This feature originally ran in 2014 and has been updated in celebration of Conor Oberst’s birthday on February 15th.
Top Songs is a feature in which we definitively handpick the very best songs in an artist or band’s catalog. Sounds simple, right? Oh, if only.
For those of us reared in the expanse of the true Midwest, the open, rolling hills and endless corn and soybean fields, music from the coasts was for escapism. We didn’t surf. We didn’t know what a major city really was, but we could listen to that music and imagine it.
The music that really hit our hearts, though, was from our own backyards, and if you were a “hip” teen anywhere from 1997 on, usually that music included Saddle Creek Records. More importantly, it included Conor Oberst, the Crown Prince of Midwest teenage self-loathing. He became someone we grew with, not just grew up with.
At the age of 12, he tipped off his songwriting career, released his first self-produced tape at 13, and by 15 had already started his first band, Commander Venus, with other Omaha stalwarts Tim Kasher (Slowdown Virginia, Cursive, The Good Life), Todd Fink and Matt Bowen of The Faint, Ben Armstong (Head of Femur), and Robb Nansel (Saddle Creek Records). However, it was his solo project, Bright Eyes, that brought him fame.
At 18 years old, his first major release, 1998’s Letting Off the Happiness, brought him critical acclaim, and lost teens latched on to his shockingly honest songs of booze, girls, and awkwardness. He was different from the emo punk kids crying into their guitars. Oberst, it seemed, was just too drunk and numb to cry anymore. He was angry with a quiet, swallowed rage that we Heart of America kids understood.
Plucked from the small Saddle Creek label, Oberst has been called our generation’s Bob Dylan — a moniker that Oberst doesn’t quite feel comfortable wearing. He has released ten Bright Eyes albums, two albums and multiple singles with punk rock side project Desaparecidos, eight solo albums (three with the Mystic Valley Band), and numerous collaborations and guest spots.
He’s written hundreds of songs with all these iterations, so it was difficult to settle on any 10 to try to encapsulate him as a songwriter. That being said, here are our top 10 Oberst-penned songs — the drunkest, angriest, saddest, and/or most poetic. Scroll to the end for a playlist of all 10 tracks.
— Nick Freed
10. Bright Eyes – “Lover I Don’t Have to Love”
Conor Oberst sees dread just about anywhere. In “Lover I Don’t Have to Love,” Oberst stars in one of the bleakest tales of groupie sex ever written or recorded. Over its signature cyclical organ riff — which serves as the song’s dull, stinging, yet unforgettably catchy anchor — Oberst chronicles a drug-fueled post-performance hookup as if it were a death sentence. Like many of Oberst’s best songs, its melodrama is so palpable that, in attempting to sound profound, it eclipses its own gravity and caves in on itself, revealing the true despair beneath all the histrionics.
“You write such pretty words/ But life’s no storybook,” Oberst whisper-cries at the song’s key fissure, proving even he’s aware that a wry turn of the songwriter’s phrase can’t help a lost soul find itself. On “Lover,” Oberst crawls towards pleasure with a weary eye and proceeds to make love in the fetal position. Its danceability only amplifies the tension between the protagonist’s goal of thoughtless pleasure and the angst that destroys all of his chances of experiencing the illusory emotional cocktail.
And like that vain quest, you can’t help but listen to “Lover I Don’t Have to Love” on repeat, trying to gleam something more from it each time. — Drew Litowitz
09. Desaparecidos – “Greater Omaha”
When Read Music/Speak Spanish by the Desaparecidos came out in 2002, the idea of Oberst as just some sad kid was blown apart. It was fuzzy, hard, smart punk rock that his voice seemed to fit perfectly, like a pair of your girlfriend’s jeans. Rather than writing inwardly — and, since it was near the beginning of the Bush regime, rather than focusing on W.’s politics — Oberst went after corporate greed and urban sprawl. There was no better place that epitomized these blights than Oberst’s beloved Omaha, Nebraska.
On “Greater Omaha,” he admonishes the corporate takeover of his hometown by drive-thrus, convenience marts, and parking lots. He spews, “And it’s all-you-can-eat, and they will never get enough/ They’ll be feeding us/ They’ll be feeding on us,” with the same level of hatred he normally reserved for himself in Bright Eyes songs. For someone like me living in a Midwestern town, seeing the same things happen, it was a welcome support to my own anger. It was also nice to hear Conor redirect his anger away from his own brain. — N.F.
08. Bright Eyes – “Something Vague”
“Something Vague” arrives right on the heels of “The Calendar Hung Itself,” gently smothering the fire of its predecessor with the aural equivalent of a collapsing snowdrift. Soft fingerpicks, accordion, and a gorgeous flute solo by Jiha Lee underscore a story of existential ennui that’s only complicated by a dream of indecipherable transcendence. Like Owen Ashworth and Saddle Creek labelmate Maria Taylor, Oberst’s early work often portrayed one’s early adulthood not as carefree, but as desperate and directionless.
“Calendar” zeroed its rage on a specific person, but “Something Vague” sweeps its eyes across an empty sky, asking in vain for some sign, any sign. Of course, this is a Conor Oberst song, so the one that comes leads not to revelation, but to confusion. Bummer. — Randall Colburn
07. Bright Eyes – “Four Winds”
For better or worse, Cassadaga marked Oberst’s full plunge into the bluegrassification of his sound. With mixed results, it painted Oberst as a roots revivalist struggling with his artistic evolution. “Four Winds” is easily the set’s most successful composition. Though it arguably apes its fiddle-led melody from both The Waterboys’ “Fisherman’s Blues” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” it holds its own entirely.
Filled with some of Oberst’s most vivid imagery to date, the rollicking song is one of the catchiest and most stirring in his entire ouevre. Geopolitical and bleak, Oberst culls his most biting criticisms on religion and separatism to create an unlikely anthem for peaceful co-existence. Oberst’s rapid-fire lyrics are frustratingly on-point as he rattles off one great line after the next over some killer twang.
“The Bible’s blind, Torah’s deaf, the Qur’an is mute/ If you burned them all together, you’d get close to the truth,” probably didn’t win him any religious fans, though. Now let’s go burn some scripture! — D.L.
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