A year ago, I heard Conor Oberst’s Ruminations (2016) for the first time. I’ve been struggling with describing my reaction to it ever since. Last night I saw Conor Oberst in concert, so now I’m ready to give it a shot.
I’ve been aware of Bright Eyes and Oberst for many years. My family is from Nebraska, so of course I was aware of the Omaha connection. My sister gave me a copy of I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (2005) close to the time that it was released. I recall really liking Road to Joy, and being confused by the intro to At the Bottom of Everything, but I don’t really remember having a strong reaction to the rest of the album. I accumulated random songs over the years—When the President Talks to God, Zigzagging Toward the Light, Lua, Four Winds—but I wasn’t really invested.
For some reason, when Ruminations debuted on NPR’s First Listen last fall, it caught my attention. The first track, Tachycardia, grabbed me immediately as the opening piano chords immediately gave way to the lyrics:
It's a mass grave
A dollar-fifty resting place
On the north face
It's a rope I've gotta climb
I'm a stone's throw from everyone I love and know
But I can't show up looking like I do
In an old suit my hair is slicked back nice and smooth
In a court room, sweat rolling down my back
It's a bad dream
I have it seven times a week
No it's not me
But I'm the one who has to die
I don’t remember what I was doing when I first started listening to Ruminations, but whatever it was, I stopped immediately. I listened to the entire album. And then I listened again. And again. My first impression (and my second) was that it sounded like a suicide note. How else was I supposed to interpret the opening lines of Counting Sheep?
Closing my eyes, counting sheep
Gun in my mouth, trying to sleep
Everything ends, everything has to
Ruminations is bleak. Oberst sings and plays the guitar, piano, and harmonica. That’s it. The rawness of the production amplifies the desperation of the lyrics—he rotates between spitting anger, wistfulness, guilt, and acceptance so rapidly, sometimes within the same song, that the result is a fundamentally disquieting album.
The result is also an album of incredible emotional resonance and power. Oberst told Charlie Rose in late July that when he writes songs, he writes the melody first and then the lyrics because “I feel like the phrasing and the way that you lay the words in the scope of the melody is just as important in the poetry, you know what I mean, they have to be married in the right way.” Perhaps the reason that Ruminations impacted me so immediately and deeply is that more so than other Oberst creative efforts, the lyrics clearly dominate the music. At no point does the music drown out the words or demand your full attention—the same cannot be said for many studio recordings of Bright Eyes songs or other Oberst solo efforts.
What is so remarkable about Ruminations is that it never should have happened. The songs are so sparse because this recording was intended only as demos for a full studio album (which was released in March 2017 as Salutations). Oberst recorded the songs at his home in Omaha in a 48 hour period over the winter of 2015. He had interrupted a tour supporting the second studio album with his band Desaparecidos in October 2015 and it was announced that he had been hospitalized due to “laryngitis, anxiety, and exhaustion.” It was later revealed that the reason for his dizziness was more concerning—a cyst on his brain discovered at the Mayo Clinic. While Oberst recovered from this health scare, he wrote the songs that became Ruminations.
The health scare and cancelled tour came a year after the woman who had accused Oberst of raping her when she was 16 years old admitted that she had invented the story. Her apology came seven months after her initial story appeared online in December 2013 on the now defunct website xoJane. Seven months in which Oberst saw once-rabid fans spread the story from blogs to the legitimate news media.
The song that feels (to me) like the emotional centerpiece of Ruminations is You All Loved Him Once:
You all loved him once
Yes, you ate out of his hand
He mirrored your confusion
So that you might understand
Then your soul was an experiment
So he drew a diagram
You all loved him once
It ended bad
The opening lines “you all loved him once / and not without cause” are essentially quoting Marc Antony’s lines about Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play. Different stanzas clearly reference Caesar and John Lennon, and possibly Barack Obama. But in the context of the rape allegations and the abandonment of Oberst by so many fans, the entire song is also thematically if not literally autobiographical.
As I continued to listen to Ruminations, and then as I heard the full-band versions on Salutations that Oberst had originally intended, I realized that the album is not a suicide note. It is a defiant declaration that no matter what life may throw at him (and life has thrown a lot at Oberst the last few years), he will persist. Despite the anger and the sadness that dominates Ruminations, there is hope and love. In The Rain Follows the Plow, the aggressively atheist Oberst confesses that he has struggled with the Catholic faith that he was raised in before concluding “Well I don't need God or common law to tell me right from wrong / 'Cause when you press me to your chest / I know where I belong.”
