Tag: bright eyes

BGS 5+5: River Whyless

Posted on by Editor

Artist: River Whyless
Hometown: Asheville, North Carolina
Latest Album: Monoflora

All answers by Ryan O’Keefe

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

Being the son of some hippies, and growing up in the woods of Maine, the folk singers from the ’60s and ’70s were pretty much on constant rotation in my house. Mitchell, Dylan, Baez, Collins and many more filled the space between the cedar walls of the small cabin my folks built. Though the calluses on my mothers fingers had long since softened, she still strummed the tunes of her youth on the Ibanez she had carried around Australia with her from 1971 to 1973. So it was one of the great pleasures of my life to place the call to my parents, letting them know that we would indeed be playing at the Newport Folk Festival. Elated, we got them tickets and set up a weekend for them to come down and watch their son on the very stage that had influenced so much of their lives.

We played an early set. An unknown band, brought in from North Carolina to perform at the fort and no idea if anyone was going to show up. They did. The most eager, dedicated crowd we’ve ever performed for. Thousands packed inside and outside of the tent that cradled the stage. We performed in a blur and time floated by and we just kinda let ourselves get swept downstream. It all ended with an encore, a standing crowd and us lingering on the stage that had given us so much life in such a short period of time. When we finally did walk off, Jay (the director of the festival) clapped us on the back and said welcome to the family. It struck me that that family I was now a part of included the artists who made those very records that I grew up listening to in the quilted cabin in Maine.

Since food and music go so well together, what is your dream pairing of a meal and a musician?

During the pandemic, when all our tours were canceled, I teamed up with my good friend Israel, and we started making elaborate meals cooked strictly outdoors. I suppose at the time we wanted to get our friends together in a safe way and so this was our solution. The first meal was cochinita pibil, a Yucatan classic of slow-cooked pork shoulder wrapped in banana leaves cooked in a pit in the ground. Next, Justin Ringle from the band Horse Feathers, came into town and we reconfigured the pibil pit to make jerk chicken. The most recent dinner was a stew cooked in a five-gallon cauldron over an open flame. Music has always been around, of course, and Israel plays the uilleann pipes so I have been trying my hand at some traditional Irish guitar. We stumble our way through a couple jigs and reels but anything sounds good when you’re cooking five gallons of stew in a cauldron, outside, with your friends.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I was a late bloomer musically. I really didn’t start playing guitar until I met Alex, our drummer, in college at Appalachian State University. He sparked my true musical awakening and, in his dorm room, we devoured angsty indie rock and pop records from the early 2000s. Bright Eyes, Mates of State, The Decemberists. I wanted to learn the songs so Alex and I could play music together. I picked up guitar but was awful at learning covers so I just started writing my own songs. I think shortly after that I realized that writing music, in particular, was my calling. I didn’t know if I’d be any good, but I knew that I lost myself in the craft. And that’s all I can ask for.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Songs generally come out of the blue. At least the good ones. I have hundreds of pieces of songs saved in voice memos that have long since been forgotten. I think a lot of them have potential but the moment has been lost. For me, it’s imperative that I stop everything and just work on a song when it “comes.” That first session with a new idea is the most important time for the life of a song. With all that being said, I don’t follow my own advice nearly enough. I get distracted, or have some other obligation, which happens more and more the older I get. But there are songs, just pieces that just continue to nag at me and refuse to sink quietly into the depths of my phone. The song “Oil Skin” off our new album comes to mind. The first line, “When I was a child my mother would bathe me in the sink, pull the oil from my skin” has been kicking around my head for years. We tried to make a song of it on We All the Light and then again on Kindness a Rebel. But it wasn’t until we sat down to write Monoflora that the song finally found a home. I think it was Dan who suggested that we switch the groove from a waltz to a straight 4/4 beat. We left the vocal melody resembling the original waltz and that was the key. It has a subtle trippy cadence that I wouldn’t have naturally thought of. It still took some work but we had unlocked the door and stepped inside.

Which elements of nature do you spend the most time with and how do those impact your work?

I live in the woods. I spend most of my time at my house with my wife and daughter. The only neighbor I can see is Alex, our drummer. So the North Carolina mountains are everything to me at this point. They are so infused in my life that I can’t separate myself from them at all. I hike everyday on old logging roads out back of my house with my daughter on my back and my dog at my side. Often I take it for granted. I try not to, but it’s inevitable. It influences every part of my writing because it influences every part of me.

