I & I: Growing Up with Bright Eyes

Last Tuesday night, one of my friends showed me a YouTube video Bright Eyes had released of a listening party of their new album, The People’s Key. You could listen to the entire record while watching a couple members of the band and some other random people (along with a dog) wandering in and out of the room, drinking and listening. This development further fueled the gleeful feeling I’d felt the day before when I found out the album had been made available to stream in full on NPR’s website.

I guess glee isn’t an emotion most normal people associate with Bright Eyes, but there you have it.

I sat down on the couch and placed my laptop on my coffee table to watch and listen. I decided I’d take notes throughout, so I could write a review – because I’m sure there won’t be very many of those coming out in the coming weeks.

I wrote a few things down during my listening party of a listening party, and when I read back over them during a brief pause in the music while frontman Conor Oberst flipped the vinyl, I decided it’d be kind of stupid of me to review something Oberst had come out with. The notes I had at that point read like something an adolescent girl would write about a new Justin Bieber single. I almost wanted to rip the sheet out and fold it up very intricately, then pass it to a girl as subtly as possible while I blushed profusely.

I realized a review of this album would be terribly biased if done by me. It’d read like a sales pitch, really, because I’ve been unable to find fault with anything Oberst has come out with since I became an avid Bright Eyes listener nearly a decade ago. I’ll be the first to admit that I have a pretty hefty man crush on the guy, and he is undoubtedly my favorite living musician. If I wrote a review of The People’s Key, the finished product would probably be very similar to Kanye West reviewing one of his own albums (minus the CAPS lock). My adoration prevents me from being critical, like how love makes you blind.

My older brother, Kevin, introduced me to Bright Eyes when I was 13. He gave me a burnt version of Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground shortly after it was released in 2002. This would probably be a better story if I said I listened to it and fell in love with everything about it immediately, but that isn’t the case. I listened to the first 10 minutes or so, and didn’t dig it at all. The first eight minutes consisted of a guy and girl speaking unintelligibly while they were in a car, and the first song didn’t seem like anything too special. I was quick to dismiss it. I told my brother this, and said Dashboard Confessional was much better. I didn’t think this Oberst guy was nearly as talented a lyricist as Chris Carrabba. My brother told me that I was just completely wrong. I disagreed and then went back into my bedroom, probably to listen to Good Charlotte or something.

A few months later, I heard the song “Bowl of Oranges” while we were sitting in our hotel room on a rainy day during our family’s annual beach vacation. I told Kev it wasn’t bad. Truth was, I thought it was great, but had too much pride in my flawless musical taste to admit that he may have been onto something when he gave me Lifted.

“Yeah, that’s a good one, but that’s not how most of his songs sound,” he said, and then we had a marathon listening session.

This is really fucking melodramatic, but I do not believe I have ever been the same.

I won’t downplay the possibility that I was probably in the perfect position at the time to become a Bright Eyes fan, because I got into them while I was experiencing my first instance of heartbreak (if you can legitimately call it that at such an age), which is something Oberst addressed in his songs of the time as often as Juvenile addresses bitches and expensive cars. He made melancholy his territory the way Bob Marley made marijuana his.

Oberst and I were both sad and pissed off, it seemed, but the difference was that he was much, much better at being sad and pissed off than I was or thought I ever could be. I began listening to Bright Eyes constantly, and pasting his lyrics in my AOL Instant Messenger profile, because he had this knack for always saying the things I was feeling and wanted to say but was unable to articulate on my own. Back then, that was how you let others know about your emotions.

When my ex-girlfriend (if you can legitimately call it that at such an age) took her affection elsewhere and I found out about it from a friend of hers, I listened to “Haligh, Haligh, a Lie, Haligh” incessantly. I’d drink in my friend’s basement and lament my loss while we listened to “If Winter Ends” and claimed that we drank to stay warm while we killed selected memories. We were like seasoned alcoholic divorcees, not high school freshmen stealing gin from our parents.

Throughout high school and into college, I was able to keep drawing parallels between my life and the songs Oberst would sing. The only difference was the lyrics now found themselves on my Facebook profile as AIM became antiquated and I needed to find another digital way to express myself. I would rely on his old songs to put words to my emotions, and then he’d come out with newer stuff that seemed to be almost directed toward what I was experiencing (and yes, obviously some of this was because I was looking for these partial similarities). When I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn came out at the same time during my senior year of high school, it was like some kind of holiday for me. I remember being happy with life in general at that time. I was old enough then to actually date someone seriously, and I was doing that. So, I was just absolutely floored when I heard “First Day of My Life.” It didn’t mesh with the rest of the album emotionally, really, but it showed me that Oberst was capable of being decently happy and singing about it.

When that relationship decayed, I went back to my old ways and listened to “Gold Mine Gutted” and pretty much all of his other sad songs. I was living in Pennsylvania and drinking on the weekends, and I also hoped I’d never see this girl again, so “Landlocked Blues” became a favorite.

In college, I somehow managed to sleep with a female friend. I’d been in love with her since high school, but had drifted into the purely Platonic zone and stayed there, until we got drunk and went at it in her dorm room one night. She didn’t want things to change between us, though, and I was pretty saddened by this. I listened to “Take it Easy, Love Nothing” so often in the following months that my roommate wanted to strangle me. The song – which was somehow simultaneously gritty and Super Nintendo techno-sounding – and its lyrics encapsulated almost exactly how I was feeling. I didn’t want to have feelings for anyone, and would be fine taking my vengeance out on other girls (who had nothing at all to do with my friend and the way she viewed our relationship) by way of fake stoicism and meaningless sex. It was perfect.

