Bright Eyes Is Still Glowing Bright in Dim Times

“I just felt fucking sad and angry and confused and just like, how is this even possible?”

Bright Eyes songwriter/frontman Conor Oberst is recalling his initial reaction to Donald Trump's election last November. In the wake of the regime change, Bright Eyes formed the Poison Oak Project, a charitable initiative dedicated to advancing equity for LGBTQ+ people, with a particular focus on the trans community.

As the Trump administration issued a slew of executive orders targeting the transgender community, Oberst’s ire grew. “They are using just complete cruelty. It’s unconscionable what they’re doing to trans people and to the undocumented communities,” Oberst says. “It’s the classic scapegoat: ‘Look at this – This is your enemy,' while we create an oligarchy and potentially a fascist state led by the billionaires.”

The Bright Eyes song “Poison Oak” was released two decades ago, on the highly acclaimed album I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (the album also includes one of the band's biggest hits, “First Day of My Life”). “Poison Oak” is a delicate tribute to a cousin of Oberst’s who struggled with his sexuality and took his own life when Oberst was barely out of his teens.

“It’s personal to me and my family, but beyond that, trans rights are human rights,” Oberst says. “To see some of the things they’re doing, putting trans women back in men’s prisons – I mean, that’s essentially, you’re sentencing someone to torture if you do that. It’s literally a crime against humanity.”

Bright Eyes is raising awareness and funds for dozens of LGBTQ+ organizations around the country via the Poison Oak Project as the band tours behind its latest album, Five Dice, All Threes. The trio will be in Fort Collins for a show at Washington’s on Tuesday, April 1.
The new record is something of an anomaly in the Bright Eyes catalog, which now spans eleven full-length albums since 1998. Whereas its predecessor, 2020’s Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was, was a typically grand album, produced to the hilt over the course of two and a half years, Five Dice, All Threes was a departure from Oberst’s usual process.

He explains that a few years back, Brooklyn-based punk singer Alex Levine, aka Alex Orange Drink of the So So Glos, was staying with Oberst at his Los Angeles pad and the two began writing songs together at Levine’s suggestion.

Oberst and Levine wrote and demoed a few songs, and once Oberst deemed them Bright Eyes compositions (as opposed to solo tracks or one of his many side project collaborations), the songs ended with “those two maniacs” – multi-instrumentalists Nate Walcott and Mike Mogis (also the band’s production wizard), who along with Oberst comprise the core of Bright Eyes.

“No one else [besides Levine] has really been at the songwriting, the beginning process of a Bright Eyes record, I think it’s fair to say,” Oberst says. “Once the wheels were in motion for me mentally, then I continued to write songs and work on them with Walcott. Still, we can’t do anything and have it be not sort of produced, and I feel like the studio is one of the other instruments in the band – Mike plays the studio.”

Five Dice, All Threes is less grand a record than previous Bright Eyes opuses like Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground and I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, but offers tracks like “Rainbow Overpass” crackling with punkish electricity contrasted with the dirge-y piano and studio effects on “The Time We Have Left,” a duet with The National’s Matt Berninger.

On this tour, though, Bright Eyes isn’t just pushing the new songs to longtime fans. “We have all these records, and it’s not that people don’t like when we put shit out, but sometimes it takes people a minute to like the new ones as much as the old ones,” Oberst says.

Bright Eyes has some forty songs in its touring arsenal right now: “The band changes every tour, so we might know some shit, but it doesn’t mean the drummers knows,” Oberst notes. Concertgoers will hear some new songs, yes, but they’ll hear tracks from across Bright Eyes’ eras, as well, along with a “for-the-heads section," Oberst says, "with B-sides and weird shit,” and likely some cover songs.

Oberst takes particular pleasure in allowing old Bright Eyes standbys to rise again in new incarnations on stage. “I’ve always felt like some of our songs, the songs are better than the recordings.” He points to two tracks in particular that have evolved over the years, “Claireaudients (Kill or Be Killed)” and “The Calendar Hung Itself.”

“I believe in second chances,” Oberst laughs.

Bright Eyes, 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, April 1, Washington’s, 132 Laporte Avenue in Fort Collins. Sold out.