![]() ![]() ![]() “One thing I love to do is write interesting, weird chord progressions, so that worked out well. “In this case, we started from the ground up,” adds Walcott, whose side gigs include touring with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and composing scores for TV and film. He went to music school, and his musicality is much more sophisticated than mine.” ![]() “Even with some of the ones that I brought in more finished, I would turn them over to Nate and he would do chord substitutions. “Nate and Mike would send me little bits of music, and then I would mess around with it and then write the vocal melodies and the lyrics to their musical ideas,” Oberst says. Typically in the past, Oberst would write songs and bring them finished to the band, and they’d arrange them together. To me, that represents some of my happiest memories of the last years.”Īll three members of Bright Eyes cite Down In the Weeds as the band’s most collaborative album. I always associate that with feelings of happiness, when you open the door and you hear all your friends and you hear the music. My friend Dan McCarthy plays ragtime, Scott Joplin stuff, every Thursday happy hour. “All our records have some kind of strange sound-collage intro,” Oberst says. He’s not a guy who makes the same-sounding records.” He’s a very fun person to collaborate with, because he’s so receptive to new shit. “He tried his fucking hardest to make me feel respected and listened to. “I was super-nervous when we were making Better Oblivion, because I just didn’t feel like a peer,” Bridgers, 26, said earlier this year. ![]() Last year, Oberst formed the band Better Oblivion Community Center with one of his clearest stylistic heirs, Phoebe Bridgers, who grew up listening to Bright Eyes. He’s also become a major influence on a younger generation of singer-songwriters who favor melancholy honesty. In the last decade, Oberst has released several solo albums, as well as a second record with his best-known other band, Desaparecidos (2015’s Payola ). It’s a stark collection of 14 songs that’s simultaneously heart-wrenching and joyous, as Oberst grapples with divorce and the loss of his late brother (the album is dedicated to him), while staying optimistic about the future. The album that resulted from those calls, Down In the Weeds, Where the World Once Was, marks Bright Eyes’ first new release since 2011’s The People’s Key. “I think it was probably the right move to call me the next day to make sure I understood that it wasn’t a dream that I had.” “I was in the mall doing some Christmas shopping with my kids,” Mogis says. Or if I was up, I was probably a little drunk.” Mogis agreed right away, but Oberst called the musician and producer again the following day just to confirm that he was on board. “I honestly don’t even remember that call,” Mogis, 46, admits. That night, Oberst and Walcott huddled into the bathroom to call their bandmate Mike Mogis, who was back home in Omaha. Also, there’s just the simple fact that we like hanging out with each other. “It wasn’t like I was standing in the kitchen and dropped a pound cake,” the 42-year-old musician cracks. To Walcott, the decision to end the band’s unofficial hiatus of nearly a decade felt organic. “It kind of just came out of my mouth,” Oberst, 40, recalls: “’Let’s do it. A few years ago, Conor Oberst was attending a Christmas party at Nate Walcott’s home in Los Angeles when he told his Bright Eyes bandmate he had an idea. ![]()
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