keith’s new self

“Bright Eyes” aka Conor Oberst has been owning my playlist lately. The elements of his style - songwriting, singing, arrangement - come together in magical ways to create beautiful, captivating songs. Here’s a quote from a review, by someone more eloquent than me:

I’m Wide Awake perfectly captures a place and time in Oberst’s life. It chronicles his first memories of staying in New York City, and the metropolis rarely gets a folk singer to chronicle its streets this lucidly, at least since the hootenanny days; he frequents its parties and stumbles down its streets like a midwestern transplant instead of a jaded hipster, sings about chemical dependency and the endless pains of love, while capturing as a backdrop the build-up to a foreign war. I’m Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve– the songs that still give me chills every time, like “At the Bottom of Everything”: “Into the face of every criminal strapped firmly to a chair/ We must stare, we must stare, we must stare.”

Yup, good stuff.
tags: brighteyes, folk, indierock, music

posted: 9:19 pm