Bright Eyes - Conor Oberst speaks

From the distant confines of Nebraska, where his brother started up the Saddle Creek label to put out his tapes at the age of 14, Bright Eyes have sold hundreds of thousands of records, adorning magazines both sides of the Atlantic and before their now historic march to the top of the Billboards.

Far from being the start of this mass fascination with Conor Oberst, this was simply the milestone which had followed breakthrough album Lifted… and the ream of television and festival appearances that followed.

The sweeping orchestration, harps and horns and gushing melodies from new  LP Cassadaga represent a return to the songwriting muscle that Oberst eschewed somewhere for the more stripped down Wide Awake and its sister LP, the more experimental, Digital Ash In A Digital Urn, which sourced synths and programmed beats as its musical backdrop.

Andrew Future caught up with Conor Oberst in Oxford.

VF: You’ve smoothed your songwriting out in recent years to be more melodic and more song-based. Has this been an intentional thing or just a natural consequence of growing up?

Conor:  “My early work was so far from refined, vitriol spewing at whatever was there, and that was fine, but I’ve been trying to move towards more subtlety and more universal ideas. It’s more interesting to me now to be doing that than something more gut-wrenching.”

VF: You’ve written hundreds of songs, many with startling narratives about a host of different things. Where does it come from?

Conor: “I honestly don’t have that much of an idea where it all comes from. It’s very much a two step process. the initial song – the essence – the vocal melody and a few lines of lyrics that come from out of nowhere, and the ‘where’ and ‘why’ which are still pretty mysterious to me. When that happens I don’t have much control over it.”

VF: But this develops into a formula?

Conor: “Once that appears though, the songwriting then becomes more of a straightforward process. I’ve made a lot of songs over the years, so I have a good idea of what I do and what I don’t like and it becomes a little bit of a craft at that point. At the point of arrangement and instrumentation, that’s when Mike Bogus and Nate Walcott get involved.”

VF: Cassadaga is a particularly expansive record, production-wise. What commercial pressures are now on you as a part of the Universal Records money machine?

Conor: “The only pressure I feel comes somewhere from having some responsibilities. In the US we’re still on Saddle Creek and I have about 12 friends who work for that label. Everyone I have a business relationship with I also have a personal one too and obviously at UK label Polydor it’s all different, ‘cos I just met all those people, I hope the music’s successful because so many people are relying on being successful. Kinda like keep the ship afloat and I have my own label with bands and there’s so much that goes on beyond the glory of having a hit record.”

VF: What difference does having a hit make?

Conor: “It hasn’t changed the way we make the music, the only thing it’s changed is that we’ve tried to be smarter about our business aspects. We used to not do anything. The making of the music the recording of the records is still shockingly the same. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

VF: When you’re done with music, do you envisage a career in the top job? At the White House?

Conor: “I don’t want that job. No, I don’t think I could lie that much.”

The album Cassadaga is out now.