Conor Oberst: ‘A special moment governed more by intuition than intellect’.
The Story is in the Soil
Lifted or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground is plainly too long for the name of an album — but Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst will always happily sacrifice tidy form to the expression of powerful feelings. In the album’s first song, ‘The Big Picture’, we find the singer riding in the back of the tour van while the driver and the guy in the passenger seat argue jokingly about where this place they’re looking for is supposed to be. Something about this conversation gives the singer an idea. He pulls out his guitar and starts picking out some chords, letting the words come as the music builds up a head of steam. It doesn’t rhyme properly in places, and some of the words are crammed a little awkwardly into the metre — but the feeling is real, and it’s the feeling, not some pre-conceived idea of ‘good songwriting’ that Oberst follows in bringing this tune to completion. ‘The Big Picture’ goes on for another six and a half minutes — bringing the whole to a total of eight minutes and forty-seven seconds. Too long, you might say, for a melancholy dirge banged out in the back of the tour bus. But to Oberst in 2004 criticism of this kind meant nothing. ‘There’s a point where they feel complete, and that’s where I stop’, he said of his songs. ‘Maybe for some listeners they felt complete four minutes ago — they can fade it out.’1
Oberst is a student of nature, so he’s not interested in rules or traditions. He might sound philosophical in 2005’s ‘I Believe in Symmetry’, but really he’s expressing a wish to be rid once and for all of philosophy — and all the other stuff they teach you at school. Has any of it, Oberst asks himself, made me happier?
An argument for consciousness
The instinct of the blind insect
Who makes love to a flower bed
And dies in the first freeze
‘I want to know such simple things,’ says the singer, ‘no politics, no history.’2 But ridding yourself of five centuries of tradition is not as easy as all that — politics is everywhere, and history keeps screaming in his ear. In ‘Road to Joy’, recorded the same year, Oberst decides to scream back. The song is a portrait of a young man with a sensitive heart and a head full of noise trying to get his thoughts down before it’s too late:
So now I’m drinking, breathing, writing, singing.
Every day I’m on the clock.
My mind races with all my longings.
But I can’t keep up with what I got.3
What he’s got is a feeling, not just for himself, but for the whole country, the whole human race. Now, politics has become personal for the singer, and he’s turned into a sort of emotional news anchor, reporting on the state of his world as it relates to President Bush’s War on Terror. Everything is involved — his parents, his girlfriend, the flowers in the driveway, the dead bodies in the cemetery, everything hums to the tune of his anxious ballad. Oberst has what Wordsworth would call ‘a heart that watches and receives’, and hearts like this can’t help but pick up the world’s static. He gives his feeling words, and fits the words to a tune — not one of his own, this time, but one that was written to give voice to a similar mood of turmoil and hope almost two centuries before Conor Oberst was born.
In 1785 Friedrich Schiller had just gotten over his last girlfriend, and spring was coming to his village near Leipzig. He was overcome with an incredible surge of happiness and goodwill for the human race, and sat down to write an ‘Ode to Joy’:
Joy, brilliant spark of the gods,
daughter of Elysium, heavenly being,
we enter, drunk with fire,
your holy sanctuary.
Your magic reunites
what was split by convention,
and all men become brothers
where your gentle wings are spread.
Be embraced, you millions!
This kiss for all the world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy
must surely dwell a loving father.4
Schiller’s lines expressed the highest ideals of his century — the hope that the clearing away of dogma and outmoded institutions would, in time, heal the rifts in modern society and bring an end to war and misery. They also hinted at something new (or something very old, which seemed new); a wish to take leave of one’s senses — to dance, to sing, to lose oneself in a happy throng. Five years after he wrote it, young German poets were running through a meadow near the seminary at Tubingen shouting Schiller’s poem into the night air, and pausing between stanzas to take swigs from a bottle of wine.5
Schiller, like Wordsworth, was deeply sympathetic to the Revolution; and like the English poet, he found his convictions impossible to maintain after the Reign of Terror. But if the Revolution shattered his faith in the ideals of the Enlightenment, it convinced him more than ever of the importance of art and poetry:
If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.6
Even after world events had conspired to make Schiller’s optimism seem naïve, it was impossible to dismiss out of hand the vision he had presented in ‘Ode to Joy’. In fact, as the bright hopes of 1789 receded into the distance, the question of how to make people happy seemed more pressing than ever. Ludwig van Beethoven decided to tackle the problem himself in 1802, announcing his intention to set Schiller’s ‘Ode’ to music. It would be another twenty-two years before he would write to his publisher with good news on this front:
Vienna, March 10, 1824.