Photo Credit: Molly Milroy

The Show on the Road – The Felice Brothers

Posted on by Shelby Williamson

This week, we call into the Catskills of New York for a deep conversation with James Felice: accordionist, pianist, songwriter and co-founder of fun-house-mirror Americana group, The Felice Brothers.

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James started the band with his brothers (poet lead singer Ian) and percussionist Simone in 2006 as a busking folk pop experiment with a literary rebel streak within the subways of New York City. They’ve joined roots-pop luminaries like Bright Eyes at venues as storied as Radio City Music Hall — but somehow the gritty, back-alley bar seems like their natural habitat. Ian, James and their longtime quartet (Will Lawrence and bassist Jesske Hume round out the band) returned after years of hibernation to release their daring party-through-the-apocalypse rollercoaster of a new LP From Dreams To Dust in 2021 on Yep Roc Records.

Some bands record at home, or maybe in tricked-out cabins or plush studios, but The Felice Brothers seem to make records that use their unique and often bizarre surroundings as an added character in the band. Their beloved self-titled record, which came out 2008, feels like a gin-soaked saloon party where Hemingway and Lou Reed and Sly Stone would join in on swaying sing-alongs besides a sweat-soaked piano. It was somehow recorded in a converted chicken coop, while their brassy, bizarro-rock romp Celebration, Florida (2011) was recorded in a booming high school gymnasium. “Honda Civic” is a musical-theater-esque favorite, with an explosion at the local Wonder Bread warehouse taking center stage in the narrative. Does any of it make sense? Does it matter?

Their newest work is a more emotional, sonically lush, storytelling-driven operation, having been recorded in a church in Harlemville, New York, with award-winning mixer Mike Mogis at the helm. Mortality takes the spotlight. Ian Felice is in rare form here, spitting more words and setting more strange scenes per song than most slam-poets or absurdist playwrights. The lead song, “Jazz on the Autobahn,” has become a staple on Americana radio, showcasing what TFB have always done best: taking their listeners on a white-knuckle ride that has no predicable end or resolve in sight.

Conor Oberst, Phoebe Bridgers Unveil Better Oblivion Community Center

Posted on by Editor

Right around the time the clocks switched over from 2018 to 2019, a mysterious ad appeared on a bus bench in Los Angeles, near the intersection of Sunset and Alvarado. It promoted something called the Better Oblivion Community Center, which offers “assisted self-care” and “free human empathy screening,” among other vaguely New Agey services. A telephone number led callers to a voice mail for this strange clinic, and the website included no explanatory text beyond a registration form for a free brochure. It sounds like one of those odd storefronts you’d see in a Los Angeles strip mall offering a hodgepodge of healing techniques and questionable diet regimens—the kind of place Oh No Ross & Carrie might devote an episode or two to exploring and debunking.

It turns out, however, that the Better Oblivion Community Center is not, in fact, a clinic or a church, but a band consisting of two ace singer-songwriters: Conor Oberst, the guy behind Bright Eyes and Desaparecidos, and Phoebe Bridgers, a solo artist who made her debut with 2017’s Stranger in the Alps and more recently was one-third of the indie-rock supergroup Boygenius. The bus ad was, in a roundabout way, an announcement for the duo’s self-titled debut, which they are surprise-releasing this week, following a performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

“Those words sound nice together, and it rolls off the tongue, even though it’s long,” says Oberst of the duo’s moniker. “More than that, at this moment in time everyone is feeling a little impending doom, like oblivion is just around the corner. But the idea of the community center means that you’re not alone in it. We’re all going through this moment in time together, so maybe it’s not all doom and gloom in there. Maybe there’s some hopefulness in that community concept.”

That’s a lot of weight to pin on an album, but Bridgers and Oberst explore that hope and dread on these songs, from the self-questioning “Didn’t Know What I Was in For” to the self-annihilating “Dylan Thomas.” The music is jittery-nerved folk-rock, full of jangly guitars and jumpy choruses, reflecting the musical personalities of these two musicians: the measured drama of Bridgers’ vocals clashing with the precision of Oberst’s lyrics.

