I know! Shit, Lifted was amazing. And Fevers and Mirrors! I mean, all my favourite saddest songs are BE, but whilst it used to be explicit, now you have to read into it to get the same sadness...in a way that's good, and I'm used to doing that with other songs anyway, but one of the things that used to set BE fans apart from other people was that in a sick way they fed off all the fucked-up-ness, which was unhealthy but also a little special...there was something very connecting about listening to a 19-year-old screaming for the sunlight...his voice has definitely improved, but that was another thing...you could only be a BE fan if you could deal with the bad vocals and all the intensity of emotion - like the two kinds of Dylan fans: people who think the songs are amazing but better when someone else, like the Byrds, sing them, and people who know that they're best when Bob sings them because he *feels* them too.
I mean, No One Could Riot for Less is a song that sort of rips me up inside, but it's turned outwards now, it's the madness of the governments, it's what happens when the oil runs out, it's no longer what happens when all the life drains out of a young man and he tries to claw it back through music, which I guess would have been the lyrical content if he'd written it five years ago. Hell would have been here inside his head, rather than a sweeping metaphor for our collectiv future.
With Cassadaga, anyone could be a Bright Eyes fan, and whilst they wouldn't have the same connectedness that someone who is familiar with the backstory, the last however many years, Cassadaga is still an album they could enjoy. And I like that. But I'm mourning the publicly depressed, the anxious, the mixed-up, the drunk, the cokehead Conor in a way as well.
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Date: 2007-04-11 04:32 pm (UTC)I mean, No One Could Riot for Less is a song that sort of rips me up inside, but it's turned outwards now, it's the madness of the governments, it's what happens when the oil runs out, it's no longer what happens when all the life drains out of a young man and he tries to claw it back through music, which I guess would have been the lyrical content if he'd written it five years ago. Hell would have been here inside his head, rather than a sweeping metaphor for our collectiv future.
With Cassadaga, anyone could be a Bright Eyes fan, and whilst they wouldn't have the same connectedness that someone who is familiar with the backstory, the last however many years, Cassadaga is still an album they could enjoy. And I like that. But I'm mourning the publicly depressed, the anxious, the mixed-up, the drunk, the cokehead Conor in a way as well.
And it's reassuring that you feel the same!