52 in 52: Week 10 - "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning"

Week of 12/14/14 - 12/20/14

Album from 2005

So I was pretty busy the last two or so weeks, what with it being the holidays and all that stuff, but I did manage to buy an album released in 2005, and even wrote up a little something about it.

Hey, at least these are starting to get a little cheaper the further back in time I go. I got "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning" by Bright Eyes for less than $15, and that seems like a good enough deal for me. Bright Eyes can be pretty hit or miss for me. Of the eight Bright Eyes studio albums, "Letting Off the Happiness" and "The People's Key" are pretty forgettable, "Fevers and Mirrors," "Lifted, or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground," and "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn" are somewhere in between, but this album and "Cassadaga" are all-timers (I know that's only seven; I realized that I really don't know their first album "A Collection of Songs Written and Recorded 1995-1997" well enough to pass any judgement).

"Wide Awake" contains all the hallmarks of the Bright Eyes catalog, or it could even be said that this album is the reason that a lot of these things are seen as hallmarks; sarcasm, satire, anger, beauty, politics, quivering, loneliness.

 Conor Oberst is condemning and angry, but not in the Billy Joel way where he does it because he thinks he's too cool and everyone else is not cool enough, but because he thinks that his targets are morally wrong. In the album's folksy sounding opener, Oberst combines what sounds like a classic tune, just begging for a sing-a-long, with lyrics calling for the end of something, maybe the world, that call out hypocrisy in society:

"Set fire to the preacher who is promising us hell."

"We must stare into a crystal ball and only see the past."

"In the ear of every anarchist that sleeps but doesn't dream, we must sing."

It's typical of the tone of most of the album, and, for me, all of it adds up to the first time in Conor Oberst's discography that it makes sense to call him a singular songwriter and one of the voices of his generation. The early comparisons to Dylan aren't exactly off-base, as he's got plenty going for him. There's the off-kilter voice, the prophetic and political statements, the excellent lyricism, the folk songs, and even a decent amount of mainstream success, or at least certainly more so than other "Next Dylans" like Josh Ritter or Alex Dezen.

Oberst's lyricism also has a very clear position. They aren't empty maxims, or vagaries that sound pretty with nothing behind them. The album came out in 2005, shortly after the reelection of George Bush, and during the invasion of Iraq. So much of this album plays as a direct response to what was going on then, but never is it so specific that it isn't still relevant now. There's an anger, but it's contained, most easily compared to Dylan's in that at times he's almost accepted the way the world is as he's tearing it down around him, and only bubbling over into rage at certain, very calculated outbursts, like the climax of "Old Soul Song (For the New World Order)," when he sings "And just when I get so lonesome I can't speak, I see some flowers on the hillside like a wall of new TVs," or his exclamation of "'Cause we're coming for ya!" following the line "If you're still free start running away" in "Land Locked Blues."

But I also described this album as beautiful, and the outbursts and simmering don't change that. Earlier in "Land Locked Blues," Conor relates a story that's both damning of the world, and from a beautiful point of view at the same time:

"There's kids playing guns in the street,
And one's pointing his tree branch at me,
So I put my hands up,
I say enough is enough,
If you walk away I'll walk away,
And he shot me dead."

Or from the album's closer, "Road to Joy":

"Nobody ever plans to sleep in the gutter, sometimes that's just the most comfortable place."

It's cynical, but the worldview behind it isn't a fully cynical one. Begging for peace and pointing out the terrors of the world ("greed is a bottomless pit, and all freedom's a joke, we're just taking a piss") is certainly a dark place to come from, but at the same time it's still begging for peace.

At the center of this politically charged album is a beautiful love song in "The First Day of My Life," where Conor puts that twist of phrase to some good, spouting romantic lines like "I think I was blind before I met you," "I'm glad I didn't die before I met you," and "I'd rather be working for a paycheck than waiting to win the lottery."

There are layers to this album, ones that won't be revealed unto the listener in one, two, or three listens. I've probably listened to it over a hundred times and there's still things that I find on each new listen.

Last one: "Free Life" by Dan Wilson