getting right down to the bottom of everything at the bright eyes hollywood bowl concert

The Bright Eyes show at the Hollywood Bowl was the first show in a long about which I couldn't immediately barf out a blog post. Seeing Conor Oberst + a big ol' band play through his fraternal twin classics I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning and Digital Ash In A Digital Urn hit me harder than I even thought was possible and the words just weren't coming!

Both of those albums were...uh...so important to me. They came out in 2005 when I was fifteen. I'd gotten into Bright Eyes the year prior when my friend Ruby excitedly proffered a Discman and headphones at summer theater camp and put me on to Fevers and Mirrors. Alternately ecstatic and depressed, catastrophically horny and deeply ashamed of the things that would need to be done to alleviate said horniness, chafing at the bit to become an adult and equally freaked out at the prospect, I received Conor's lyrics about abject hookups and generalized social nausea with the reverence I could no longer muster at Sunday Mass. Even at his lowest, he was all about music-as-salvation, the writing and performing songs as the things you do when everything else sucks. As someone who would wait eons for a moment alone in my crowded house to belt Rilo Kiley songs in the bathroom with the good acoustics, I appreciated this approach to life. It's cool if you keep quiet, but / I like singing, he yelled. Yes, Conor, same.

Wide Awake and Digital Ash hit at the right time, maximum confusion and uneasiness at a time of maximum disempowerment. There's nothing quite like not being old enough to vote when a war criminal is in office. The drunken drawling on "Hit The Switch," the manic roar of "Another Travelin' Song"—self-destruction, presented through music so exuberant you couldn't help but find a bit of deranged joy in it. 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.

Anyway, a lot emotionally riding on the 21st "birthday party" for those albums, and I'm not gonna lie, I was a little nervous for Conor to be able to pull it off, having seen some performance videos in the past couple of years that made it seem like his particular brand of living was not paying dividends. But he crushed it. The band was big—a string section, some buck wild pedal steel, Nick Zinner from Yeah Yeah Yeahs on one of the many guitars—and every song sounded perfect to me.

There were subtle adjustments to the 21-year-old songs: the mention of an Oura ring in the monologue that opens "At The Bottom of Everything," changing the age in the line "The world's got me dizzy again / You think after 22 years I'd be used to the spin" from 22 to 46. The audience was, of course, quite millennial, and people were wearing hats that might have been sitting in closets since "Are you a hipster?" features were appearing in print magazines, or, who knows, might have been proudly atop heads this whole time (Los Angeles is a Hat Town, after all).

What made me most emotional was the political stuff, which Conor did not shy away from getting into. 21 years ago we were at war in the Middle East and we're still there and it's hard to not get upset thinking about how we might still be doing the same old shit when my daughter is a teenager. There were some bold screen graphics in the middle of the Digital Ash portion of the night, calling Trump and Netanyahu psychopathic war criminals who should be arrested; before the encore, the band played "America The Beautiful" while the graphics acknowledged that America was built on the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African-Americans, and is currently being terrorized by ICE daily. I felt an acute despair, and then as if anticipating that despair, the screen flashed:

Then he played "Lover I Don't Have To Love," ha, ha. A very nihilistic song about numbing yourself with sex and drugs. A very adult song, to my teen self, back when I hadn't met a single kid who had the chemicals, and wasn't really sure what chemicals he was talking about. Anniversary concerts are the perfect occasion to look at your life and look at your choices and try to appreciate how far you've come. Ideally you keep getting a little better even if the world keeps getting worse? Is that attitude what they call "cope"? Okay, then I cope. I am coping.

This all reminds me of discussing the end of One Battle After Another with my husband: I found the idea of Willa having to take up her parents' mantle of protest and resistance to be depressing, and Chris said it represented something hopeful about the unavoidable eternal struggle—keeping at it, keeping the faith. He had a point. That's what those Bright Eyes albums were about all along, I guess. You have to keep getting out of bed, you have to keep singing. There is no right way or wrong / you just have to live, Conor sings on "Hit The Switch." Granted, he's wasted on the song, getting on with yet another drunken night, looking blearily at the world through of one of those really heavy dive bar shot glasses. But he's not wrong.

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