Oscar Wilde said a few centuries ago that "All of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." This idea is consoling to those of us who are frustrated by the impasse between what is and what could be, echoed in Bright Eyes' infamous "Road To Joy" line, "No one ever plans to wake up in the gutter/ Sometimes that's just the most comfortable place."
Conor Oberst’s songwriting no longer seems informed or, better, made necessary by the kind of suffering that renders spooning a sewage drain attractive. He has broken away from Bright Eyes to form Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and with this change has comes music that abandons high-stake confessionalism for a safer brand of rock. If that gutter quote from It's Morning, I'm Wide Awake (2005) epitomizes Bright Eyes, more relevant to Conor’s solo work are lyrics from his new limited edition EP: Gentelman's Pact: "Life's not fair/ I tried to die young with my true love/ Ended up a millionaire."
This shift to the middle is omnipresent at The Warfield on October 24. The effect of this change from the tortured king of emo to "the Paul Simon of indie rock" (we'll get to that later) has been to create more mainstream fans — at the price of estranging his loyal core of followers.
With $9 Fernet shots and limited ins-and-outs for smokers, my crew and I are a little put-off at the outset of the show. I am with Alexandra, a 27-year-old and 8-year fan; Alison, a 19-year-old and 6-year fan; and Mike, a music writer for the SF Weekly.
All Smiles opens the show, followed by the all-girl trio The Like. Alexandra compares these openers with past choices, saying that "I have seen Her Space Holiday and The Faint open for Bright Eyes. On the Cassadaga tour, Jim James opened with a solo performance. Those three artists are definitely on par musically with Bright Eyes. The Like was pretty good, but I find it interesting that he picked bands so obviously not on that level of musical ingenuity with his past openers. It's kind of a mainstream band move, like how you don't want an artist to open with a set as good as yours."
Oberst's set is a hybrid of classic rock and alt-country, with only undertones of the deathly eloquent songwriting that put him in the club with other starry-eyed gutter punks. Alison Burke says that her favorite songs of the night are "Eagle on a Pole" and "Milk Thistle," the two that most channel the Bright Eyes style. "I thought the other songs were regressing back to the ’70s, like ripping off past music phases. Aside from that, I just didn't really feel the connection that I felt with his music in the past. I didn't leave feeling the same way at all."
Mike Rowell (the music writer in tote) says that "The songs weren't bad, but they didn't move me the way older Bright Eyes stuff has, and they smacked of generic rockism. Whether he's deliberately shooting for wider appeal with his classic retro-rock stylings, who knows."
Rowell tells me that, when they met around 2002, Oberst said he had taken up smoking so that his voice would be more gravelly. Gravelly it may be, but not muddled. It drives a clear yet rough cut through the instrumentation, and you can tell that the songs have been written in a way that keeps the lyrics front-and-center. "I thought the music was orchestrated well,” Alexandra says. “Nate Walcott does all the horns, strings and keys and he's a genius. But I think since his old producer Mike Mogis left, the band has lacked an experimental side. It's been really regimented. There is a classically-trained element driving it."
This control aspect spills into the songwriting, too. "He's abandoning the way he writes, which has always been a huge quality that people commended him for," Burke says. "He's not singing about himself anymore, and he's being very influenced by other artists — people like Tom Petty and Bob Dylan. He's trying to go down that road instead of the one he created for himself 14 years ago."
Alexandra also comments on this turning-outward. "Some of his songs are still really good, but it seems that he's trying to appeal more to a mass audience so there are very few of those songs that feel true and are really moving. Bright Eyes was always a very introspective songwriting outfit that showed the most extreme ugly and beautiful sides of the world from one person's perspective. It was very relatable; I think a lot of people identified with it. Likewise, I think many people hated it because it was so extreme."
"I did think the cover of Paul Simon's ‘Kodachrome’ was telling," Rowell says. "It seems he's a younger guy rediscovering the ’70s, and everything old is new again. Unfortunately, while ‘Kodachrome’ is an admittedly catchy song, I was never that hot on it, even back in the day. If Conor wants to be the modern-day Paul Simon, that's fine, but don't expect me to be too enthusiastic about it."
"It's hard for me to say whether I will see him again," Burke says. "I'm such a huge Bright Eyes fan, and I've loved him for years. If he were with Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, I don't know if I would — unless the next album was more genuine."
I ask Alexandra what she would say if he were right in front of her and asked her opinion of the show. "I would hope that I would say I'm really disappointed in his choices," she answers. "But I don't know if I could even speak."