Bright Eyes: The People's Key (Music to Hear)

Losing a close friend in late 2010 to suicide, Conor Oberst was close to completing "The People's Key", his seventh full-length under the Bright Eyes banner. An album for which he had returned home to Nebraska to record in bursts throughout that year. Tucked into the album's waning moments is "Ladder Song", a purse-lipped heartbreaker Oberst wrote on piano out of grief. When he sat down later to record the song in the home studio he co-founded with Bright Eyes producer & multi-instrumentalist Mike Mogis, Oberst opted to play it on an old keyboard rather than the grand piano their new setup afforded him. The end result, eerily similar to "Sunrise, Sunset", a song from 2000's eye-opening Fevers & Mirrors, sounds very much in tune with Bright Eyes' beginnings: manic and rickety, grave & strangely gripping, Oberst spitting his words up as though it's just as painful to share them as it is to keep them inside. Here, on what the one-time wunderkind has called this project's final ride, its playlist's final addition stands completely alone both sonically & otherwise. "Ladder Song" is not just a bracing tribute, it's a throwback glimpse at how much has changed or not changed at all in the way Oberst has chosen to present himself & his songwriting.

Well over a decade after its inception, it's easy to forget that before Oberst's lyrical abracadabra on 2002's "Lifted" garnered "New Dylan!" hosannas, the Bright Eyes brand got its first bit of traction amongst the indie crowds. Oberst was a poster boy, alongside another indie prince Ryan Adams, with his hair always swept perfectly across his sad, massive, Milk-Dud eyes, fit to erupt in small rooms like those in which he first recorded. In the years that followed Lifted's release, he left behind his handcrafted, attic-pop leanings to fully embrace American roots music. It was a path he hit all the harder as his audience & profile grew. From pure folk to ham-fisted honky tonky to the classic rock of his Mystic Valley band, each subsequent release employed a recording method to match the ambition of Oberst's increasingly dystopian lyric book. That trajectory reached a pivotal point in 2007's "Cassadaga", a cinematic, string-embossed epic that found Oberst in all those modes at once, engaging even further with themes both mystic & apocalyptic. Yet his latest record seems to be the loudest expression of what Bright Eyes had seemingly always been about: articulating the world's many weights, as he meant to carry them around. "The People's Key", its sci-fi successor, breaks from the narrative. It attempts to articulate ideas within us all and a history best not forgotten.

It's as well-assembled and produced a set of songs as you'd expect from pros like these guys, and fortunately, much of it tends to ring true. As "Jejune Stars" comes to a close, you'll find a short interstitial recording of Denny Brewer, a Texas musician whose husky, shares musings on other dimensions, extra-terrestrial ancient reptilian life forms inspired by new aged spiritual beliefs & ancient Sumerian writings, also comprise most of the album's liberating message and sound.

In talking about the etymology of the word "pomegranate," he renacts the moment the fruit got its name: "I don't know why it's called a pomegranate, but it looks like a pomegranate. No matter what language you spoke it in, syllables are frequencies." Though his brayed delivery tends to be a tipping point for many, Oberst's lyrical acumen has always been his work's great strength. Whether it was four chords for a love song or three to size up of everything that's wrong with Right Now, he's been able to rule a recording from the start. But here, he's occupying a frequency all by himself, arranging words that do wonders harmonically, yet mean next to nothing side-by-side if a faint attention is paid to it all. Through and through, this record's overarching themes of "oneness" and connectivity feel blurred by the fragmented, illusory nature of our modern reality. Yet Oberst seems to have fallen down any and every rabbit hole he could find to climb back out and share Rastafarian imagery making room for shamanic allusions, futurist tail-chasing, half-baked philosophizing, aimless retrospection, evangelizing as "One for You, One for Me" attests, dead end time travel & one very short, psychedelic walk into a place named the "Land of Tomorrow".

In the end, every line is laid with a rich sense of rhythm and texture mastered over the years, but it may all still add up to very little for those without the knowledgeable base needed despite being from those who are open-minded and educated in such matters. Luckily with just a little curiosity, listeners will find a wildly spiritual record with a double album's amount of spirit.

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