Conor Oberst didn’t mention his marriage to Corina Figueroa Escamilla (if that’s who he married, we know he married someone but my flakey friend is missing in action so…) when he spoke to Billboard, er,, five minutes ago.
But here is what he did say:
“We’re over the Americana, rootsy, whatever that sound is. People say country, but I never thought were very country at all. But whatever that element is or that aesthetic is, I guess it’s worn a little thin for me these days. So we very much wanted it to be rocking and, for lack of a better term, contemporary, or modern
“I don’t think it’s overtly political,” Oberst explains. “There’s a certain desire for, like, common ground between people, just the idea that we’re all kind of in the same boat and are all the same as far as the way human beings go. There’s this future that’s coming that’s really trying to, I think, divide us more and in a lot of ways strip us of our human nature in the sense that now when you walk into a room it’s like 20 people all staring down at this little screen in their hands, typing away, not looking at each other. That’s kind of scary, and it’s going to just keep going that way. I think it’s a dangerous position to put ourselves in because our only chance of solving problems or disagreements is by talking to each other and seeing ourselves in each other.
“It seems like everything I do musically I tend to lose a few fans and gain a few fans, and it all kind of evens out,” he says. “It’s never for shock value or wanting to alienate the audience in some way. We don’t try to do anything other than follow our interests, which are obviously a moving target.
“We’re going to kind of avoid the acoustic instruments,” he says. “There’s going to be two pretty deep keyboard rigs. We still want to play a lot of old songs, but we’re going to rely more on nice, super hi-fi keyboard samples instead of hauling a strong quartet around or something like that. It should be good.”
Heeeeaaaaavy