Sasha Frere-Jones on Bright Eyes

There are three things that people often say about Conor Oberst, the singer, songwriter, and only permanent member of the band Bright Eyes. One is that he started his musical career when he was thirteen. Another is that he is the new Bob Dylan. And the third is that he is not unpopular with the women who attend his shows. Oberst did begin recording at thirteen, and he was touring three years later, while still in high school and living with his parents in Omaha, Nebraska. Oberst’s own label, Saddle Creek, which he formed with his brother and a friend when he was seventeen, has seized on his youth as a promotional asset. A sticker on the 2002 album “Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground” declared, “Conor Oberst owns a voice that quakes with the tumultuous energy that only youth can produce.”

This isn’t just sales talk. At the age of twenty-four, Oberst is delicate and skinny, with the long face and rumpled corduroys of someone who is preparing to be fifteen forever. Many of his songs—there are already more than a hundred—deal with the states of high dudgeon that are native to teen-agers everywhere: extreme heartbreak, extreme moral disapproval, extreme sadness. His wobbling voice and overstuffed couplets call to mind late-night dorm-room epiphanies, those moments when, drunk on cheap wine and the excitement of a new crush, you realize that nobody means anyone else any good, that companies care only about profit, but that you and me, babe, we can make it through the night—though I will probably be shoving off in the wee morning light. Babe.

This sense of being let down by the world at a young age may remind people of Dylan. Or maybe the comparison came about because Oberst plays an acoustic guitar and sings songs with lots of words, sometimes in Dylan’s cadence. In fact, Oberst is not very much like Dylan, but the differences between them are instructive. Dylan is armor-plated, even when singing about love; Oberst is permanently open to pain, wonder, and confusion. Dylan gives voice to thoughts so dense that he himself might not understand them all; Oberst is content to tackle hope and heartbreak—and, increasingly now, politics—in accessible, occasionally sententious language. Dylan fled the Midwest and invented a person who seemed to come from nowhere; Oberst moved to an apartment in the East Village a year and a half ago but still spends a third of his time in Omaha, where Saddle Creek is based. He talks freely to reporters and is exactly as charming as the girls who scream “I love you, Conor!” hope he is. Oberst has not transformed rock music. (If there were a “new Bob Dylan,” he would make people uncomfortable right away, attack the world with a pickaxe, and refuse to say he’s sorry. He would probably not be a musician.) Oberst is simply more talented, and more prolific, than the average songwriter.

Last week, Bright Eyes released “I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning” and “Digital Ash in a Digital Urn,” the band’s fifth and sixth albums. “I’m Wide Awake,” the stronger of the two, was recorded quickly, with some songs done live in one take, and generally resembles Oberst’s earlier work. “Digital Ash,” which was created using a combination of electronic sources (such as keyboards and programmed samples) and traditional instruments, represents something of a departure. On both albums, the songs move at a fairly brisk pace and shy away from grand pronouncements. It’s a blessing that Oberst has cut back on fortune-cookie lines like “Your eyes must do some raining if you are ever going to grow” (from “Lifted”). But platitudes are an occupational hazard for a songwriter who specializes in gauging the human heart. If Oberst sometimes mistakes his private turmoil for the universal condition, it is not simply because he is young; he understands that pop songs need to overstate the case, to howl, to make a moment last because there might not be another like it. The outsize emotions are still there, but now they’re delivered in a more compressed, catchier form.

Two songs from the albums, “Lua” and “Take It Easy (Love Nothing),” were released as singles last November. Within a week, they were No. 1 and No. 2, respectively, on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Sales chart, an uncommon feat for independent rock releases. (The chart is based solely on sales and does not reflect radio play.) “Take It Easy,” from “Digital Ash,” is taut and upbeat. Oberst is falling in love again: “You took off your clothes, left on the light. You stood there so brave. You used to be shy.” But in the next verse his lover leaves him a note: “Don’t take it so bad, it is nothing you did. It is just once something dies you can’t make it live. You are a beautiful boy. You’re a sweet little kid but I am a woman.” It’s a canny maneuver. Oberst wants us to know that, kid or not, he’s getting around, and, at the same time, that he’s still as vulnerable as he was when he had to yell in order to speak.

“Lua,” from “I’m Wide Awake,” is the quietest song on either record, just a very soft guitar and Oberst singing. It is a blue, but not regretful, story of a night that never ends: “Julie knows a party at some actor’s West Side loft. Supplies are endless in the evening, by the morning they’ll be gone.” Just when Oberst begins to sound jaded, he drops the conceit: “When everything is lonely I can be my own best friend. I get a coffee and the paper; have my own conversations with sidewalk and pigeons and my window reflection.” He lingers delightfully on the word “conversations,” making his banal morning ritual sound as pleasurable as the previous night’s adventure.

Last Tuesday, the day the albums were released, Bright Eyes performed the first of three shows at Town Hall. Oberst, in a tight white tennis shirt and sagging jeans, was in an affectionate mood. He whispered with his bandmates, and at one point gently nuzzled his bass player’s shoulder. The set was made up almost entirely of songs from “I’m Wide Awake,” and Mike Mogis, on pedal-steel guitar, and Nate Walcott, on trumpet, gave the music an unexpectedly big and colorful shape. Midway through the show, the band left the stage, and Oberst performed alone. “I was so moved by the President’s inauguration speech last week that I wrote this song,” he announced. To the evening’s loudest applause, he sang “When the President Talks to God,” a fierce synthesis of accusation and repetition which recalled Dylan’s early protest songs: “When the President talks to God, does he ever think maybe he’s not, that the voice is just inside his head? As he kneels next to the presidential bed, does he ever smell his own bullshit, when the President talks to God?”

The show ended with a rowdy version of “Road to Joy,” a song from “I’m Wide Awake” that neatly ties together Oberst’s many concerns. Based on the melody of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the song unfolds like a march, even though Oberst seems to be retreating into himself: “I have my drugs. I have my woman. They keep away my loneliness. My parents, they have their religion, but sleep in separate houses.” Gradually, his voice falls into step with the music, and his words become harsh and sarcastic: “So when you’re asked to fight a war that’s over nothing, it’s best to join the side that’s going to win. And no one’s sure how all of this got started, but we’re going to make them goddamn certain how it’s going to end.” Riled, Oberst turns the anger back on himself: “I could have been a famous singer, if I had someone else’s voice. But failure’s always sounded better, let’s fuck it up, boys. Make some noise.” The band obliges with a burst of horns and galloping drums. But Oberst knows that the lyric is implausible. After all, he is a famous singer. So, perhaps to convince himself, and his fans, that he’s an ordinary guy trying to find his place in the world, he reprises the song’s opening lines, this time screaming them: “The sun came up with no conclusions. Flowers sleeping in their beds. The city cemetery’s humming. I’m wide awake, it’s morning.”