March 01, 2007

Bright Eyes meets Four Eyes

I interviewed Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes today for the AOL Sessions performance thing-a-ma-doo. While I was there, I was also lucky enough to see Bright Eyes perform seven songs for Sessions, and I was doubly lucky that M. Ward showed up to play a couple songs with Bright Eyes.

Here's the set list:

Crazy as a Loon
Smoke without Fire (w/ M. Ward)
Tourist Trap
Middle Man
Four Winds
Cartoon Blues
Soul Singer in a Session Band (w/ M. Ward)

The whole thing (performance and interview) should be up on AOL sometime in early April.

I've been a fan of Bright Eyes ever since I saw him open for Steve Malkmus in New Orleans back in 2001. Back then he was just some kid with hair in his eyes screaming into a microphone, but I liked him then and I really like his music today.

Listening to music is such a big part of how I write that I feel like I owe something to all of the musicians whose music keeps me typing. Conor is definitely one of those musicians (I listened to his I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning album a lot while writing Lick Your Neighbor), so it was nice to see him perform in such an intimate setting and to ask him a bunch of what I'm sure were annoying questions.

I must admit that I was nervous about the interview at first, mainly because musicians are so damn cool and writers and so damn lame. But then I realized that Conor was a snot-nosed kid once...

And I was a snot-nosed kid once too...

And underneath all his indie folk hero mystique, and underneath all my novelist in a bear suit mystique (or the lack thereof), we're still just a couple of crazy mixed-up kids trying to make our way through this strange world of ours, with the dual ultimate goals of obtaining spiritual enlightenment and, along the way, fake-killing as many people as possible with our photon pistols.

OK, maybe Conor Oberst doesn't share my ultimate goal of fake-killing millions of people with the power of photons, but that's not the point! The point is that we both had shitty haircuts as kids. Everyone did. That is the one thing that binds us all together as humans. We may not all be black or white or Christians or Muslims, but we all, at some point during our formative years, looked like total jackasses because of an awful haircut that was most likely given to us by our moms.

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