[SIMG]http://forum.interference.com/gallery/data//585/39656brighteyes-sml.jpg[/SIMG]
By Andy Smith, Editor
2007.05
The healing power of the Bright Eyes “Cassadaga” tour descended on the Nashville venue known to old-timers as “the mother church” last Saturday night for an almost four-hour, triple-bill feast supported by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings along with Oakley Hall.
On his second visit to the Ryman, with a humorous and humbled accolade, singer Conor Oberst echoed many performers who have previously graced this stage. Instead of being entirely reverent, he suggested he felt like he was still “waiting to get thrown out the back door.” When support act and intoxicating singer Gillian Welch spoke of the room, her sincerity rang to the rafters. She must have known in her heart that the venue had a vision its own, operating as an additional member of the band. And really, the fact that an alt-country goddess and all around folkin’ force like Welch would be the “opening act” only testifies to the growing respect that Bright Eyes has earned from peers across the genres.
Having arrived late at the love-it or hate-it Bright Eyes party, I didn’t have to spend eons enduring all the backlash against Oberst’s notoriety as a whining emo-Dylan. (For the record, I was introduced to Bright Eyes by the “Coachella” DVD and its amazing version of “Lua.”)
But anti-Conor is real, a chilly cult of chatter bent on castigating a media image—attacking an alleged more-indie-than-thou persona and once popular perception that his was a voice-like-fingers-on-the-chalkboard. But for those who champion him and his songs, it matters not whether it sounds like he’s channeling Dylan or John Lennon or even a little bit of the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano—because he’s always channeling the genius that is Conor whether its an infusion of folk or rock or alt-country or punk or all-and-none-of-the-above and all-at-once.
Clearly an icon of an internet-tamed-and-tainted era where fashions become fetishes and figures like this become virtual statues for critics to take potshots at until the mystique starts to tumble down, the mature and magical Conor Oberst can now let that legacy roll off him like water and claim his place in the pantheon of great songwriters without apology. Once known as a boywonder, Oberst now boasts a mature repertoire that is magnetically and musically diverse. Does this make those that always loved him finally feel some sweet vindication?
(Photo credit: Ben Hailey)
Bright Eyes filled Saturday’s show with invigorating interpretations of many tremble-inducing tracks from the new record and highlights from “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.” A premiere poet-lyricist in a league all his own, Oberst offered lines and stanzas as pure and sturdy as food, as life’s social currency.
“Four Winds” captures the religious intolerance and apocalyptic ruminations of our historical moment:
Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There's people always dying trying to keep them alive
There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building where
Squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She's standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hair
But when great Satan's gone... the Whore of Babylon...
She just can't sustain the pressure where it's placed
Then, when introducing the dance-in-the-aisles-of-church hymn called “Soul Singer in A Session Band,” Oberst offered a serious gesture to all the aspiring Nashville cultural workers in attendance, saying that keeping their day-jobs and doing paid-by-the-gig stuff on the weekends was like “Picasso painting houses.”
With funky fiddle riffs and a memorable melody, this epic evokes the idea of an instant classic and contains some of my favorite lines in recent rock, including:
I had a lengthy discussion about The Power of Myth
With a post-modern author who didn't exist
In this fictitious world all reality twists
I was a hopeless romantic now I'm just turning tricks
Or
His room is on fire since he painted it red
There are a stranger's silk sequins at the foot of the bed
He has been to weddings and funerals but he still never wept
Now sorrow is pleasure when you want it instead
So, what is Cassadaga? Allegedly, it’s an actual place, a town filled with psychics that Conor Oberst visited, and on the current album and tour, Cassadaga visits us. Many fans at the show also collected bizarre, photocopied tracts that it appears Conor himself had made.
A parody of religious propaganda, and somehow sincere in itself, the piece boasted its purpose: “The Spiritual Telegraph: A Brief Tract dedicated to the Revelation of Nature’s Divine Mystery, a Discourse presented to you by the BRIGHT EYES SPIRITUALIST LYCEUM—Est. 1909, Cassadaga, Florida; Rev. Conrad Oberman, Founder.”