The two met several years ago at a show in Los Angeles. After hearing her play a short set, Oberst asked Bridgers to send him any music she had. They played more shows together, toured together, and even duetted on Stranger in the Alps. After recording their first album as the Better Oblivion Community Center, they decided to keep it under their hats to preserve a bit of the mystery and to buy a bus bench rather than a billboard. “There are no rules anymore,” says Oberst. “This was an experiment. We wanted people to hear the album all at once and take it for what it is. That seemed a lot more fun that the textbook album release cycle.”

Was there a moment when you realized you could do something larger together?

Phoebe Bridgers: We didn’t think about it that hard. I run stuff by my friends, and I write with a lot of my friends. That’s something I really enjoy doing. So I was showing Conor some of my songs, and he was showing me some of his songs. The album just emerged out of that. I don’t think we ever talked about what style it would be. There was one time after one of our shows in Europe when Conor was like, “We should start a band!” But we never talked about it again. So by the time we started writing songs, that wasn’t even really a goal we had in mind. It just naturally became something more.

Conor Oberst: The first song we wrote is the first song on the record, which is “Didn’t Know What I Was in For.” We wrote it not knowing if it was going to be for my record or her record or someone else’s record. But we realized pretty quickly that it was meant to be its own thing. It snowballed from there.

What was that process like? Was it different from other collaborations you’ve done?

CO: We wrote all of them together with guitars. One of us would have a starting point, a little melody or a line or two of lyrics. Then it’s just bouncing ideas off each other. It was fun for me, because I’ve written songs with different people over the years, but I’ve never done a full record with only one other songwriter, where I was writing everything with one other person. It was an educational experience, because Phoebe has a lot of strengths that I don’t have. She’s a much better singer, and has a much better concept of harmony and melody than I do. I would have some half-baked idea and say to her, “Can you make this better?” Or, “Can you make it sound like a complete thought?” And she would come up with some amazing idea that I would never have on my own.

PB: I actually feel similarly with lyrics. I would be on a rant about something and say, “I want this verse to be about insert theme here.” And Conor would just do it. I would have some idea or be talking about something for a long time, and the next time we’d sit down to write, he would have a cool lyric idea. It was nice to play to each other’s strengths, especially since we’re very different in our processes.

How do you mean?

PB: It takes me forever to finish a song, but it takes Conor a day. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to take forever, but I’m a little too much of a perfectionist. I write from top to bottom, but Conor pushed me not to avoid anything—just write whatever and come back to it later. Don’t get stuck for weeks at a time on something. But I tried to stretch out Conor’s writing time as well. What if we add another verse? Or, what if it was longer or we added a coda? In our differences we found a lot of fun stuff to do.

CO: I definitely tend to do something and just move on. Phoebe was like, “Let’s go back and think about that a little harder. Maybe we can make it better.” And usually we did. That was a great added layer of just… trying harder.

PB: Weirdly, “Dylan Thomas” was the last song we wrote for the album. I had spent fucking fourteen hours in the studio with my band Boygenius, and Conor and I were hanging out getting ready to record. We didn’t even have a plan to put another song on there, but we had some extra time. Conor was like, “You have any more ideas?” I had this weird voice memo that was just a verse and a chorus melody. We ended up writing that song in one day, which is super rare for me.

You mentioned “Didn’t Know What I Was in For” as the first song you wrote together. That really sets up this album and introduces some knotty, compelling themes.

CO: The idea is that we all want to do things to help make the world a better place, but a lot of the time it can feel futile—like slacktivism or whatever. “Oh, I’ll do a 5K run and cure cancer today.” I can do these little gestures in my life to bring about a better world, but maybe it doesn’t do anything. I think those feeling are competing inside all of us. Everyone who has a conscience struggles with that. Am I doing enough? Do these actions have any value? The alternative, though, is to do nothing. And if everybody does nothing, then nothing gets better. So maybe it’s better to do these little gestures, even if they don’t feel like they’re ever enough.

PB: I always think about what my friend [and Boygenius bandmate] Julien Baker was telling me, about how she feels this weight of responsibility on social media. She feels this great duty every time she speaks to her fans for it to mean something, for it to matter. Why would you post all this bullshit about playing a festival when there are starving children and LGBTQ teenagers who don’t have home? She’ll talk about spending a half-hour drafting a tweet about something important, then she’ll scroll down and see some really crass, stupid joke that I posted. I think about that a lot. It feels like when you open that box of human empathy, it’s hard to shut. There’s a real burden of responsibility that every human being with a heart should feel, even if you’re doing something that feels so futile.

