January 16, 2005
Mr. Sincerity Tries a New Trick By KELEFA SANNEH
The New York Times HOW did indie rock become the voice of emotional sincerity? Ten years ago, in the heyday of Pavement and Liz Phair and Beck (the old, funny Beck), indie rockers were supposed to be at least a little bit prickly. The genre was known for its urbane disinclination to perform any icky operations involving hearts: pouring them out, for instance, or affixing them to sleeves.
But by 2004, indie rock sounded sweeter and more earnest than ever. It was the year a long-running (and somewhat cranky) band called Modest Mouse sold half a million copies of "Good News for People Who Love Bad News," featuring the unexpectedly joyful single "Float On." The wistful, whistlable songs of the Shins took pride of place on the hit soundtrack to the movie "Garden State." The gently melancholic singer Ben Gibbard became something like a mainstream star, with the continuing crossover success of his band, Death Cab for Cutie (recently signed to Atlantic Records), and his electro-pop side project, the Postal Service. The television show "The O.C." made a point of stuffing its soundtrack with achy alt-rock love songs. And you could even hear this sensibility reflected in the wide-eyed wonder of folk-inspired weirdos like Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective and Joanna Newsom, all of whom were praised (however inaccurately) for their perceived purity and innocence.
If you're looking for a symbol of the new sincerity, it's hard to do better than Conor Oberst, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter who has spent the last decade recording audacious hyper-romantic songs under the name Bright Eyes. One early song, "Padraic My Prince," used the (fictional) drowning death of his baby brother as an analogy for getting dumped. By 2002, he had already amassed a cult of rabid Conorians, who hung on his every lament, but he wanted more. So he recorded "Lifted, or the Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground" (Saddle Creek), a tangled treatise on love and faith and truth, full of ragged orchestra crescendos and yawping finales.
The album turned an underground heartthrob from Omaha into one of indie rock's biggest stars, and in the two and a half years since its release, every month has brought more exposure to the singer whom fans had once kept like a secret. There were sold-out tours, gushing magazine profiles and surreal TV appearances, including an odd visit to David Letterman. The low point came when People magazine printed a widely circulated picture of Mr. Oberst kissing Winona Ryder; the high point came last fall, when he played a series of "Vote for Change" concerts with his former idols and new friends R.E.M. and Bruce Springsteen - the Nebraska kid and the "Nebraska" guy, together at last.
Along the way, he became a character - and, to his detractors, a caricature. That precious name, those tortured ballads: even compared to your average sad-sack indie-rock band, Bright Eyes sounded pretty extreme. (The busters, like the boosters, vented online; one short-lived site was called, simply, We Hate Bright Eyes!) Bright Eyes fans didn't help their cause by celebrating their idol's broken-down voice as proof of his wounded soul, and by lionizing the music as a heartfelt antidote to our heartless pop culture. Yuck. If some potential listeners decided, in advance, that this stylized anxiety was the last thing they needed, can you blame them?
Mr. Oberst was well aware of these pitfalls, and he struggled with them energetically. He knows that his fragile voice inspires unearned credulity in his fans. (In a song called "False Advertising," he criticized his own "well-rehearsed" sorrow.) And he knows nonfans might be skeptical of some Dylan-obsessed kid singing ontological love songs while abusing an acoustic guitar. He understands, because he's skeptical, too. Which, depending on your perspective, makes him either one of the most sincere indie rockers around or one of the least.
On the Tuesday after next, Saddle Creek will release, separately, two new Bright Eyes albums, taking this story in two different directions. "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn" is a bold response to the myth of St. Conor: the icon of unplugged authenticity goes not just electric but electronic, letting the mythology melt away in a solvent of flickering rhythms and chirping synthesizers. Then there's "I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning," which is even bolder. "Wide Awake" captures the spare, shivery sound of Mr. Oberst daring to embrace the role of Serious Singer-Songwriter, instead of shadowboxing with it: the folky arrangements give him plenty of room to tell his stories, and the only thing chirping is Emmylou Harris, singing backup.
"Digital Ash" is the album more likely to convert nonfans (and, for that matter, music supervisors for Hollywood movies - a handful of songs sound distinctly soundtrackable). Somehow, the music is both louder and softer than anything Mr. Oberst has done before: instead of grabbing you by the throat, the songs float gently toward you. The desperation in Mr. Oberst's voice remains, but now it's cushioned by fuzzy guitars and keyboards, and the old tantrums and rallying cries have been replaced by resigned shrugs and halfhearted optimism. The album's first single, released late last year, was "Take It Easy (Love Nothing)," a bubbling collaboration with Jimmy Tamborello, the beatmaker behind the Postal Service. As an electric guitar twists around him, Mr. Oberst sums up lost love not as tragedy, but as bittersweet relief: "Now I do as I please and I lie through my teeth/ Someone might get hurt but it won't be me/ I should probably feel cheap but I just feel free/ And a little bit empty."
The old idealism remains, but it's been muted, and Mr. Oberst's voice is often half-buried and occasionally disfigured, as if to keep the true believers from getting too close. If Mr. Oberst had recorded the song "I Believe in Symmetry" a few years ago, it probably would have sounded grandiose and a little bit cockeyed. (One stanza begins, "An argument for consciousness/ The instinct of the blind insect.") But now he's sly enough to do something that makes those words go down a lot easier: he sings them to a tune that echoes Nena's 1984 hit "99 Luftballons." And in "Arc of Time (Time Code)," he gets a galloping computer-generated beat and some computer-processed guitar; when he sings about blacking out "in the covered cage of night," he makes oblivion seem seductive. That's the appeal of this album, which conjures up the warmish feeling you get when everything gets fuzzy and you finally fall asleep.