The swirling and religiously-tinted “Cassadaga” creates a crown of musical light in the listener’s mind. To some, such stuff will always sound corny and pretentious, but to others it becomes more terrifying and perfect the more one listens. On tour, it’s a traveling medicine show and rock revival that puts its spiritualist spell on any crowd that gathers in the theater the night of the show.
“We’re all hippies now,” chirped Conor Oberst in his fancy white suit. In fact, all of the dozen or maybe more onstage wore white. And they were surrounded by flowers and showered in video projections—with swirling colors or images of a giant etch-a-sketch or of a giant ouija board behind. The impressive touring band included Bright Eyes’ core members, two female drummers, a string section, and so much more.
Outside in the Music City, gangs of unsupervised yet obviously “saved” folk roamed the neon streets. A loud and contemporary Christian music festival had taken over downtown. From the Ryman stage, Oberst half-seriously wondered why Bright Eyes had not been invited to play there, and then, launched into an impeccable (better than the album) version of “I Believe in Symmetry.”
Getting to the show, we saw gaggles of obedient people with a common mother and matching outfits strolling up Second Avenue. Christians everywhere, but up the street at the bars on Broadway, drunken women in low-cut shirts and drunken men in cowboy hats danced sinfully to cover songs. At that point, it would be hard for the sensitive observer to not feel trapped in one of the more surreal scenes in Robert Altman’s landmark film that bears the name of our fine city.
(Photo credit: Ben Hailey)
Then, before Bright Eyes, we got with Gillian Welch’s haunting and heavenly pipes proudly laying down lyrics about wild love and whiskey or Jesus and Elvis. Yes, the lovely May day gave way to a calm and cool May night. And then, it was hard not to imagine that all of us were inside a strip of celluloid in the cosmic mind on the downtown strip where the lyrics, the power, and the spirited stage presence of Bright Eyes were eternal. But then, in the last song of my wide-awake evening, with Welch and Rawlings by his side, Oberst reminded us that “what was normal in the evening by the morning seems insane.”
For more information on Bright Eyes, visit
http://www.saddle-creek.com/cassadaga, or to learn more about Gillian Welch, visit http://www.gillianwelch.com/ . "Cassadaga" was released by Saddle Creek on April 10.
By Andy Smith, Editor
2007.05
The healing power of the Bright Eyes “Cassadaga” tour descended on the Nashville venue known to old-timers as “the mother church” last Saturday night for an almost four-hour, triple-bill feast supported by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings along with Oakley Hall.
On his second visit to the Ryman, with a humorous and humbled accolade, singer Conor Oberst echoed many performers who have previously graced this stage. Instead of being entirely reverent, he suggested he felt like he was still “waiting to get thrown out the back door.” When support act and intoxicating singer Gillian Welch spoke of the room, her sincerity rang to the rafters. She must have known in her heart that the venue had a vision its own, operating as an additional member of the band. And really, the fact that an alt-country goddess and all around folkin’ force like Welch would be the “opening act” only testifies to the growing respect that Bright Eyes has earned from peers across the genres.
Having arrived late at the love-it or hate-it Bright Eyes party, I didn’t have to spend eons enduring all the backlash against Oberst’s notoriety as a whining emo-Dylan. (For the record, I was introduced to Bright Eyes by the “Coachella” DVD and its amazing version of “Lua.”)
But anti-Conor is real, a chilly cult of chatter bent on castigating a media image—attacking an alleged more-indie-than-thou persona and once popular perception that his was a voice-like-fingers-on-the-chalkboard. But for those who champion him and his songs, it matters not whether it sounds like he’s channeling Dylan or John Lennon or even a little bit of the Violent Femmes’ Gordon Gano—because he’s always channeling the genius that is Conor whether its an infusion of folk or rock or alt-country or punk or all-and-none-of-the-above and all-at-once.
Clearly an icon of an internet-tamed-and-tainted era where fashions become fetishes and figures like this become virtual statues for critics to take potshots at until the mystique starts to tumble down, the mature and magical Conor Oberst can now let that legacy roll off him like water and claim his place in the pantheon of great songwriters without apology. Once known as a boywonder, Oberst now boasts a mature repertoire that is magnetically and musically diverse. Does this make those that always loved him finally feel some sweet vindication?
