. : : April 10th, 2025 : : .
I’ve seen Bright Eyes a couple of times in the (somehow) distant past, some eighteen years ago, and my memory of them is faint and fuzzy at best.
As someone who fell in love with Lifted…or the Story is in the Soil album, juuuuuuust before the band blew up big with their I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning album, I remember being really excited to see them live and leaving really disappointed.
The band was known for wild, energetic, and chaotic performances that teetered on the edge of being an incoherent mess, but which side it leaned towards on any given night seemed to depend on front man Conor Oberst‘s sobriety (or rather, the lack thereof).
The two shows I saw in Toronto I remember as being fine, if perfunctory, and really lacking in emotion — an odd thing to say about a band that is synonymous with the emo genre.
Known for set lists that span the entire musical catalogue of one of the more prolific songwriters of our generation — no b-side, limited release, split single, or rare EP song was ever off the table — I still lucked out with actually pretty decent set lists. But somehow, I never connected with the live performance in the way I connected with the recordings.
After the better part of two decades, curiosity (and a great touring support act!) led me to give them a third chance, and … well…
I left feeling like the performance was fine, if perfunctory, and somewhat lacking in emotion.
One thing I can credit the band with: they are absolute chameleons, and their style and approach to the live performances of songs changes (sometimes quite dramatically) based on who’s on stage at any given time.
Sometimes these gambles pay dividends, but the banjo-led version of First Day of My Life takes a sweet, perhaps saccharin love song to unlistenably hokey ditty before the first verse finishes, and the horn-forward take on The Calendar Hung Itself felt like an odd cover by a mariachi band.
While the more intimate moments, like Shell Games, Take It Easy (Love Nothing), or We Are Nowhere and It’s Now, where some minor editing and a degree of self-control led to set highlights, there’s also something to be said for the chaos of everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach for songs like set-closer and singalong Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and Be Loved) when used sparingly and for effect.
The song selection itself felt uneven in quality. Although leaning on the latest album Five Dice, All Threes, I’m left wondering why the middling if not forgotten albums Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was and The People’s Key were both better represented than the band’s (excellent) first breakout and genre-defining album, Fevers and Mirrors.
Of course, the band’s always going to play what it feels like playing, regardless of where and how in its oeuvre it was originally presented, and I could respect that stance — but the conviction, in way of emotional integrity, has to support it. A sin for any band, but perhaps doubly so for a performer who surprised fans and viewers everywhere during a Late Night with Jay Leno performance where expected songs from his concurrently released albums I’m Wide Awake…, and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn with eschewed for a freshly minted, extremely political protest song When The President Talks to God. Truly risky, heart-on-sleeve behaviours that, twenty-years later, retains its relevance.
Unfortunately, this performance still felt like a fairly paint-by-numbers set that had become hollow routine late in the touring cycle.
That said, the recording sounds solid, and would definitely be of interest to current fans who have held on across the decades.
But relapsed fans will find less to love, and new listeners are likely to give a perfunctory shrug and conclude, “Yeah, that was fine.”
- [introduction]
- Bells and Whistles
- El Capitan
- Gold Mine Gutted
- We Are Nowhere and It’s Now
- [banter]
- Soul Singer in a Session Band
- Method Acting
- [banter]
- Trains Still Run on Time
- First Day of My Life
- Loose Leaves
- Persona non grata
- Mariana Trench
- [banter]
- Nothing Gets Crossed Out*
- Take It Easy (Love Nothing)
- Shell Games
- Tiny Suicides
- [banter]
- Tin Soldier Boy
- The Calendar Hung Itself…
- [banter]
- One for You, One for Me
- [encore]
- [banter]
- At the Bottom of Everything
- [banter]
- Hypnotist (Song for Daniel H.) [Lullaby for the Working Class]#
- Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (to Love and to Be Loved)
*With Tim Kasher
#With Ted Stevens, Megan Siebe, and Patrick Newbery.
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