In the past year, I have read years and years worth of reviews and “think” pieces about Oberst and Bright Eyes. And honestly, many of them made me angry because a common theme is trying to tear down some myth about Oberst that music journalists created in the first place. Oberst has been called “the next Bob Dylan” for decades. Has been labeled the “voice of a generation” since he was a teenager. He has been saddled with inspiring a certain fashionable despondency. Claims of his supposed excesses are part of the picture drawn by music critics. In the past few years, most of the reviews begin by describing his physical appearance, and the disconnect between the “pixie-ish” teenage lead singer of Bright Eyes and the 37 year old today. The Guardian recently said that he “looks defeated.” A Vulture story last year said that “Oberst … shows some signs of rock-and-roll wear and tear.” A Noisey piece recently described him and compared him to his younger self: “The smooth baby face that sparked a million indie rock crushes in the early 2000s is starting to show some cracks and is peppered with a few days' worth of stubble. His hair is no longer shaped into the asymmetrical swoop that accidentally made him an emo style icon at 20, but is now a rat's nest of black strands pinned back by a pair of sunglasses.”
In Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved), Oberst sings “I do not read the reviews / No, I am not singing for you.” Friend, I do not blame you. I wouldn’t read any of those reviews either. If you only knew Oberst from these reviews, you could imagine an isolated, depressed person who believes himself to be a musical or poetic genius and is carefully cultivating that image. But then spend a little time on YouTube watching performances, or listen to some of Oberst’s unedited interviews, and the most common word you’ll hear him say is “friend.” This is a connected person, so connected that he gave up his apartment in New York City after thirteen years to move home to Omaha.
I can quote the lyrics from this fifteen year old Bright Eyes song because after listening to Ruminations and then Salutations on a daily basis, I decided that I had to dive back into the rest of his catalog. I’m eight years older than Oberst. He isn’t the voice of my generation and I didn’t discover him as an emo teenager (emo hadn’t been invented yet when I was a teenager), but I was absolutely floored when I listened to I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (2005) again through the eyes opened by Ruminations. Why had I deprived myself of this album all of these years?
In Landlocked Blues, Oberst sings:
And the world's got me dizzy again
You think after 22 years I'd be used to the spin
And it only feels worse when I stay in one place
So I'm always pacing around or walking away
You'll be free child once you have died
From the shackles of language and measurable time
Twenty-two. He was twenty-two when he wrote that song. The critics are all wrong. Bright Eyes isn’t the house band for disaffected youth—it wrote the soundtrack for the Gen X midlife crisis. Actually, that isn’t right either. Oberst has just been writing great poetry all this time, and people seeking meaning or a common voice for their own pain and confusion have been able to find it in his lyrics.
As Oberst told Charlie Rose: “I feel like, to me, the more I can find something universal, obviously you’re expressing yourself, but finding that, I don’t know, like, human experience, I guess, if someone listens to a song that I write can they relate to it as a fellow human being on the planet. … I’m saying what I feel but the hope of course is, I think all art is a communication. You put it on a little balloon and throw it in the air and you don’t know if anyone will receive it on the other side but that’s the hope. It is out of my control once I put it out there.”
I saw Conor Oberst play last night at The Neighborhood Theater in Charlotte, North Carolina. He has been touring in support of Ruminations and Salutations for most of the past year. Oberst and his band were on the third night of six consecutive days of traveling and performing from Tennessee to Florida. He didn’t seem tired or defeated to me. He was practically snapping with compressed energy. The songs that sounded like a suicide note on Ruminations are now infused with snarling anger and pathos, sprinkled in a setlist alongside classic Bright Eyes tunes, a cover of Tom Petty’s Walls, and an unreleased love song that he performed while holding a blue Solo cup (contents unknown), and accompanied only by James Felice of The Felice Brothers on keyboard. “It’s all been said / a couple million times / but why’d you make me fall in love with you,” Oberst sang in the new LAX, “If you want to come back in the spring / we could go to the movies / we could do anything / it’s all within reason / it’s all been in my dreams / if you want to come back in the spring.” Unfortunately, Oberst didn’t play the unreleased No One Ever Changes last night, a song in which he spits defiantly: “No one ever changes / hey that’s the truth / no one ever changes / baby not for you / No one ever changes / hey that’s the truth / and I’m never gonna do what you want me to.”
A year after listening to Ruminations, I’ve figured out what I want to say: this is one of the finest pieces of art I’ve ever encountered. It is delicate and brutal, beautiful and harsh. My life is richer as a result. Oberst isn’t some sad, aging, tired former teenage hearthrob—he is a vibrant, collaborative artist at the top of his game. Dear music critics, the dude is 37. Everybody gets wrinkles and a few grey hairs when they approach 40. Stop writing about his appearance (and your expectations that he should be frozen in amber as a perpetual emo teen) and start listening to his music.
Last night, Oberst introduced Mamah Borthwick (A Sketch) as a “song about architecture.” Of course it is really also about something quite different.
A rumination in my mind
Winding like the ramp at the Guggenheim
I'm not content but I'm feeling hesitant
To build something that's sacred ‘til the end
Throughout his career, and particularly in Ruminations, Oberst has built something that promises to be sacred ‘til the end. If the unreleased LAX and No One Ever Changes are any indication of what the future holds, we have a lot more to look forward to.