Joe Skinner (Narration): Hey, it’s Joe. Before we run this week’s episode, we just wanted to let you know that our interview with Conor Oberst was recorded prior to the start of Bright Eyes’ most recent tour, which was unexpectedly cut short just a couple of weeks ago. So we actually ran into some technical problems trying to get our connections to work for this interview. Admittedly, it took about an hour.
Conor Oberst: My God, we did it!
Joe Skinner (Interview): It’s a miracle. It’s great to have you here. Really appreciate it.
Conor Oberst: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Yeah. Where are you calling from?
Conor Oberst: Omaha, Nebraska.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Great. You split your time, right? I was reading that you have a place in L.A., too?
Conor Oberst: Yeah, exactly.
Joe Skinner (Interview): I’m usually in L.A.. I’m actually in New York visiting right now. I used to live in New York.
Conor Oberst: Cool, yeah, I used to live in New York, too. And now I live in L.A., so we got a lot in common. Do you ever live in Omaha? (Laughs)
Joe Skinner (Narration): Omaha, Nebraska. Population 485,153. It’s a town that, among a certain subset of indie rock listeners, is synonymous with artists like Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. Since he was born there in 1980, Conor has called Omaha his home. As a kid coming up in the Omaha music scene, the town had just a few local venues to offer.
Conor Oberst: There wasn’t a lot of places to play. There was this place called the Cog Factory that was like just a little black box, basically. There was this place called the Ranch Bowl that was like kind of lame, but it had a bowling alley. There’s very few places for like local bands to play. A lot of house shows. So all the music did get mixed together. So you’d have – there’s a great songwriter who’s been a lifelong influence to me named Simon Joyner from here.
Clip from Simon Joyner’s “The Shortest Distance Between Two Points Is A Straight Line.”
Conor Oberst: And so, you know, you got Simon playing with an acoustic guitar by himself, and then you have this band called Mousetrap, that’s just, like super punk. Loud.
Clip from live Mousetrap performance.
Conor Oberst: You might have something that’s more like country tinged or even like, you know, 311’s from here. Sort of like, I don’t know, funk. I mean, basically everything was like, happening at the same places together. So I think that’s different than like a bigger city or somewhere where there’s a little more tribalism, where it’s like, “you play here because you’re a punk band and you play here because you’re like a country band.” Then I think nowadays that I feel like it’s even worse because like, it’s all curated. Like with the internet and stuff, it’s hard for people to discover something that’s out of their comfort zone. And I think that’s a shame. When I was going to shows as a kid, I was exposed to a lot of things. So a lot of it I didn’t like, you know, at all. But it affected me.
Joe Skinner (Narration): It makes sense when you listen to Conor Oberst’s music. He works on a lot of different subgenres within the world of indie rock. But one thing can be said across his prolific 30 plus years of output. He’s thoroughly independent.
Conor Oberst: You know, we’re in Omaha. We knew no one was ever going to give a [censored]. The city wasn’t supportive. So we really did have to like do it ourselves. Our whole kind of group of friends started a label – Saddle Creek. Then it turned into like a pretty successful thing for an independent label. I stuffed a bazillion envelopes, sending people records, and all the bands were supporting each other. It was very communal in that sense.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Saddle Creek Records was named after Saddle Creek Road, which curves right through Midtown in the middle of Omaha. In those pre-internet days, regional indie labels had a huge impact. Like Dischord Records in Washington DC, or Merge Records out in Durham, North Carolina. Likewise, Saddle Creek Records in many ways put Omaha on the map for indie rock. Instrumental to the label’s early success were three acts, including The Faint:
Clip from The Faint’s “Agenda Suicide.”
Joe Skinner (Narration): Cursive.
Clip from Cursive’s “Art is Hard.”
Joe Skinner (Narration): And Conor Oberst’s band, Bright Eyes.
Clip from Bright Eyes’ “Something Vague.”
Conor Oberst: If you listen to those three bands, The Faint, Cursive and Bright Eyes, we don’t really sound anything alike. So it wasn’t like a sound. It was more of like an ethos and like a friendship, I guess.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Hey, I’m Joe Skinner and this is American Masters: Creative Spark. In each episode, our guest breaks down their creative process. This week, we’re with Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, an icon of the DIY indie rock scene. He’s back with his newest Bright Eyes studio album, called “Five Dice, All Threes.” We’ll talk about making that record and what got him here before it.