Then you wake up. After all that haze, "I'm Wide Awake It's Morning" comes as a shock: 10 stark, sharply written songs, all of which contain at least a passing reference to that startling but banal moment described in the title. Whereas "Digital Ash" finds graceful ways to de-emphasize the link between singer and song, "Wide Awake" embraces it. You can't listen to this album the way you might listen to "Digital Ash" (or, for that matter, most other indie-rock albums), letting the words float away and humming the tune. You have to pay attention: for 45 minutes, the singer becomes a narrator becomes a character, singing stories about a life that's a version of his own.
This is the kind of role-playing that got Mr. Oberst so gloriously twisted up in knots two years ago. "Lifted" was an hourlong struggle with the notion of musical sincerity; the singer (or was it just the narrator?) wondered aloud whether the process of writing a song was merely the process of getting into character, feigning the feeling he was hoping to conjure up. "This method acting, well, I call that living," he bawled, complaining but not quite apologizing. And if he screamed a lot on that album, perhaps it was because he wanted to unite the guy in the song with the guy singing the song: in a climactic wordless shriek, the two performances merged; the story became the sound, and vice versa.
The same tensions reappear on "Wide Awake," but there's no more fighting, and not much screaming; he has stopped struggling and started to play along. Mr. Oberst knows that truth is a musical illusion - it's what listeners think they're hearing when someone finds exactly the right mixture of clichés and lies. But it's an addictive illusion, and when he gets the recipe right, the results are both astonishing and slightly disorienting. His narratives aim to suck you in, the way you might get sucked into a book or a movie. (Oddly enough, newcomers might feel this effect more intensely than longtime listeners, who probably know these songs by heart: all 10 are Bright Eyes concert favorites, and live MP3's have been freely circulating for years.)
These songs are high-wire acts: listeners don't have much to focus on besides his voice and his words, so one errant phrase can send the whole contraption hurtling back toward earth. (One song comes to a grinding halt with some hokey symbolism, as Mr. Oberst and Ms. Harris harmonize, "Did you forget your yellow bird?/How could you forget your yellow bird?") And sometimes the focus on lyrics is exhausting. A love-and-war ballad called "Land Locked Blues" slows down the album's second half, not least because Mr. Oberst already released a bigger, better version on a compilation last year, under the title "One Foot in Front of the Other."
Most of the time, though, "Wide Awake" is enthralling. "Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)" is the best kind of protest song: a cryptic one. The first verse lovingly evokes the New York City antiwar march of Feb. 15, 2003, without naming it: "The crowd kept pushing forward, till they swallowed the police/ Yeah, they went wild." The second verse finds the narrator in a darkroom with a friend, reliving the day: "You drop the paper in the water and it all begins to bloom/ Yeah, they go wild." There's a subtext here, although only the most obsessed fan could be expected to know it. The day of the rally was also the day Mr. Oberst turned 23; so the protest song may also be his secret way of wishing himself happy birthday.
Then there's "Train Under Water," which might be the most complete song he's ever written. It's a breakup song of startling clarity, free of spite or regret, and maybe crueler because of it. "It happened to me, now it's happening to you," the narrator shrugs, adding, "But if you take that train under water then we could talk it through." A pedal steel guitar and a harmonica add a dash of sympathy, and there are no metanarrative twists or musical surprises or full-throated freakouts, just a single thought, a single story, slowly expanding. He stays in character all the way through - two characters, in fact: an ex-boyfriend learning how to act the part, and a young singer-songwriter doing the same.
The happiest surprise on these two albums is the absence of hand-wringing about the price of fame. Once upon a time, cult heroes who earned even a dash of mainstream success were expected to release a tortured (or, alternately, snarky) album about how awful (or, alternately, hilarious) it all was. But on these two discs, Mr. Oberst doesn't bother to grouse about the mainstream, not even People magazine.
Then again, it's hard for the underground to complain about the overground when no one is quite sure who's who. The dreary old debate about selling out seems less relevant than ever, at a time when bands are routinely praised for licensing their music to TV shows and even commercials. And an indie-rock culture that once worshipped the limited-edition record has reconciled itself to the age of unlimited-edition MP3's circulating endlessly on fan Web sites.
Maybe what seems like indie's newfound sincerity is merely the sound of indie acts learning to navigate this strange terrain, to stop worrying and learn to love their ambiguous relationship with the mainstream. The most perceptive indie-rock stars know better than to claim they hate all those chart-topping pop songs, especially if they're trying - sincerely - to write one. For lots of these acts, sincerity is inseparable from ambition: if they believe what they sing, maybe lots of listeners will, too.
You can hear a hint of this ambition in "Another Travelin' Song," a tidy bit of country music from "Wide Awake," when an unsettling dream comes to a sudden end: "I awoke to my alarm clock/ It was a pop song, it was playing loud." Years ago, Mr. Oberst might have delivered these words with a sneer, but now he sounds exhilarated by the imaginary blare, and maybe slightly envious. Why settle for merely infiltrating people's dreams, when you might be able to infiltrate their clock radios, too?
