why weird music deserves listening

One of my Christmas presents was a very thoughtful gift from my boyfriend, a copy of a magazine called FILTER, simply because the singer from one of my favorite heart wrenching bands was on the cover, Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes.

Most people have never heard of Bright Eyes. Some people have and despise Conor's plaintive wails. And very few (you know, like 200,000 of billions) really really really like Bright Eyes.

I'm one of the special people that is able to look past the lock of hair perfectly coiffed over the eye (everyone needs a look), the reputation that Conor has made as a persnickity fucker backstage (I'll never meet him anyway), and the overbearing whine (haven't we all done it at some point?) to just plain and simple, the music and how it makes me feel.

Oddly enough, as I read that description, I think about another singer who has captured my heart, who also encompasses those traits. Ryan Adams (Heartbreaker) and previously, leader singer of Chicago favorite Whiskeytown. Maybe Conor is just my kind of guy. Maybe I've just got a thing for whiny male singers. Me and Winona Ryder.

Anyway, like nearly all of the music I know about and love, I discovered Bright Eyes second hand, from a boyfriend. His enthusiasm for the band alone might have been enough to lovingly memorize every note and word, but long after our relationship ended, I still adore Bright Eyes.

I guess you'd have to know a little bit about just how musically inept I was. You can pretty much gage how much I've evolved when you consider that at 13, I listened to B96 incessantly, and my favorite band was NKOTB. That I managed to develop any taste in music can be regarded dubiously because of that admission.

When I was about twenty and working across the street from Tower Records, I came across a promotional calendar Tower released for the coming year. It was poster sized, with all the months neatly assembled, a picture of a punked out girl resembling Madonna from the Papa Don't Preach days, and had the subtitle, "NO MUSIC NO LIFE."

I really took that admonishment seriously. At the time, I rarely listened to music. I was in that weird in between childhood and adulthood phase, and it was clear to me that I couldn't listen to the music that I had liked at 13, but I was lost as to what to listen to next. A coworker at a previous job piqued my musical tastes with Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup so I began to fervently collect their albums and cultivate my musical interests.

At that time, I was dating a man we all know and love, Vincent R. Francone. Most of the music he listened to back then was not as ecclectic, but also unpretentious, without fanfare, and very gritty. He definitely wouldn't have had a fondness for Bright Eyes, though I'll never know for sure, but I have a feeling he would concur with the rest of the people who've heard Bright Eyes, summed up by one coffeeshop listener who said, "Would someone please put that guy out of his misery already." But it's Vincent I have to thank for my encounters with Tom Waits, Mr. Bungle (and their various offshoots), and crazy Japanese girls. (As well as, of course, the literature of varying degrees I have loved because of Vinny.)

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What Bright Eyes--or as most people know them as, Conor and whoever he happens to bring along to play that night--does best is capture the universal feeling of emptiness and loss and the search for belonging through lyrics that are far from cliched, but feel like the thoughts you never share, the feelings you keep secret from everyone and the stories of life, told in magical metaphors. For some people, this is the essence of what life is about. Someone else talking about the things you would never expose. Knowing you're not alone.

But then the singing, yes, it is anguished, full of suffering, but we are so used to glamour and glitz and perfection that a show of emotion is too much for people. It is overwhelming, overbearing, trite. I have said that Bright Eyes is the kind of music you can only listen to when you are alone or lonely.

Also what Bright Eyes does best is musically, there are no rules. Keys jangle, instruments blare, a cacophony of sounds explode, and then, there is quiet. Balance, order, structure are not missing, but not needed. You get the sense (especially after listening to the cd's over and over again) that these people are actually having fun playing just for the fact that they're playing. It is jubilant, it is surprising, it is most of all refreshing.

The magazine FILTER is one of those new hipper than thou magazines that is sold at Urban Outfitters and I was all ready to write it off as such until I opened it and actually read the three part cover story on Conor Oberst. The latter is an interview with Conor that is four pages long, meandering into territory that covers the battle between Corporate Radio and little labels that could to Conor's writing process. And then, there is the stuff of life:

"That's it. You better fucking make a move while you got a chance. Because it's not going to wait around for you to get comfortable with the idea of your mortality. You better just bust out the machete and start chopping through this shit and heading in some direction."

One night, at Raven's, I gave up defending Bright Eyes. The guy we were with was a heavy metal dude and there was no way I was going to make him see my side of things, especially since he personally knew people who had run-in's with Conor backstage ("The guy's an asshole, I don't care about his music!"). But it made me realize that oftentimes, people get so caught up in all the things that just aren't important about music, how it looks, how it lands, how it's labeled. Do you think heavy metal dude so much as listened to one Bright Eyes song on his little Apple IPod? No way. But he can safely say the music sucks because some people told him that Conor was a jerk.

So I will do what most musicians do, let the music testify for itself. I am not preaching the good word about Bright Eyes. If you're in one of the three categories I'm not, then fine, your life isn't going to be any better or worse off for not liking or listening to Bright Eyes.

My favorite song (whose name I had to learn before I went to see Bright Eyes play at the Metro so I could chant my request for it) is "Something Vague."

It starts out ordinarily enough like this..."Now and again, it seems worse than it is, but mostly the view is accurate. You see your breath in the air as you climb up the stairs to that coffin you call your apartment. Then you sit in a chair, brush the snow from your hair, and drink the cold away. And you're not really sure what you're doing this for, but you need something to fill up the days. A few more hours..."

My favorite line of that song comes later during a dream, "And then the bridge disappears and I’m standing on air with nothing holding me. And I hang like a star, fucking glow in the dark, for all those starving eyes to see, like the ones we’ve wished on."

So the FILTER predicts that Conor's new solo album might not only be the album that makes him a household name, but possibly the best folk album ever made. I'll make ya'll a deal. I'll buy it and burn you copies and you can listen for yourself.