Conor Oberst: Some people are like, “How did you get into music? How’d it start?” It’s like, I can’t picture a life that isn’t this. You know what I mean? Because I’ve been doing it for so long and like, putting out records since I was like 13 years old and started touring when I was like 15. And I’m 44 now. So I don’t really have another concept of life other than like this thing I’ve been doing.
Joe Skinner (Narration): I guess I forgot to mention this earlier. During the beginning of those early Omaha days, Conor Oberst was 13 years old. I don’t know what else to say other than that’s a really, really young age to start a career and never look back. In fact, Saddle Creek Records first formal release back when they were called Lumberjack Records, was Conor Oberst’s debut album called “Water.” It’s a cassette he put out when he was 13 years old in 1993. Here’s the song “Hubcap” from that tape:
Clip from Conor Oberst’s “Hubcap.”
Joe Skinner (Interview): Do you feel like your mission as an artist has stayed the same from when you started? Or do you feel like, you know, do you see yourself totally differently now?
Conor Oberst: I think it has remarkably stayed almost exactly the same, which is to be living life and absorbing, you know, what’s always coming at you with the human experience. And then turning it into a song and turning it into music and I mean, I think stylistically, obviously lots of things have changed over the years. But I think at the core, it’s still like the same pursuit for me and the same, I guess, you know, both the release of negative feelings and also a way to rejoice. You know, playing music with your friends when it sounds good is like one of the best feelings in the world for me.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Alongside his friends, Conor Oberst would put out more work in his teenage years through a band called Commander Venus and most notably with his band Bright Eyes. Then in the year 2000, at age 19, he really permeated the suburbs with one of Bright Eyes’ first breakout records called “Fevers and Mirrors.” And then it was the 2002 album called “Lifted” that really skyrocketed Oberst and Bright Eyes’ fame. It was ranked the fourth best album of 2002 by Rolling Stone that year, and it led to the band’s national television debut on The Late Show with David Letterman.
Clip from The Late Show with David Letterman.
Joe Skinner (Narration): This is also when I was in middle school. And like many of my peers, I fell in love with the band. I think his emotive lyrics and expressive performance style spoke to the emotional tumultuousness of our tween and teenage years. In a retrospective review of “Fevers and Mirrors,” Pitchfork journalist Ian Cohen describes Conor Oberst’s work from this era as “critic proof” with a magnetism drawn from the music sounding unstable in its intensity. And he describes the song “The Calendar Hung Itself…” as a streaking, disintegrating comet of emotional immolation.
Clip from “The Calendar Hung Itself…”
Joe Skinner (Narration): Now, well over 20 years has passed since that song came out, along with many evolutions of the band’s sound. But you can still hear the DNA of this early Bright Eyes era in their newest album, “Five Dice, All Threes,” like in their single, “Rainbow Overpass.”
Clip from “Rainbow Overpass.”
Joe Skinner (Interview): I wrote down this one lyric, “I’m asleep at the wheel probably,” and just felt like such a classic kind of Bright Eyes turn of phrase there, the way “probably” comes out.
Conor Oberst: Yeah, I think a big part of what I like in lyrics is I think there’s obviously the content of the line, but you know, phrasing and where things hit with the music, like words have a little pause before you drop that like gut punch word that makes the line work, you know, or makes the line more powerful. I think that’s something I kind of, I think developed over the years. I think when I did really early songs, it was just like trying to squeeze as much whatever into like a line. And it’s kind of clumsy and I’ve tried to get better at that over the last 30 years.
Joe Skinner (Interview): What does your writing process typically look like?
Conor Oberst: Well, I think sometimes I’ll have like a solid idea. I have the concept or I’m thinking specifically about a certain person and that’ll be the first seed of the song and then kind of branch out from there. And then a lot of times, you know, honestly, it’s just like some phrase, like for me, like writing, I always think of it as like you walk around in your life and you hear like a little phrase of a conversation or a little something you read or just something you observe, a memory or whatever. And then there’s these little, you know, it’s like you have a little sack in your brain and like, you just pick up these pebbles and drop them in there. And they usually kind of, for me, collect in my head and. You know, swirl together. Some of my friends that are songwriters have, I think, a little more of like a technique or something that they rely on. Like, to me, it’s a little more… I don’t want to sound too grandiose, but it is like still like mysterious to me. Like if I could sit down every day and write a song I like, I would. But that’s not really how it works. You know what I mean? It has to be a time and place and a confluence of my state of mind. I mean, I would say once the song is at least in a form that has chords and the melody, the one thing I am pretty good at or consistent at is I can write a lot of lyrics like pretty fast and look at different options and keep the verses I like or edit the words into the songs. That’s what comes to me real naturally, because a lot of people have the opposite problem, like songwriters, friends of mine, who they get to the point where they have the song that the lyrics are really hard for them to finish, or to, you know, materialize, and if they ask for my help with that, like I can do it like really fast. And they’re going, “Wow, what happened?”
