Bright Eyes

Words: Tess Gionet / Photos: Kenneth Coles

“I’ve been waiting for this concert for over two years,” a friend told me as the house lights went up at The State Theatre. 

The energy around us was buzzing. This concert was supposed to happen pre-pandemic, but was rescheduled over and over as Covid put a long pause on tours. Diehard fans like my friend hadn’t seen their favorite band in years, and they weren’t quite sure what to expect. 

If the opening notes were any indication, they were right to be nervous. A strange cacophony of spoken words and unharmonized notes droned on as the band took the stage. It was a mash of sounds clearly meant to be off-putting, to make us straighten up and pay attention. This was no mellow, folksy Bright Eyes of years gone by.

One by one the band picked up their horns and guitars, sat down at their keyboards, and the strange noise melted into one clear harmonic hum. Lead singer Conor Oberst finally walked out, dressed all in black, as the note reverberated on. He shot the crowd a quick prayer hands, picked up his mic, and fell to his knees before the band. Together, they launched into Dance and Sing from their latest album, 2020’s Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was. 

The album is the first they’ve put out in nearly a decade. It’s also an album dedicated to Oberst’s brother, who died in 2016, and an album that succeeded Oberst’s divorce in 2017. There’s heaviness in this material, and to be touring it nearly three years after it was released must have been hard. Obsert spoke honestly to the crowd about it halfway through his set. 

“Mostly, I thought about doing a lot of dark things,” he says about those lost Covid years. “But we’re here now.”  

Though this is clearly a Bright Eyes that’s evolved, some things stayed the same; the horn section was as good as ever; tight, clean, and joyful. Oberst’s voice was crystal clear and booming, giving his sad and stirring lyrics the natural amplification they deserved. Backup vocals did a damn good job of melding with Oberst’s limited range, molding the songs into something other-worldly. 

The energy throughout the night picked up and died down again and again. Oberst seemed both completely at home to be back on stage and utterly unnerved by it, caught between the darkness of his recent past and the residual heaviness of the present. 

He spun wildly in tight circles in front of us, raveling and unraveling as his band played on.