It's not surprising, but the Conor Oberst’s crowd is a very young one, with a lot of hipsters, college kids, thin guys in Rolling Stone t-shirt and skinny jeans and texting beauties. My seat at the UCLA’s Royce Hall wasn't bad at all for such a big room, I generally hate seated venues, but on Friday night I was appreciating the comfort to just seat down in this magnificent theater. However, I would like these kinds of places a lot better if they were more in touch with today’s reality… what is this non-sense no-photo policy in this digital era? What is the matter with guards chasing people taking pictures during the whole show? They were more distracting than the people taking pictures and I am sure they realized how inefficient they were since, obviously, some people managed to take pictures, even videos, myself included,.. so what is their point exactly? Places that forbid pictures should get over themselves, at the rhythm technology is progressing, we will soon be grafting cameras in our retina and they will be fucked, so please, live with the time!
In any case, Conor Oberst‘s sold-out show at the Royce Hall had a sober tone, with a restrained energy compared to my last Bright Eyes’ show at the Hollywood Forever cemetery. The show could have qualified for ‘intimate’ if the place hadn’t been so large, it was rather a recital given by ‘the greatest poet of our generation’, as opener Simone Felice had declared with the deepest respect.
Sitting on a chair most of the time, hiding behind his long hair, alone or helped by a few musicians on guitar or piano for a few songs, and Jenny Lewis and the Watsons Twins making some too-short apparitions for back-up vocals, the show was well balanced and flawlessly orchestrated, and the stripped down sound did make an emphasis on the lyrics of the songs and the angst Conor usually puts in his vocals …. ‘This solo tour made me experience songs that may sound better with a band, or may sound better without a band’, said Conor at one point. Actually, all the songs sounded quite good, even when Conor was alone with his quiet guitar and passionate strong voice.
How many songs does this 32-year-old guy really have, I was wondering when realizing there were a lot of them I actually didn’t know,… Cape Canaveral? Lenders in the Temple? Southern State? Without counting the three new songs he played solo, we were not exactly on a Bright Eyes’ biggest hits mode, but Conor Oberst was giving us a mix of everything. He has so many projects, from Bright Eyes to The Mystic Valley Band, to Monsters of Folk, to solo records, that he could entertain us all night long without any repeat and nobody would complain, hearing from the enthusiastic crowd cheering each time. Even starting with ‘The Big Picture' off Bright Eyes' 2002 album,‘Lifted,…’ was an unconventional introduction, but when you have such a massive catalogue, why not?
You could have heard a pin drop when he was singing, although there were these emotional outbursts from people when a famous song would show up in the setlist, or when cute Jenny and her inseparable twin friends appeared on stage during ‘Classic Cars’ and ‘Make a Plan to Love Me’ off the Cassadaga album. Actually people went nuts at that moment, but calm down fast to listen, religiously.
At the third song we were already treated with a new tune, then, a second and a third one came later on, and Conor even apologized for playing so much new stuff. The first new one may have been called ‘Common Knowledge’ and started with the line ‘He’s my friend but he’s no friend to me’, but there was also question of champagne room, chocolate fountain and Hemingway’s death! Somehow, we had lost Camelot (JFK?) in the second one, probably called ‘Kick’, another piece of life between Montauk and Malibu, with the interesting line, ‘Pleasure’s not the same as happiness', whereas the next one, which may have been ‘You Are Your Moms', was like a nostalgic capsule of life about childhood and the experience of growing up, a mother and child relationship through time with lines like, ‘You are your mother’s child’, and ‘but one day you’ll be grown, then you’ll be on your own’. Honestly, I didn’t find them exceptional, but it’s always difficult to get new songs right away, they sounded like melodious, wordy ballads, more story-telling than metaphor-charged, although sometimes cryptic enough to be lyrically interesting. Musically speaking, this new material was so stripped down that it sounded really far from the fire burning from Bright Eyes’ last effort, ‘The People’s Key’.
At this point, the show was something else than a rock concert, may be the solemnity of the venue was part of it, but people were extremely quiet and the atmosphere very reverent,… we needed something to wake up a bit, and suddenly ‘At the Bottom of Everything’ just did this. But even then, people stayed politely seated. There was a nice horn addition on ‘Southern State’ and ‘Lua’, and the three girls back on stage, actually sang on this song, showing they weren’t only specialized in back-up vocals.
Conor wasn’t overly talkative and the politically charged discourse of his FYF Fest outfit, Desaparecidos, was totally gone,..’I wish I had gone to college here’, he said, looking around him, ‘I wish I had gone to college period! I am the streetsmart kind’, he added.
They did one of my favorites, ‘Make War’,…definitely Conor at his best, right? Fucked up crying-your-heart-out love songs! Can he write more of these? Or is he just too happy with his current love life? ‘Lime Tree’ was the last song written on his setlist, but he couldn’t leave like this and appropriately played ‘June on the West Coast’. It was a return to basics with a song that, incredibly, was almost half the age of its author.
Setlist
1. The Big Picture
2. First Day of My Life
3. New song solo (Common Knowledge?)
4. Cape Canaveral
5. Lenders in the Temple
6. Classic Cars
7. Make a Plan to Love Me
8. Ladder Song
9. At the Bottom of Everything
10. New song solo (Kick?)
11. New song solo (You Are Your Moms?)
12. Shell Games
13. Southern State
14. Map of the World
15. Lua
16. Breezy
Encore
17. Attempt to Tip the Scales
18. Make War
19. Lime Tree
20. June on the West Coast