Joe Skinner (Interview): Yeah, I mean, sounds like, so you’ve never had writer’s block really then?
Conor Oberst: Just in the sense of I can’t start the song, but once, once it’s there’s a shape to it, I can usually write the words.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The lyrics are critical to any Bright Eyes fan experience. In total, Conor Oberst’s lyrics probably have more message board comments than any other lyrics of his era. But it’s not a solo act, and collaboration is key to his work. So after the break, we’ll talk more about Bright Eyes’ newest record, “Five Days, All Threes,” and how it came together with Conor’s bandmates and his expanded circle of musician friends.
Conor Oberst: I guess there’s like two forms of writing for me. There is sitting down with yourself or with someone and like kind of strumming a guitar or piano or whatever. And then there’s like more of the band way, which is like how I grew up, where it’s just like, it’s Thursday night. We get to have band practice and we go to the basement and everyone turns up their amps too loud and you kind of make up a song together. And that’s really, that’s really fun, too.
Joe Skinner (Narration): For Conor Oberst, there are a lot of right ways to make a song. With his band’s most recent record, “Five Dice, All Threes,” it started on his porch.
Conor Oberst: I was actually in L.A. and I have a friend who’s on the record. His name is Alex Levine, but he goes under Alex Orange Drink for his solo stuff. And he’s the main singer in this band called The So So Glos, a punk band from New York. And he was staying out in L.A. to write with some other people and staying at my house. And it was one of those things where we were just sitting around with guitars on the porch and really just wasting time. And I hadn’t written a song in a while and he was like, “Why don’t we just try to write a song?” All right. Sure. And then it was just a lot of fun. It actually reminded me of the old days. Yeah, we were just writing for the fun of it and we wrote kind of a bunch of songs. And once I had those, I don’t know what it was, like 3 or 4 songs. I was like, you know what? I’m just going to go for it.
Joe Skinner (Narration): He brought the music back to his longtime bandmates in Bright Eyes, Nate Walcott and Mike Mogis, to figure out how to turn the demos into real songs.
Conor Oberst: Most of my songs start with just kind of playing some chords and trying to get a melody. Sometimes things can start with a riff or something, but that’s not usually how I do it. I kind of find the vocal melody. I have a lot of demos of me just kind of making vocal sounds like, you know, goo goo gaga or whatever while I’m singing over chords. You know, I’m not a great guitar player. I’m not a great piano player, but I’m lucky to have, like, Nate Walcott and Michael Mogis, the people in my band who are, you know, really savant, amazing musicians. Nate is like this incredible arranger and like on our record, like “Cassadaga,” it’s like we’re in like Capitol Studios with like, a 40 piece orchestra. And he’s making these arrangements and it’s so beautiful. And I love that element of our band. And also like with Mike Mogis at the studio, he plays a lot of instruments like mandolin and banjo, and he can basically play pretty much any stringed instrument. But his other like actual instrument is just the studio because he’s such an incredible producer and like I can dream up pretty much any kind of like effect I want or sort of psychedelic sound I want anyhow, make it happen. With all his magic boxes and things.
Joe Skinner (Narration): Collaborations can be seen across “Five Dice, All Threes,” with a lot of featured guests along the way.
Conor Oberst: The song we did was a song from Cat Power that has like a kind of different flavor, but I wanted her to sing on it because something about the beat just reminded me of some of her music, and I was like, Wow, if we could get her to do it, that would be perfect.
Clip from Bright Eyes “All Threes.”
Conor Oberst: Same with Matt Berninger from the National on the song he sings. It’s just that really, really, low down, sad song that I mean, not all his music is like that, of course, but he is kind of a master of that.
Clip from Bright Eyes “The Time I Have Left.”
Conor Oberst: I would say the bulk of my music. I do kind of write by myself, at least the start of it. Obviously it turns into a deep collaboration once the band gets involved. As far as like collaborating with friends, it’s the best, you know?
Joe Skinner (Narration): The cover art in “Five Dice, All Threes” depicts five bright red dice. As you may have guessed, all showing the number three. It’s suggestive of a narrative or a concept album. So as these individual tracks and collaborations come together, I wanted to figure out when in the creative process Bright Eyes starts to realize a grander vision for the record. And in this case, it goes back to those early collaborations with Alex Levine from the So So Glos.