… These are all I can at present give you for publication. I must, alas! now speak of myself, and say that this, the greatest work I have ever written, is well worth 1000 florins C.M. It is a new grand symphony, with a finale and voice parts introduced, solo and choruses, the words being those of Schiller’s immortal ‘Ode to Joy’, in the style of my pianoforte Choral Fantasia, only of much greater breadth.7
At the asking price of 600 florins, the publisher had got himself a bargain. The Choral Symphony wedded Schiller’s verses to one of Beethoven’s most powerful pieces of music. The poem appears in the final movement, which begins with the ugliest blast of discordant noise that had been heard in a concert hall up to that time — which, for Beethoven, symbolised nothing less than all the misery in the world condensed into one gigantic, impossible chord. Then, as the smoke clears and the dust settles, a lone voice pipes up in the darkness, ‘Oh friends! No more of these tones! Let us sing something full of gladness!’.
A chorus appears out of nowhere and joins the singer as he belts out Schiller’s ‘Ode’ and the whole thing is carried by a magnificent, soaring melody — the same melody, in fact, that Conor Oberst rides in ‘Road to Joy’. Beethoven, conducting this final section at the piece’s premiere in 1824, got completely carried away — he was still furiously waving his arms in the air long after the orchestra had stopped playing. And Oberst seems to be swept up in the same feeling of wild abandon as his own song comes to its conclusion. ‘Let’s fuck it up boys!’ he tells his band, ‘make some noise!’
But where Beethoven had his cacophony redeemed by a dream of universal brotherhood, Oberst ends his song with the end of the world. Oberst had always tried to write hope into his sadder songs. But you can hear his optimism fading in the last verses, as he looks around at the world and what we’ve made of it. The same suspicion with which he regards Western civilisation in ‘I Believe in Symmetry’ here reaches fever pitch. He sneers bitterly:
I hope I don’t sound too ungrateful,
What history gave modern men.
A telephone to talk to strangers,
A machine gun and a camera lens8
None of these are any consolation for the still missing-inaction dream of universal human brotherhood. It’s over two centuries since Schiller wrote his poem, one hundred and eighty years since Beethoven set it to music, and three decades years since that music was adopted as the official anthem of the European Community. But the dream it represents seems further away than ever.
The cracked howl and burst of noise at the end of ‘Road to Joy’ signalled a shift in Bright Eyes’ music. Oberst had already thrown himself into political activism, performing onstage with his hero, Bruce Springsteen, on the 2004 Vote for Change tour. Later, in May 2005, he released a download-only protest song called ‘When the President Talks to God’ — a direct critique of the Bush Administration. Then, at the beginning of 2008, he fell back — feeling, as he later described it, ‘corrupted and corroded’ — and turned his gaze inward again.9 But the album he recorded — the first to be released since his very early days under his own name — was very different to Lifted or earlier efforts like Letting off the Happiness. Where Oberst used to look inside himself and see a world of trouble, here, on songs like ‘Sausalito,’ he seemed to have found a measure of self-reliance, even peace.
The source of this new strength, it turned out, was nature. In ‘Sausalito’, the singer describes a camping trip with his girlfriend — they drive out into the desert so as to have the stars all to themselves. Here, Oberst’s experience of the landscape becomes almost religious; he has a sense of a spirit moving through creation, a ‘sound too soft to hear’. This mysterious ‘something’ accounts for the new feeling of calm in the songs on his self-titled album, which was recorded in a small cabin in rural Mexico. The music, as Oberst explained to triple j’s Zan Rowe, sprang from the landscape itself and the feelings it stirred in him. ‘I believe places have an energy to them,’ he said. ‘I felt at peace, but also inspired.’10