.” It is clear from the context that “here” doesn’t mean any one place; more like “here” in the John Lennon sense of “Be here now.” It sounds like a statement of acceptance, if not complete contentment. It is a more hopeful sentiment than some of Oberst’s past manifestos — and inherently more conditional, too.
I suggest to him that the album feels in some ways less declarative than his earlier work, and more parenthetical. “I think that’s just getting older,” he says. “And realizing that most of those statements are only true for so long. And then they get blown away.”
The next night, I go to see Bright Eyes play the second of two sold-out shows at the Bowery Ballroom on the Lower East Side. The band, which includes Patzner and M. Ward, is loose and lively. The crowd looks a little older than I expected — more late 20s than late teens — but then I consider that anyone who was 21 when the first Bright Eyes album appeared will be 30 this year. Favorites from Lifted and I’m Wide Awake get the loudest cheers. But it seems like a good sign that the few new songs in the set list (including some from the Four Winds EP, released in March) are among the highlights.
When The New York Times runs a review of the shows a few days later, the headline reads, “All Grown Up and Hard at Work.”
ND contributing editor Jesse Fox Mayshark is sitting at a desk on the Upper East Side, occasionally tossing his bangs back from his receding hairline, drinking serial cups of black coffee and worrying about deadlines.
