Unlike Bright Eyes albums, I’m gonna try to keep the intro short and just get right into the action.
With the release of Five Dice, All Threes, Conor Oberst’s discography now spans nearly 30 years. Or, from 1995’s “The Invisible Gardener” to Five Dice closer “Tin Soldier Boy,” Oberst triples in age. In that time, Oberst has been a confounding, charismatic and always restless songwriter, the cover shot of his 2008 solo album notwithstanding. On the same day in 2005, he released the timeless indie wedding staple “First Day Of My Life” and the self-explanatory, self-exculpatory f*ckboy manifesto “Take It Easy (Love Nothing).” Within a few minutes of Lifted, he’s too depressed to get out of bed, ready to take on the world, welcoming the apocalypse, but not before getting in one last night of drunken camaraderie. It’s a lot, and that’s not even including his solo work, the caustic agit-punk of Desaparecidos, the wooly Americana of Mystic Valley Band, his Phoebe Bridgers collaboration Better Oblivion Community Center, the Millennial Wilburys of Monsters Of Folk and countless Saddle Creek splits and side projects.
While most of that music is worth seeking out, it’s also not Bright Eyes, Oberst’s most popular project and the one that best encompasses his many, mercurial moods. For reasons that will soon be apparent, I can’t call this a ranking of his albums from worst to best in good conscience. But I can say they’re in order of my least favorite to favorite. So can I get a g*ddamn timpani roll? To start this g*ddamn list?
11. A Christmas Album (2002)
Sadly, not a Bright Eyes album about Christmas, with Read Music/Speak Spanish-era Conor Oberst going off on the emptiness of consumerism. Also, not Lifted-era Conor Oberst extending Yuletide classics to seven minutes with timpani rolls and doomsaying strings. Rather, quite literally a “Bright Eyes Christmas Album,” but one that nails a sort of frosted-over, The Holdovers-esque ambience where a bunch of kids try to make the best of being stranded during the holidays.
10. A Collection Of Songs Written And Recorded 1995-1997 (1998)
Surely, people who stumbled across Saddle Creek’s nineteenth release in January 1998 were happy to grade on a curve, or saw Oberst as something of a novelty — he’s 15 and writing songs with names like “The Awful Sweetness Of Escaping Sweat”! He’s from Omaha! Not all of the songs on this nearly-70-minute compilation are good, and in fact, some are borderline unlistenable, an opinion that Conor Oberst himself holds. Yet, in its unruly, very mid-’90s DIY indie sprawl, most of what constituted the core of Bright Eyes music had already been established: the volcanic emoting, the five-dollar words spilling out of overstuffed melodies, the bandcamp-in-a-basement orchestration.
On the off chance that someone reading this has never heard Bright Eyes and never heard of Bright Eyes before, I’d recommend they start here. And also, hit me up with your review — I’d love to hear from someone who hasn’t evaluated the output of a 15-to-17-year-old Conor Oberst relative to what came ten months later on Letting Off The Happiness.
9. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning (2005)
I imagine there’s a demographic of people who’d also rank I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning this low, maybe women between the ages of 35 and 45 who were subject to dozens of boys in college and/or grad school trying to impress them by playing “First Day Of My Life” on acoustic guitar. But this demographic is dwarfed by the one that would immediately put it right at the top. After all, this is the most popular and most critically acclaimed Bright Eyes album, the only that Apple Music calls “essential.” The one that followed him sharing a stage with Michael Stipe and Bruce Springsteen during a MoveOn.Org event in 2004 and ostensibly made good on the “next Dylan!” hype. And the last reason is exactly why I cannot stand I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning: it’s the album where Conor Oberst stopped being the First Conor Oberst and tried to be someone else.
I don’t blame him for wanting to escape the Myth of Conor Oberst, but that describes most of his work after 2005. Rather, Oberst rummaged through the boomer canon for pandering playacting — it’s his “New York” album. It’s his “political folk album.” He commissioned harmonies from Emmylou Harris, as if her credibility in this realm would transfer by osmosis. When I hear “Landlocked Blues,” I think of the dudes you see on Rap Twitter talking about how, I dunno, they won’t take 21 Savage or Playboi Carti seriously until they rap over soul beats.