I can’t say I wasn’t emo.

Cassadega came out in 2007, Bright Eyes went on tour, and then Oberst disappeared for a while. Later

that year, I threw myself into the most serious and long-lasting relationship I’ve been in so far in my 23 years on earth. I was so in love, I remember, that I would actually avoid Bright Eyes. I felt like I didn’t need to hear much depressing music. I listened to more upbeat stuff, and even found myself enjoying some of the sentiments on Boyz II Men’s greatest hits album, Legacy. It was disgusting. When I talk to my friends about that era, they say that I was literally “a different person.”

I guess when you’re very emotionally invested in something and it ends, it’s almost always going to be kind of a terrible experience. The way this particular relationship ended was, for lack of any better description, extremely bad. It was just before the end of my sophomore year. I was totally devastated, and I did two things: I took a summer internship at a newspaper hours and hours away from her and everybody else I knew, and I started listening to Bright Eyes again. All the time. I think my time at that internship might have been a period when I was the most acutely upset I’ve ever been over a woman. I would even listen to Bright Eyes while I was running, although it strikes me as very atypical music to listen to during physical exertion.

My internship ended on Friday, August 1, 2008. The next Tuesday, Oberst’s self-titled album came out. I’d been essentially living under a rock most of the summer, splitting my time between an office and the beach and a tiny apartment with no Internet, so I hadn’t read up on how Oberst had gone to Mexico to record Conor Oberst with some friends he eventually dubbed The Mystic Valley Band.

The first time I listened to it, I couldn’t even fucking believe it. Had it been out in May, it would’ve easily been the soundtrack to my summer. If my self-serving analysis is correct, the majority of the album was not only about love lost, but about leaving places of familiarity to regroup from the aforementioned love loss.

I read an interview with Oberst later that month, and he spoke about breaking up with his longtime girlfriend, musician Maria Taylor. After that, he left for Moab, Utah, and then Tepoztlan, Mexico, where he recorded the album. Both were desolate, foreign places.

When Outer South came out in May 2009, I listened and was surprised there was very little talk of female-induced depression at all. Things seemed to be looking up for Oberst, and, oddly enough, the same was happening for me.

Oberst’s work with The Mystic Valley Band was different musically than most Bright Eyes songs, but it seemed like he was still coming out with stuff that I could really empathize with. He was still angry, but not as angry, and women didn’t seem to be such a catalyst for the remaining anger.

This was fine, I thought, and I felt the same way myself. I was a big fan of The Mystic Valley Band. I went to see them play live, and would list it among my favorite shows even though Oberst didn’t play one Bright Eyes song. (He and Ben Kweller did cover the theme from Ghostbusters, though.) Most of my friends didn’t like it so much, because they’d gotten so used to Oberst being a very, very sad person, or at least portraying one through his music.

I was no longer as upset or infatuated with heartbreak as I had been when I was a teenager. It was still there, somewhere, but it wasn’t such a severe feeling anymore. I was at a point where it wasn’t really a necessity for him to come out with more sad songs, because I didn’t feel like I’d be affected by them in the same way. I was learning how to really embrace being alone, and to not make some big deal out of it. I’d learned that there could always be something upsetting about relationships, but that all the time and energy I was dedicating to the aftermath wasn’t really worth it, or helping anything.

(I was still angry, though, and with no real reason to be.)

So, when he formed Monsters of Folk with M. Ward and Yim Yames, and released another album that had little to do with break-ups, I really enjoyed that, too. Their studio video for “Temazcal” became a staple for me during my drunken, late-night YouTube binges that happened frequently during my senior year of college.

I really expected The People’s Key to be Oberst’s return to more saddening songs. I guess I’m like a lot of other people, and have been programmed to associate Bright Eyes with that emotional mindset.

The record is sad as Hell, but it’s not sad about girls. It’s sad about things worth being sad about, like a friend committing suicide (a big contribution to “Ladder Song,” I’ve read), which must trump any feeling some girl is capable of instilling upon you. I’ve grown up listening to Bright Eyes, and will always immensely value the type of music that makes me feel better about relationships (even though I have definitely, definitely hurt more women than women have hurt me). I will value The People’s Key, too, but in a different way. I’ll value it because it gives me some kind of hope that I’ll eventually grow up and distance myself from my lingering sensitivity to female rejection. If Conor Oberst isn’t so pissed off about girls anymore, then I suppose I don’t need to be either. I can still worry about things more than I should, but maybe now they’ll be things worth worrying about; things in the future, and not in the past.

Supposedly, this is the last Bright Eyes record. If that’s true, then I’ll have no more new songs to draw parallels from and mold to events pertaining to my own life. From Oberst, maybe, but not from Bright Eyes. My emotions won’t have any new words from Bright Eyes to use for vicarious purposes. My experiences will be all mine, now, and maybe I’ll find some way to put my own words to them. I’ve probably always been foolish in my thinking that my life is anything like Oberst’s. If the guy is nothing else, he’s an individual, and no two instances of heartbreak are exactly the same, either. They’re like fingerprints or something from Lady Gaga’s closet.

If The People’s Key is it for Bright Eyes, then the final new words of the final song on the record (before Denny Brewer’s last creepy-ass monologue that I actually enjoy, go figure) will be the last new words I’ll ever hear Oberst record under that moniker. The song is called “One for You, One for Me,” and they are as follows:

“You and me, that is an awful lie. It’s I and I.”

I’m almost certain that line wasn’t addressed to me, but, as usual, I can empathize.

I probably couldn’t have said it better myself, either, but it did seem like a suitable goodbye.