Used to dream of time machines
Now it's been said we're post-everything
Approximate Sunlight
The People’s Key starts with a voice holding a lecture about humanity, progress, the bible and cross-dimensional travel. The first time that I ever heard Bright Eyes was a late-night radio broadcast of one their concerts (post Lifted – I have a recording of that concert and Connor Oberst’s introduction of Let’s Not Shit Ourselves, in 2002, apologizing for the President to a Viennese audience beforehand, feels just as strong to me now) – I was fifteen and I had never felt such a desire to understand every single word in a piece of music before. I bought Lifted a couple of weeks later and read the lyrics in the booklet as I listened to the songs, and they got stuck in my head – they repeated over and over again for months, the words and the way they were sung, angry and sad and demanding. Fevers and Mirrors and Lifted accompanied me through school, but by the time the next record was released, I had moved on. It was one of the magic instances were the development of a band coincided with my own, and then Bright Eyes parted to walk different paths.
The People’s Key feels like a travel through past records. There are moments that recall Lifted (Shell Games specifically, with its allusions to teenage obsession with emotional torture, anger and madness, makes me think of the “weak from whiskey and pills in a Chicago hospital” line), and sometimes it reminds the audience of the fact that Connor once had a second band called The Desaparecidos with a seemingly more purposeful and specific anger (Jejune). In Approximate Sunlight, a narrator that never intervenes illuminates a gruesome scene of a shooting at a Quinceañera celebration, only to move on (“All I do is follow, just follow, just follow this hollow you around”).
The lyrics are, if anything, more complex than they were all those years ago – and there is a new layer of mysterious imagery, even though they are at their best when they manage to capture all the sadness that comes with being perceptive about the world and still find that spark of hope.
The lyrics are, if anything, more complex than they were all those years ago – and there is a new layer of mysterious imagery, even though they are at their best when they manage to capture all the sadness that comes with being perceptive about the world and still find that spark of hope.
This whole life's a hallucination:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
You're not alone in anything
You're not alone in trying to be
Ladder Song
The city's love is cold and the city's love is hard
locks into our veins from the first September’s frost
January snap and the April winter thaw
rough and tumble summers underneath the midnight sun
Good Night
Only a couple of seconds into The Rural Alberta Advantage’s Departing, I felt like coming home. There is an inherent emotion in this music that resonates with me and it almost feels like a second heartbeat. Departing also feels like more of a second part to Hometowns – a departure, but it starts where the previous record ended.
The quiet genius of this record is the intricate connection between place and emotion, natural phenomena and people, that almost makes it seem like there is inevitability to the end of winter and the end of a relationship –
The quiet genius of this record is the intricate connection between place and emotion, natural phenomena and people, that almost makes it seem like there is inevitability to the end of winter and the end of a relationship –
When the ice breaks,
When the hearts shake in the town and it marks the end of Winter,
The end of our love for now.
[…]
And I held you tight,
We were waiting for the breakup,
All the cracks in the ice.
The Breakup
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