The weird thing about I’m Wide Awake is that everything that people dismissed about Oberst on earlier albums — expressing emotion almost entirely through a quavering pitch, the overblown and undercooked politics — were laid bare rather than being matched by Lifted‘s grandiosity or the righteous rage of Desaparecidos’ Read Music/Speak Spanish. Praise for I’m Wide Awake was typically prefaced by some variation of “the Bright Eyes album for people who don’t like Bright Eyes.” I couldn’t agree more.
8. Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was (2020)
The first Bright Eyes album in nine years was likely going to be a “return to form” by default. And Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was did not disappoint on that front, doing buffet-style fan service that encompassed the past 20 years: there was Cassadaga-esque psych-pop (“Mariana Trench”), the hauntology of Digital Ash (“One And Done”), inscrutable word puzzles a la The People’s Key (“Persona Non Grata”) and Lifted stein-swinging (“Dance & Sing”). Plus, you know, Flea playing slap bass and the drummer from Mars Volta, because 2020 Conor Oberst is in much different group chats than he was in the aughts. And then, after years of (understandably) avoiding the press, there was the surprisingly exhaustive interview circuit that Oberst endured, hitting the same points ad nauseum about climate apocalypse, divorce, and the passing of his brother.
And yet, the subject matter reveals how Down In The Weeds fell short on a true “return to form,” because… well, imagine Fevers And Mirrors-era Oberst getting a crack at these topics. Instead, Down In The Weeds was “accomplished” and “professional,” rather than truly overwhelming, an unexpected source of comfort food at a time where quarantine felt like it might never end.
7. Cassadaga (2007)
A personal favorite of my Indiecast co-host and fellow Bright Eyes listmaker Steven Hyden, and I get it: Cassadaga is probably the most “porch music” album they’ve ever made. “Four Winds” and “If The Brakeman Turns My Way” boast robust, heartland rock choruses, the production is slick and string-laden, reflecting the status of a band who will debut in Billboard‘s top 5, and Conor Oberst tries to defy his image with a newfound interest in spirituality and vaguely Eastern percussion, a la No Code. Plus the cover really does look like a ’70s Grateful Dead joint.
Anecdotally, Cassadaga is “the most underrated Bright Eyes album,” and it’s an opinion I see so often that it can’t totally be true: For all of its charms, the politics grew ever heavy-handed despite the music’s lighter touch and “Soul Singer In A Session Band” is somehow more smug than Oberst claiming on “Bowl Of Oranges” that he has magical healing powers. A fascinating, flawed fork in the Bright Eyes catalog, but still the one that sounds best at a barbecue.
6. Five Dice, All Threes (2024)
Elvis Costello once quipped that you get 20 years to write your debut album and six months to write your second, and it’s been used ever since to explain “the sophomore slump,” “the darker, more introspective follow-up,” or the Max Power-esque “more of the same, but faster” mindset that gave us Room and Fire or Antics. Yet, that adage gets flipped whenever I talk to a band about their comeback album — they tend to be way more excited about the next one, even if it isn’t written yet, because they know it’ll take far less time to get done.
Five Dice, All Threes is only a quickie turnaround by latter-day Bright Eyes standards, but it nonetheless feels more urgent, more organic, more fun than Down In The Weeds, Where the World Once Was. The galloping strums and distorted acoustics of “El Capitan” and “Rainbow Overpass” prove that Bright Eyes is still a Saddle Creek band in spirit, if not in name, while “I’d never thought I’d see 45 / how is it that I’m still alive,” proves that he can still set an album’s narrative with a single line (especially since he isn’t 45 just yet). No longer burdened by any particular agenda, Five Dice, All Threes is perhaps the first Bright Eyes album that simply aspired to be “the new Bright Eyes album” and is all the better for it.