Does that apply to songwriting? Is writing a song enough?

CO: That’s a struggle that a lot of my friends and a lot of songwriters I know deal with. Phoebe and I were talking about it the other day while listening to the radio. Wow, most songs are about nothing at all. When you hear the lyrics, it’s either so abstract or insider baseball as far as what the writer is trying to say. It starts to evaporate and not mean anything.

PB: I hear the same songwriting tropes in so many songs. If I have to hear one more white guy sing about riding a train…

CO: Hey, careful there!

PB: If I have to hear one more guy talk about ruminations! [Ruminations is the title of Oberst’s recent album.] Trains and whiskey and turpentine. All the shit that doesn’t resonate with anyone anymore—I hear that in so many songs. There’s a fear of writing about nothing, but there’s also a fear of sounding self-important. It’s a never-ending struggle.

CO: I’m hyperaware of sounding too preachy. That’s always the trick—to present ideas in a song but not do it too on the nose or in a way that sounds too heavy-handed.

That seems to be one of the overarching ideas you’re exploring on these songs—trying to feel comfortable in your own skin, in the world, in your craft.

CO: That’s something that art and more specifically music can in their best form provide, that feeling of not feeling so alone. We’re all going through this at this particular moment in time, globally and politically. It can feel terrifying and overwhelming. Lately I find myself going back to records I like, books and movies I like, stuff that provides some context on the human condition, so I don’t feel as adrift and as alone in the world. I don’t know if our music can do that for other people, but that would be a wonderful thing.

PB: We didn’t set out to have a super-political theme on this record by any means. We barely even talked about it, but I think scenes emerge in songs that reflect what you feel or what you’re thinking about. A subtext emerges over time that maybe you didn’t even intend. I think I relate to my songs the more space I get from them, for that reason. I feel more comfortable with songs I wrote two years ago. I was nervous singing about some of that stuff then. I think the same thing will happen with these songs and I’ll figure out more and more what the fuck we’re talking about.

It doesn’t necessarily feel like a political album. It sounds more like it’s coming from a fixed perspective, two people taking in the world at a particular moment in time.

CO: I think you’re always writing from wherever you’re at in your life. We wrote all these songs in the span of a year, so it’s a snapshot of us at that time. Life goes on and things change, but that’s one thing that’s so cool about making a record: It’s a little document of a moment that you get to keep forever. And even if it isn’t as specific as a diary entry, it does encapsulate where you are in your life, where you’re writing from.

Photo credit: Nik Freitas

Conor Oberst, ‘Gossamer Thin’

Posted on by Editor

When life is at its most beautiful, it is often also at its most frail. Love, happiness, fame … it can all fall apart within seconds, fraying, as Conor Oberst observes on "Gossamer Thin" (from his truly excellent new solo LP, Ruminations), between our very fingers. Because that beauty, like a sheer swath of fabric, tears when it's stretched too far: There's only so much shimmer or silk to go around before it's an unrecognizable fragment of what once was. Oberst, who is so adeptly able to write in a narrative style that is both observant of others and painfully self-aware, paints this through the story of a drug-addicted rock star leaving his wife at home for a pool of groupies; through a pair of adulterers, sneaking off to a nearby motel; and through a narrator quickly losing grip on both his physical and mental health. Oberst has struggled with his own well-being of late, but it doesn't matter whether or not the words are autobiographical: Though many paint him as the poster boy for confessionals, he's incredibly skilled at lyrical empathy, articulating the struggles most are too proud to discuss, often at the expense of his own personal ego.

"I'm worn gossamer thin," he sings to a melancholy waltz of piano, "like a delicate arch, carved by the wind." It's a rare, visceral metaphor drenched in poetry but not so saturated that it becomes foggy and obscure. Without the support of the rest of Bright Eyes, the Mystic Valley band, or Monsters of Folk on any of Ruminations, only Oberst is left to realize his — and our — hopes, struggles, and sorrows. Not pulled in any direction but his own, he's stronger than ever — frayed but not frail, and fully whole.