(Photo credit: Ben Hailey)
Bright Eyes filled Saturday’s show with invigorating interpretations of many tremble-inducing tracks from the new record and highlights from “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn.” A premiere poet-lyricist in a league all his own, Oberst offered lines and stanzas as pure and sturdy as food, as life’s social currency.
“Four Winds” captures the religious intolerance and apocalyptic ruminations of our historical moment:
Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There's people always dying trying to keep them alive
There's bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building where
Squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She's standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hair
But when great Satan's gone... the Whore of Babylon...
She just can't sustain the pressure where it's placed
Then, when introducing the dance-in-the-aisles-of-church hymn called “Soul Singer in A Session Band,” Oberst offered a serious gesture to all the aspiring Nashville cultural workers in attendance, saying that keeping their day-jobs and doing paid-by-the-gig stuff on the weekends was like “Picasso painting houses.”
With funky fiddle riffs and a memorable melody, this epic evokes the idea of an instant classic and contains some of my favorite lines in recent rock, including:
I had a lengthy discussion about The Power of Myth
With a post-modern author who didn't exist
In this fictitious world all reality twists
I was a hopeless romantic now I'm just turning tricks
Or
His room is on fire since he painted it red
There are a stranger's silk sequins at the foot of the bed
He has been to weddings and funerals but he still never wept
Now sorrow is pleasure when you want it instead
So, what is Cassadaga? Allegedly, it’s an actual place, a town filled with psychics that Conor Oberst visited, and on the current album and tour, Cassadaga visits us. Many fans at the show also collected bizarre, photocopied tracts that it appears Conor himself had made.
A parody of religious propaganda, and somehow sincere in itself, the piece boasted its purpose: “The Spiritual Telegraph: A Brief Tract dedicated to the Revelation of Nature’s Divine Mystery, a Discourse presented to you by the BRIGHT EYES SPIRITUALIST LYCEUM—Est. 1909, Cassadaga, Florida; Rev. Conrad Oberman, Founder.”
The swirling and religiously-tinted “Cassadaga” creates a crown of musical light in the listener’s mind. To some, such stuff will always sound corny and pretentious, but to others it becomes more terrifying and perfect the more one listens. On tour, it’s a traveling medicine show and rock revival that puts its spiritualist spell on any crowd that gathers in the theater the night of the show.
“We’re all hippies now,” chirped Conor Oberst in his fancy white suit. In fact, all of the dozen or maybe more onstage wore white. And they were surrounded by flowers and showered in video projections—with swirling colors or images of a giant etch-a-sketch or of a giant ouija board behind. The impressive touring band included Bright Eyes’ core members, two female drummers, a string section, and so much more.
Outside in the Music City, gangs of unsupervised yet obviously “saved” folk roamed the neon streets. A loud and contemporary Christian music festival had taken over downtown. From the Ryman stage, Oberst half-seriously wondered why Bright Eyes had not been invited to play there, and then, launched into an impeccable (better than the album) version of “I Believe in Symmetry.”
Getting to the show, we saw gaggles of obedient people with a common mother and matching outfits strolling up Second Avenue. Christians everywhere, but up the street at the bars on Broadway, drunken women in low-cut shirts and drunken men in cowboy hats danced sinfully to cover songs. At that point, it would be hard for the sensitive observer to not feel trapped in one of the more surreal scenes in Robert Altman’s landmark film that bears the name of our fine city.
(Photo credit: Ben Hailey)
Then, before Bright Eyes, we got with Gillian Welch’s haunting and heavenly pipes proudly laying down lyrics about wild love and whiskey or Jesus and Elvis. Yes, the lovely May day gave way to a calm and cool May night. And then, it was hard not to imagine that all of us were inside a strip of celluloid in the cosmic mind on the downtown strip where the lyrics, the power, and the spirited stage presence of Bright Eyes were eternal. But then, in the last song of my wide-awake evening, with Welch and Rawlings by his side, Oberst reminded us that “what was normal in the evening by the morning seems insane.”
For more information on Bright Eyes, visit
http://www.saddle-creek.com/cassadaga, or to learn more about Gillian Welch, visit http://www.gillianwelch.com/ . "Cassadaga" was released by Saddle Creek on April 10.
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