5. Digital Ash In A Digital Urn (2005)
While it’s not necessary to overrate Digital Ash In A Digital Urn to make a point about I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, these companion albums had similar aims and inverse strengths: since Lifted couldn’t possibly be topped by doing more of the same, Conor Oberst made smaller, sensible genre albums that would inevitably be described as “his most focused yet.” But rather than emulating the past masters to which he had already been compared and shearing off his more unflattering lyrical turns, Bright Eyes went for a gothic, synth-pop makeover that recognized “Lover I Don’t Have To Love” as the fan favorite from Lifted.
I suppose I’m telling on myself when I say prefer Oberst’s bleak, hermetic songs about substance abuse and cheap sex feel over his Greenwich Village cosplay, but “Hit The Switch” and “Down In The Rabbit Hole” are more interesting and more idiosyncratic than “Lua,” even if I can’t prove they’re more honest.
4. The People’s Key (2011)
A four-year gap between proper LPs once would’ve been unimaginable for Conor Oberst, but after Cassadaga, he got the sense that people were about as tired of Bright Eyes as he was. And so by the time they returned — and I do mean they, as Oberst truly considered him, Mike Mogis, and Nate Walcott as a democracy — The People’s Key was as distant from Bright Eyes 1.0 as anything could be while centering Oberst’s voice. To the same degree Cassadaga bulked up I’m Wide Awake‘s rabble-rousing folk-rock, The People’s Key detoxed Digital Ash and brought out the striving, New Wave synth-pop at its core. “Shell Games” and “Jejune Stars” make for some of the most outright catchy Bright Eyes singles, yet due to Oberst’s pan-religious musings — on AI and Rastafarianism and lizard people — The People’s Key earned the reputation as the band’s most impenetrable work; not for nothing is the first song called “Firewall.”
And yet, this is the album I find myself returning to most often these days, if not loving or even enjoying more than the albums that rank higher on this list. Oberst (or more accurately, the Faint’s Todd Fink playing Conor Oberst) once claimed that he liked to feel the burn of the audience’s eyes when he revealed his darkest secrets; ten years later, he learned to appreciate the chill when he withholds.
3. Letting Off The Happiness (1998)
There’s the type of person who will loudly profess their preference of Isn’t Everything over Loveless, On Avery Island over In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, De Stijl over White Blood Cells, Burial over Untrue… you get the picture. Maybe there’s some classic contrarianism, but there’s something to be said about the thrill of genius in chrysalis, the sense that an artist is coming to grips with the potency of their powers, if not their full scope. Such is the case with Letting Off the Happiness, which is both light years away from his raw, early work and still a classic “album before The Album” — a hint of greater things to come, yet fully formed in its own right.
2. Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground (2002)
Let me set the scene for you: it’s August 2002 and I’m 22 years old, living with my parents after finishing college, with no real distinction and no real long-term prospects. I have recently been fired from the kind of summer job which, frankly, nobody should manage to get fired from. I have absolutely no idea what I want to do with my life, but in the short-term, I have the new 73-minute Bright Eyes CD, a case of Yuengling, and NCAA Football 03 Dynasty Mode. Even as a hardcore Bright Eyes acolyte at the time, I’m still blown away by how much “Method Acting” and “You Will. You? Will. You? Will. You? Will.” speak to my experience, or at least the experience I’m imagining in my head. Eventually, I get to “Nothing Gets Crossed Out,” wherein Conor Oberst, also 22 years old, admits that he just wants someone to walk in front, and he’ll follow the leader. That working on the record seems pointless now. That one day, maybe, he’ll get to where he’s going. He’s been called a genius in mainstream publications and is less than a year away from dating Winona Ryder. And the only thing he really wants to do is get drunk with Tim Kasher.
I tend to get extremely cynical when music critics talk about how they cried over certain songs or while they were writing about a certain album, because A: I don’t really believe it, and B: show, don’t tell! But I’m going to be a hypocrite and tell you that I have never cried more profusely over any piece of art than “Nothing Gets Crossed Out.” I had never felt more seen in my entire life and to this day, I can’t listen to it around other people or if I’m on my way to work. It just reflexively turns on the waterworks and I am back in my parents’ basement, wondering if everything good in my life has already happened.
