Bright Eyes @ The Paramount Theater (9/28/11)

Bright Eyes is winding down. Conor Oberst is retiring the moniker and a small piece of everyone in my age bracket’s adolescence is dying with it. I very clearly remember the day I first heard Lifted; it was a gateway drug into the twisted boy genius world of Bright Eyes that has resulted in a decade of fandom. In that time I’ve seen Conor live three times, once as part of Monsters of Folk and (now) twice as Bright Eyes. The MoF show and the first Bright Eyes show (2004 and 2005 respectively if I’m not mistaken) were good in their own way, but neither of them prepared me for the 2011 incarnation of Bright Eyes live.

One thing I can say for certain is that Conor is a consummate performer. He’s continually improving, and the difference between a Digital Ash-era Bright Eyes show and the one I saw a couple weeks ago is striking. The set was tight, driven, and sounded amazing beginning to end, despite some exceptionally shitty sound engineering during opener “Four Winds”. The pacing was perfect; Conor blasted through 22 or so songs in a 140 minute set that didn’t feel half as long as any of the ~90 minute shows I’ve seen this year. The breadth of material was staggering too, pulling from the Cartoon Blues EP, that 2004 split with Neva Dinova, and every album between Fevers & Mirrors and The People’s Key with a striking bias away from that newest release. They only dipped into The People’s Key three times, two of which (“Shell Games” and “Approximate Sunlight”) came back to back and were followed by “Something Vague”, an 11-year old song that I haven’t even thought about in half that time but remember every word to. It was a reminder of what this tour really was– a goodbye to a significant part of his career, not an attempt to move a new record.

Conor looked the part of the retiree, spinning triumphantly, smiling regularly, climbing into the audience, calling out Rick Rubin and Dr. Dre during the encore, and hamming it up in a way that both shocked and pleased me. My other two live experiences were of a distinctly different nature– an awkward man standing center stage angrily whispering acoustic songs– and I’ll take the self-confident man with the childish grin and custom Mike Mogis t-shirt any day.

I can see, though, why he’s retiring the moniker. That persona worked, and that music worked best, when he was fully invested in the character of Bright Eyes– the sulking, self-loathing, uncertain kid who obsessively scribbled dark poetry and felt weird in public places. But watching Conor strut around the stage, downright cocky, it’s clear that he’s outgrown Bright Eyes. He’s taken that train to the end of line, and he summed it up perfectly with an extra tidbit thrown into closer “Road To Joy”: “My mind races with all my longings/but can’t keep up with what I’ve got”. He let those words hang in the air for just a second and then, with a grin, added “which is so fucking much it’s ridiculous”.