Conor Oberst: Alex taught me this dice game and it’s called Threes. And so you roll five dice, and each time you roll, the threes are worth zero and everything else is the same and you’re trying to get the lowest score. So in that game, if you roll, you know, all threes, that’s like a perfect roll. And usually you’re playing for money and you’re like laughing and drinking and stuff. So it’s fun. But I think that, I don’t know, I guess, the desire for perfection because that would be a perfect roll, but also knowing that very rarely happens. And that, you know, kind of everything. You know, if we want to go big with the metaphor, you know, kind of everything on this earth is like a game of chance in a way. And, well, we’re all forced to play it and we’re like, we’re hoping for that perfect roll, but, you know, it doesn’t happen that often, I guess.
Joe Skinner (Narration): The album gets dark at times with several songs that seem to meditate on death and existence. And for me, a standout moment conceptually, is with the track “Bas Jan Ader,” which is about a Dutch performance artist and photographer who is mysteriously lost at sea while he was attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a tiny sailboat. The disappearance happened in 1975 and has gone unresolved to this day.
Conor Oberst: I mean, I didn’t know about him until, you know, recently in the last couple of years. And yeah, it’s a crazy story. It’s a very, I mean, it’s a really sad story. But the song’s not sad. The song’s pretty catchy.
Clip from “Bas Jan Ader.”
Conor Oberst: I like to believe that, like when he sailed out to sea, it was, you know, it was more of a joyous like, I’m going to find something else, you know?
Joe Skinner (Interview): So would you say that song is kind of like an ode to his story?
Conor Oberst: Yeah, in a way, I think so. In part. For sure. I think that, like living with like a pretty big reservoir of just sorrow and, I don’t know, just, you know, I’ve always been definitely a depressive person, even though I’m, I think I like can be pretty fun. But like underneath it’s there is like a, just, you know. You know, you know the type. And so to have those feelings and live with those feelings and trying to make something out of those feelings or trying to avoid them, I don’t know. All those different ways that you deal with… That we all deal with our own mental state or personality or whatever you want to call it, just internal worlds. And then, you know, I do like the idea of making some grand gesture, like, you know, disappearing on a boat is, I don’t know, it’s just romantic, I suppose.
Joe Skinner (Interview): I mean, this is kind of a big, broad question, but I guess, do you see music as kind of just like a healing process in a way?
Conor Oberst: I mean, I think definitely there’s, you know, catharsis in music. I mean, it’s been probably what’s kept me alive and kept me filling my life with purpose and not at all just playing it. I mean, just listening to it my whole life and the way it’s the one thing I feel like I can return to and it’s always there for me. I mean some of the saddest things or times… You know, it does not happen that often in my life. But when I feel like disconnected and like don’t even care to listen to music and definitely don’t care to write it, I mean, that’s probably when I’m the most depressed, you know? But for the most part, like, yeah, I always return to it, and sometimes on tour it can get really exhausting and you’re tired and all of that stuff and then the show happens. And for me, it feels like, wow, because, you know, I feel like this is why I’m here. This is what I’m supposed to be doing. And I think that’s a great feeling because, I don’t know, everyone wants to feel some kind of point to all this, you know?
Joe Skinner (Interview): I was curious if you had any other last things about the record that you wanted to say.
Conor Oberst: You know, I really don’t. I mean, I do sincerely hope people listen to it. I think that we’ve made a lot of different kinds of records, and I’ve made on my own even more different records. So if you have had a bad impression of the band or me or something in the past, you know, maybe give this one a shot, you might like it.
Joe Skinner (Interview): Well, thanks, Conor. It was really nice meeting you.
Conor Oberst: Thanks, Joe. Have a good one.
Joe Skinner (Narration): That’s our show. Thank you to Conor Oberst for taking the time to talk. You can listen to “Five Dice, All Threes” now wherever you find your music. And don’t forget, if you like what you heard, please rate and review our show, it really helps, and tell your friends to listen to American Masters: Creative Spark, wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen on our site at pbs.org/americanmasters.
American Masters: Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you. This episode was produced by me, Joe Skinner. Our executive producer is Michael Kantor. Original music is composed by Hannis Brown. This episode was mixed and mastered by Jon Berman.
Funding for American Masters: Creative Spark was provided by the Rosalind P. Walter Foundation, Thea Petschek Iervolino Foundation, the Anderson Family Fund, the Marc Haas Foundation, Sue and Edgar Wachenheim III, the Charina Endowment Fund, the Ambrose Monell Foundation, and the Kate W. Cassidy Foundation.