There are plenty of moments on Lifted that come awfully close to matching “Nothing Gets Crossed Out” — “this method acting, I call it living,” “I’ll start drinking like the way I drank before, and I just won’t have a future anymore,” the end the orchestral hip-hop thump of “Lover I Don’t Have To Love,” the feverish Bob Dylan Thomas purge of “Let’s Not Sh*t Ourselves.” 22 years later, I have enough distance to not subject myself to the interminable “Big Picture” or the Irish brogue he takes on to inject some scare-quotes “authenticity” into “Waste Of Paint,” or the “god saves gas prices” verse of the otherwise phenomenal “Don’t Know When But A Day’s Gonna Come” that I’m 99.9 percent positive wasn’t on the original CD. And yet, when I fast-forward through these moments, Lifted somehow becomes diminished. You gotta take the highest highs with the lowest lows to really get the full experience of Bright Eyes’ most extra album.
1. Fevers And Mirrors (2000)
I feel like we’ve got a pretty good idea of how 2024 will be presented a few months from now – Brat Summer, the whole Cindy Lee Thing, the rise of Chappell Roan, dudes rock and the Pop Girlies changing of the guard. And maybe that’s how we’ll still remember 2024 in a decade. But the more effort you spend framing a narrative in real time, the easier it is to lose sight of the bigger picture. As we speak, there are surely some teenage artists speaking directly to other teenagers in ways they’ve never been spoken to before, far out of sight from the mainstream, or to much confusion or credulity from the critics who do engage — and they will be the ones rewriting history and browbeating their elders for not getting it.
So let’s talk about the synth line in the chorus of Bright Eyes’ “The Calendar Hung Itself…” I had never heard Bright Eyes before and I first encountered Fevers And Mirrors in a manner that will burnish my authenticity on the subject and also embarrass me. Some time in 2000, I tagged along with a couple who were driving to see a Dashboard Confessional show, and I was less excited to see Dashboard Confessional than I was to spend time with the woman who lent me her copy of The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most. You know, she just happened to have a boyfriend and all, who was driving. In the midst of hours upon hours of hopelessly pining, she put on Fevers And Mirrors and… at the risk of overstatement, it’s a moment that changed the trajectory of my life. I had no real concept of emo or Saddle Creek or even Jeff Mangum, the artist to whom Conor Oberst was most often compared by that point. Rather, the layering of a shrieking G-funk keyboard over nervy, distorted acoustic strums, while a guy my age quivered helplessly about lust and vengeance and self-loathing and ego… this was it. The atom was split. This was the music I had been waiting for my whole life, to explain what I was feeling at that moment and, frankly, most others throughout college.
I’d soon find moments on Fevers And Mirrors that felt nearly as compelling — those spooky keyboards on “Something Vague,” the frigid cornfield ambience of “Arienette,” Oberst yelling “THIS ISN’T HAPPENING HAPPENING HAPPENING” over plinking piano. I always thought the “interview” at the end of “An Attempt To Tip The Scales” was hilarious, even if I thought it was meant to be ironic and not outright fake, with the Faint’s Todd Fink playing the role of Conor Oberst. But the fact that the original Pitchfork review did think it was real and in astonishingly poor taste just sealed the deal for me. Of course they wouldn’t get it. Twelve years later, I was literally and figuratively settling the score. Most likely while laughing off whatever the next Bright Eyes was going to be.
I have to ask myself, who is this list really for? Hardcore Bright Eyes fans looking to compare notes? Teenagers who haven’t heard Bright Eyes and are looking for a place to start? People in my age group who’ve been Bright Eyes skeptics their entire lives? If the latter was the case, I don’t think I’d put Fevers And Mirrors at No. 1, since so much of that record’s power (and really, the peak of Bright Eyes) lies in its validation of a specific worldview, one to which people lose their access once a crush or a sh*tty day at school no longer becomes the sort of thing an entire concept album can be built around. Once you stop relating to a song called “The Center Of The World.” I don’t know if I get too much new out of Fevers And Mirrors when I listen to it now, but that doesn’t diminish its power to take me there, the same way that adolescent classics like Violent Femmes or Weezer’s The Blue Album do. Maybe it’s a record that gets one shot at you, but it doesn’t miss.
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