“Instead of asking the question ‘why,’ we like to say ‘why not?’” Bright Eyes frontman Conor Oberst says of his band’s unexpected reunion for grandiose new album Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was nearly a decade after their last new full-length.
“Where we were all at in our lives, it felt like a good idea to make a record with, you know, your most trusted collaborators and friends,” Oberst concludes. “There wasn’t a lot of trepidation on anyone’s part.”
After 2011’s The People’s Key, Oberst, along with bandmates Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott, took a hiatus from the band. When Oberst reignited his earlier punk band Los Desaparecidos the following year, perhaps an eventual reunion still felt likely ], but as he and the rest of the band went on to a slew of other successful projects, that hope faded.
Mogis and Oberst joined with M. Ward and My Morning Jacket’s Jim James to form Monsters of Folk. Mogis and Walcott both collaborated with Jason Mraz and scored The Fault In Our Stars before Walcott dug deeper into film scores. Most recently, in 2019, Oberst joined with critically acclaimed songwriter Phoebe Bridgers to receive high praise as Better Oblivion Community Center. All this begging the question of why the band chose to reunite now.
“I think everything that I’ve done as a musician,” Oberst explains, “it informs my whole sensibilities and what I look for in musical collaborations. I’ve always been a big believer in rotating the crops as far as my creativity.”
At a Christmas party in 2017, the trio made the decision to return to the Bright Eyes project, and by the following spring, had convened in their original home of Omaha, Nebraska. Ten albums into their career, though, Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was found them in a markedly different place.
Where Bright Eyes earlier works were often stripped-down, punk-inspired folk with blown out, acoustic guitars and lo-fi vocals recorded, at one point in Oberst’s parents’ laundry room, the band now has access to three studio rooms at Mogis’ Another Recording Company, captured orchestral arrangements with top session players in the famed Capitol Studios, and invited Red Hot Chili Pepper’s bassist Flea and The Mars Volta drummer Jon Theodore to contribute to the album.
“We’re so fortunate to be able to work with [high-caliber session musicians], but at the same time, that’s not going to prevent us from making creative choices while mixing,” Walcott says. “It comes down to choices and not out of necessity, necessarily, which is kind of a wonderful and fortunate place to be in.”
The choices made for Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was deliberately revisit much of Bright Eyes’ past without ever nearing on recitation. Naturally, Oberst’s songwriting and voice still form the heart of the music, but it’s by taking a more collaborative approach and allowing the musical and production characters of Mogis and Walcott to take a more foundational role that the album creates a novel entry in the band’s catalog.
In the past, the two’s excellent musicality has often felt more of an aesthetic choice in handling the songs rather than creating the songs, like in the folksy orchestration’s of Cassadaga or the warped and electronic-heavy Digital Ash In A Digital Urn. Here, washes of strings, fluttery delays, and deliciously crunched drum sounds feel vital to the cause.
“We wanted to make a record that had a certain nostalgia to it and fit in with the Bright Eyes catalog,” Oberst says. “We didn’t want to rehash anything exactly, and we wanted it to represent where we were all at being a little bit older and having spent the last nine years doing all these different things. So, we were trying to make a record that felt like us in 2019 or whenever we were recording, but at the same time, really make it feel like a Bright Eyes record so that when old fans put it on, they’re not like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ They’re like, ‘Oh, it’s my old pal.’”
Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was definitely doesn’t pick up quite where the band left off in 2011, but for loyal fans Oberst’s voice will probably be enough to get reeled in. And from there, it’s a continuation of Bright Eyes’ commitment to an ever-evolving sound.
“All you can do is make the music you want to make, and hopefully there are some people out there that like it, and I feel like that’s what we did on this record,” Walcott says. “Hopefully, people love it, and if they don’t, you know, stick around. There will probably be another one, and it’ll be a lot different.”
Purchase Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was here.
Bright Eyes photo by Shawn Brackbill
