Bright Eyes encompasses a certain emotional musicality vibe, especially for teens and 20-somethings growing up in the early 2000s. The Omaha trio, consisting of multi-instrumentalist and producer, Mike Mogis, pianist, trumpeteer and composer, Nate Walcott, and guitarist and singer-songwriter, Conor Oberst, have gained quite the following. They've crafted new sounds that incorporate everyone from Lucinda Williams to everything including digital landscapes.
In 2011, Bright Eyes released the album The People's Key and seemed to call it a day, unofficially of course. Each member of Bright Eyes has had his hands in other projects throughout the course of the band's lifetime, and even so when the band went on hiatus in the late 2000s. But this time, no one was really certain if that was, in fact, the final release from the group.
Then came a silver lining in early 2020 (one of very few). Bright Eyes announced in January they had signed with the iconic indie label Dead Oceans. By March they'd released their first song in nine years, "Persona Non-Grata," and shortly thereafter, announced Down In The Weeds Where the World Once Was, released Aug. 21 via Dead Oceans.
Oberst, Walcott, and Mogis joined us just before the album dropped to talk about the Christmas party that brought the band back together, recording the new album in anonymity, and the help from Flea, of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame, on the new album. They also performed a couple of songs from the album, plus two classics.
Listen to the interview and performance below:
Bright Eyes Set List:
- Mariana Trench
- Persona Non Grata
- From A Balance Beam
- A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever and A Necklace
