BRIGHT EYES 

The Paramount Theatre

Seattle, Wa

9.28.11

I prepared for last night by reading about cultural rites of passage; the kinds of happenings where young men are taken into the jungle, given a spear, and aren’t allowed back into the village until they’ve claimed the life of the desired beast.  Or the Jewish bar mitzvah, in which the young man recites a portion of the Torah and, in exchange, gets to ride a chair over the heads of old people.  The goal of these events is to contrive a trial that forces the youth into finding the other side of the liminal state that is puberty.  These trials come at different times in different cultures.  In America, it’s common for them to not happen at all.  American youth are left to navigate the here-and-there of adulthood with little more trial than being required to sit maturely while their parents describe the sexy method of family-starting.  Tonight is a kind of rite of passage for me.

Its easy for me to feel like I’ve grown up alongside Connor Oberst, the lead man of the decade-stretching, tear-jerking, panty-swim that is Bright Eyes.  Although he has quite some years on me, the stages of his life are perfectly encapsulated in the band’s seven full-length albums.  Oberst was 25 years old when I first started listening to his records.  His manner of describing a specific moment so intimately that it felt like it happened to you a long time ago was astonishing.  Oberst was 27 years old when I sobbed all the way through Fevers and Mirrors, walking through the different rooms of my childhood home, before leaving them for the fair West Coast.  I listened to it again on the plane with my mom the next day, and repeated the experience.  In retrospect, it was kind of a cruel music choice on my part.  And then, Oberst was 31 years old last night, when he played what -according to his touring schedule and press releases- could have been his last American performance as “Bright Eyes“ , his call-name since 1995. Read the rest of this entry →