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Motion sickness lyrics4/30/2023 Oberst trips over a cover of Feist's wonderful "Mushaboom", failing to really own its tripping melody, faring better on Elliot Smith's "The Biggest Lie". The tuneless protest song "When the President Talks to God" is another hat that doesn't quite fit, although it's pretty clearly included for political and not musical reasons, and draws approving screams from the audience. His band is tight, but Oberst sounds a bit tense and weighed down on heavily embellished tracks like "At the Bottom of Everything" and Lua B-side "True Blue". But for now, he sounds like he's still working out a new way of singing that suits the thicker country-rock arrangements he began to favor on Lifted, sometimes faltering in a sort of stifled mid-range. And while all those vocal tics are still intact, they've been subdued- probably for the best, in the long run. Emotional and musical nudity make good bedfellows. I must've seen him play at least 10 times in my late teens and early twenties, and the most memorable performance of them all was a post- Fevers and Mirrors solo show where he shuddered, sweated, whispered, and howled over shattered-glass chords. The Bright Eyes I grew up with- literally, we being the same age- was always best on his own. Musically, Oberst finds himself in a similarly transitional state, somewhere between the tortured no-fi manqué he was and the mellowed country singer he's becoming, and the same tension that enriches his lyrics creates some minor hitches in his musical delivery. In fact, it's a summary of Oberst's entire lyrical perspective and the collective twentysomething suburban worldview it excavates, an expression of the tension between two conflicting desires: For lasting security and galvanizing change. The magnetism of the music is in its jolts of recognition, those moments when mental states that one thought were private, from within the solipsism of youth, are revealed as universal.Īnother telling audience response occurs during the quiet rendition of "Landlocked Blues", when a smattering of cheers follows the line "If you love something, give it away." It could refer to Oberst's songs, with their tacit promise to not simply entertain, but to unveil something of the messy humanity of their author. Not "you rock," not "I love your music," but "I love you." It's a helpful clue toward understanding his widespread popularity- Oberst's intimate, earnest music is calibrated for maximum personal identification it's an invitation for fans to feel not just privy to his private life, but complicit in it. Buried in this applause a female voice shouts, "Conor, I love you!". Live album issued by Team Love was recorded on the I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning tour and features covers of songs by Feist and Elliott Smith.īright Eyes' new live album, cobbled together from recordings of the I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning tour, opens with the requisite applause.
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